chapter Twenty-five
The day never ended. Callahan disappeared into Carly’s house. Ellen came out twenty minutes later and walked straight through her own front door. Caleb presided over the shift change, fielded questions, kept order. Katie dropped by with tacos around seven, which he wolfed down standing up.
It got dark after nine, and lights came on in Ellen’s house. A few hours later, they went out. The crowd around the barricades gradually thinned, but it didn’t disappear, and neither did he. He still had work to do.
He did sit down, though, for the first time since late afternoon. Falling heavily into one of Ellen’s cast-iron chairs on the flagstone patio out back, he stared at the fence without seeing it and tried to recharge his depleted brain.
If the universe had been taking requests, he’d have asked for a beer. Ellen in his lap would be nice, too. Ellen and a beer. All he wanted in the world.
He’d thought about her while he stood there watching her brother sing and strip for Carly. Callahan had made an ass of himself, but he’d pulled it off. There was nobility in going after what you wanted when you had to walk over broken glass to get it. Somehow, Jamie had known what it would take to get Carly to give him a shot.
Caleb didn’t know what it was going to take with Ellen. But he knew what he had to do.
So, yeah. A beer would hit the spot.
The security light came on as Ellen’s door opened behind him.
She sat down in the wrought-iron chair next to his, an open bottle of wine in one hand and two empty glasses in the other. His dream girl in shorts and a T-shirt. Ellen with a bottle of wine was almost as good as Ellen with a beer. She didn’t look too much like she wanted to chew him out, either. She actually looked pretty mellow.
“I thought you were asleep,” he said.
“I’ve been keeping tabs on you out the window. You started to slow down about an hour ago, and I thought if I waited long enough, you’d eventually come to rest somewhere. Need a drink?”
“I’m still on duty.”
She reached over and pried his phone out of his hand. After fiddling with it for a while, she got it turned off. “I’m clocking you out.” She set it on the ground, poured a glass of wine, and handed it over.
He took a deep breath and let it out slowly. No way could he leave his phone off all night, but he could give it half an hour or so. Long enough to drink a glass of wine and see what he could do about fixing the mess he’d made.
“Thanks.” Their fingers met briefly when he accepted the glass, and he had to remind himself not to extend the contact. Not to slide his hand up her arm and pull her close.
The light shut off, plunging them into darkness. Fireflies lit erratic paths in the air. He’d missed fireflies. The army had sent him all over the world, but nowhere else seemed to have fireflies except Fort Leonard Wood, where he’d gone for MP school. At eighteen, the sight of lightning bugs in Missouri had made him homesick.
“Can I ask you a question?” he said.
“I don’t owe you any answers right now.” She sounded amused.
He could probably have her owing him an answer inside of ten minutes, but that wasn’t where he wanted to go with this encounter. Katie was right—he had to ease up on the physical stuff if he expected Ellen to take him seriously.
“Can I ask anyway?”
She must have run her finger around the rim of her glass, because it made a low, melodic sound. “Yes.”
“Did Richard kiss you this afternoon?”
“What?”
“Did he kiss you? He looked like he was going to.”
“He looked like he was going to strangle me.”
“Before that. When he was over here.”
She turned toward him, but it was too dark to read her expression. He heard her take a drink, and then there was a long pause. “No,” she said. “He didn’t kiss me. Why, were you jealous?”
“No comment.”
She smiled then, a flash of white teeth. “How unpleasant for you.”
It had been. The jealousy had dissolved when he overheard her attack Richard at Maureen’s, but the situation still didn’t sit right with him. Ellen’s ex wanted something from her, and whatever it was, Caleb wasn’t positive it was over.
“What did he come here for?”
“I’m not sure. He told me he wanted me back. Maureen made it sound like the pictures were some twisted kind of stunt to win my affection.”
“There any chance that’s going to happen?”
She drank her wine and made him wait a long time for an answer. “He looked right through me and said I was his lodestar. I don’t want to be a lodestar. Not his. Not anybody’s.”
Considering Caleb only halfway knew what the word meant, he thought he didn’t have much to worry about there.
They were silent for a while. His vision had compensated for the darkness some. Enough for him to watch her chest rise and fall beneath her dark T-shirt and to admire the smooth lines of her legs crossed at the ankles. Her feet were bare again. He wondered what she had against shoes.
“I owe you an apology,” she said. “For the fence.”
“That’s funny. I thought I owed you one.”
“You already apologized,” she said. “Now it’s my turn. You were right. We needed the fence. I don’t know how you knew we would, but you did. So thank you. Though if you ever try to pull something like that again, fair warning, I’m going to stop speaking to you.”
An apology and a thank you. Huh. Maybe he hadn’t screwed up absolutely everything today. But he was about to.
“Ellen, I think we’d better not see each other anymore. Not until after this job’s done.”
It hurt more than having the shrapnel removed from his hip, but he gritted his teeth and let the statement stand.
She stiffened, and for a moment she didn’t seem to breathe at all. Then her chest rose again, and she said in a decent approximation of her normal tone, “What makes you say that?”
“It turns out I’m not any good at mixing business with pleasure. If the fence didn’t make that clear, then what happened this afternoon did. I’ve been thinking about you too much when I ought to be thinking about the job.”
Katie had been right the first time. He’d thrown over his principles for Ellen. He’d made the wrong call, and the result was his unacceptable failure to protect Henry. If he hadn’t been so caught up in her, he’d have seen the situation more clearly. Followed up with the police and been a more active part of the Plimpton investigation. Something.
Every time he thought about it, his stomach soured. It could have been so much worse, and if it had been, there would have been no one to blame but himself.
But his bad judgment wasn’t the whole problem. It was worse than that, because he was falling for her, he wanted to build a life with her, and she hadn’t given him a single sign that she felt the same way.
“I want a chance to start over with you,” he said at last. “I want to take you out to dinner and do this thing in the right order. Not—” He faltered. He didn’t know how to describe what they’d been doing.
“Not play hide the bone with me the day after we met?”
“Yeah.” Exactly.
She set her glass down on the flagstones and leaned toward him. Their knees brushed, and she splayed her hands over his thighs, high up. “What if I say I want to play hide the bone?”
Ah, hell. Just her playful tone of voice was enough to turn him on. Just the light pressure of her fingers on him. The smell of her hair.
“I’d say I want that too. But we need to wait.”
Ellen cocked her head to the side and studied him. “When do you expect the job to be done?”
He had no idea. Days? Weeks? Months? Maybe not until after Carly had her baby. Maybe longer. It depended on whether Jamie Callahan decided to stick around and whether Carly decided to let him. Whether Breckenridge fired Caleb for letting the concert go on. Dozens of things would make a difference, and all of them were out of his control.
“I don’t know.”
She stood, and the floodlight clicked on, backlighting her so that Caleb couldn’t see her face, only her shape. She took his wine out of his hand, placed it on the ground, and lowered herself onto his lap, wrapping her arms around his neck.
“I don’t want to wait,” she said. “We have a contract. I’m pretty sure it obligates you to take me to bed now.”
“I can’t, sweetheart. I shouldn’t, and I really can’t. I have to work.”
She tucked her head against his neck, making his throat thicken. She was so beautiful, and he wanted her so much. Right now. All the time. He didn’t really have much hope of holding out against her. But what did that say about him, if he sucked this much at doing the right thing?
The night lapped at the edges of their pool of light, humid and thick with the sound of crickets chirping. There were no other sounds. No other activities to manage just now. “You haven’t slept or stopped working in two days,” she murmured, kissing his throat. He shifted beneath her, pushing his erection into her hip. Unable to help himself. “Jamie is at Carly’s now, and he’s not coming back out. She won’t see him yet, but Nana’s going to let him sleep on the couch.”
Ellen trailed kisses along his jawline, then brushed her lips over his mouth with a soft sigh that completely wrecked him. “Your people know what to do. I watched you whipping them into shape all day. It’s time for you to relax. I can help with that.”
His hands gripped the arms of the chair. Ellen picked them up, one at a time, and placed them directly on her breasts. She wasn’t wearing a bra. Her nipples hardened beneath his palms. A hoarse groan escaped from his chest.
He didn’t stand a chance of resisting her. Never had. Probably never would.
The light clicked off. Black again.
Ellen arched her back, pressing the weight of her breasts into his hands. “I want you, Caleb. Just you. Take me to bed.”
He gave in and kissed her. Another wrong call, but that knowledge didn’t stop him. It was just one more fact among the others—the wrongness of his decision and the rightness of her soft, silky skin when he moved his hands under her shirt. She braced her hands on his shoulders and turned, spreading her legs wide to straddle him. Her shorts were flimsy cotton things, no barrier at all to his fingers when they dropped to her knees and followed the irresistible trail along the inside of both spread thighs and past the loose hem, directly to the hot, wet center of her.
Where he found out she wasn’t wearing panties, either.
When he stroked her with his thumbs, she moaned, and he took a deep breath, fighting the urge to unzip and slide into her right here, right now, with only the darkness to hide them. He shouldn’t be kissing her, shouldn’t be touching her, but he couldn’t stop, and he couldn’t even regret it. She soothed all his jagged edges. The sweet, dark taste of her, like wine and chocolate. The way she moved against him and the way she whimpered when he stroked her core. He needed Ellen like he’d never needed anyone. She made him weak.
He kissed her again, hot and deep and long. Stood up, spotlit with Ellen in his arms, and carried her inside.
In her room, he laid her on the bed and turned on the lamp. She raised her arms above her head, stretching languorously, and said, “This is more like it.”
He kneeled above her, watching. Thinking about what he was going to take off of her first, and whether to use his hands or his teeth.
“This is the part where you ravish me, right? Because I’ve been thinking about this part for hours.”
“No.”
“No?”
He unbuttoned his shirt and shrugged it off, eyes on her face as the fabric dropped away. Her appreciation fired him up. Knowing she wanted him, knowing how easily he could make her wet, was an incredible turn-on. But it was nothing compared to what it did to him to make her whimper and moan and beg. To feel her coming apart and know he was the one doing it to her. It captivated him, the way she responded. She was the most passionate woman he’d ever met.
“This is the part where I make love to you. Very slowly, and very thoroughly.”
She bit her lip. “That sounds . . . intense.”
He brought his lips to her throat. “With my hands . . .” He brushed the hair off her forehead. “And my mouth . . .” Kissed her pulse point. “And my tongue . . .” Ran his tongue around the rim of her ear. “And my teeth.” Drew her earlobe into his mouth and bit gently.
Ellen let out a soft sigh and rocked her hips up off the bed. “I hope that’s not all. You’ve got another part I’d like to visit with.”
“Mmm,” he said. “That one, too. But not for a while yet.”
He took his time removing her clothes, wanting to go slow and appreciate everything she already had on display, then everything he revealed as he peeled off her soft T-shirt and shorts. Ellen had no patience. Her fingers tugged at his hair, nails scraping over his shoulders, trying to pull him up between her legs and inside her.
He refused to be rushed.
He’d get there. Eventually. First he wanted to find out how sensitive the backs of her knees were.
Very.
Whether she liked it when he scraped his stubbled jaw along the insides of her thighs.
Affirmative.
Whether he could make her come with just his mouth on her breasts and her hips rocking up into his thigh.
That took a while, but it was another affirmative, and the sounds she made as she went over the edge nearly carried him along for the ride.
When he finally moved inside her, she was trembling. Or he was. Maybe it was both of them. Her face was flushed and glowing, her pupils huge, lips swollen. He pressed into her slowly, pausing a few times because he had to or he’d lose it. There was nothing like this. Nothing in his life that could have prepared him for what it felt like to be joined to Ellen. Every time, it killed him. Every single time.
She closed her eyes, and he asked her to open them.
I love you.
He didn’t mean to tell her. Not really. But he was already telling her with his body, and she must have seen it in his expression—something vulnerable he didn’t intend her to catch sight of—because her eyes went wide and alarmed. Pushing at his shoulders with both hands, she shoved his face away as her legs wrapped tighter around his hips, holding him in place. “Don’t,” she said, turning her face to the side. “Don’t look at me like that.”
With his hand on her cheek, he brought her head back around and waited for her to open her eyes again. When she did, he started to move, and she cried out, panicked and aroused.
He kissed her temple. “Relax. You don’t have to do anything about it. Just let me.”
She closed her eyes again, but she allowed him to kiss her, parting her lips and accepting his tongue. She brought her hips up to meet his, matching his speed. He worried her nipple with his teeth, and she gasped and wrapped her arms around him again, pulling him close. “This wasn’t part of the deal,” she whispered. The fear in her voice tore him up.
“No. Sorry. This is all me.”
As their breath came short and each stroke came faster and deeper and harder than the one before, he moved his arms beneath her and braced his hands over her shoulders. When she started to tighten around him, she said his name and clung to him so tight, he thought she might never let go.
He wished she never would. Heat rushed through him, and he came inside her with that wish ringing like a bell in his head. Don’t let go.
But she did. Afterward, she turned her back to him, curling up into a little ball. He curved his body around her and held her as her breathing settled and she fell asleep.
He lay there awake for a long time, knowing he needed to head back outside. Get back to work.
He couldn’t bring himself to leave.