chapter Five
As he cut across one dark corner of the campus, Caleb pondered the mystery of Camelot College. He’d never thought to question it growing up, but surely there was a story to explain how this collection of imposing granite buildings had come to be nestled among the cornfields. The architecture gave the place an unexpected flavor of New England, as if someone had hoped to bring Yale to the Midwest.
The college drew people in, but it was Camelot that got a hold on them. It had certainly gotten a hold on his family. Dad had sunk his savings into the Camelot Arms Apartments when Caleb was only four years old.
Enthusing about the virtues of becoming his own boss and the income stream they’d siphon from an endless supply of student renters, Dad had driven the Clarks two hundred miles from Detroit to Camelot and separated Mom from her relatives, inflicting a wound she’d never properly recovered from. Mom still talked about moving back to Michigan one day. Everyone but her knew it was never going to happen.
For Caleb, Camelot was home, and he was a homebody. In basic training, he’d run his mouth about how great Ohio was so often, he’d earned himself the nickname “Buckeye.”
Caleb passed the tennis courts, crossed the invisible line that divided the campus from the town, and emerged onto Ellen’s street. Only two paparazzi vehicles lay in wait tonight when he checked in at the security SUV. Eric and Cassie told him they’d logged a few others doing drive-bys, but it had been a quiet afternoon.
He found Ellen lounging on a weathered Adirondack chair on her recessed front porch, a glass of red wine in her hand. The open bottle sat beside her foot, along with an unused second glass. His eyes flicked to the empty chair next to hers.
Rather than approach, Caleb veered off to the left, seizing his chance to do a quick assessment of the house while she didn’t look inclined to run him off with a shotgun.
The inventory didn’t cheer him up any. Both the exterior door off the kitchen and the French doors in back had cheap, worthless locks and no deadbolts. Most of the rear wall was plate glass, which effectively turned Ellen’s living room into a fishbowl. The overhanging roof threw deep shadows over all the entrances, but only the front porch had a security light, and if the black, sooty spot on the flat surface of the bulb was any indication, it had burned out.
Ellen’s place was a home invasion waiting to happen. She didn’t have even the standard homeowner protections—blinds on her windows, deadbolts and floodlights to make break-ins less likely. She needed those, and more. He wouldn’t recommend an alarm system to just anybody, but he’d sure as hell insist on one for anybody with a relative as famous as Jamie Callahan. That, and a tall, solid fence with a gate and a keypad.
Time to find out just how persuasive he could be.
“Hey there, Ellen Callahan.” He planted one foot on the bottom porch step.
“Hey yourself, Camelot Security. Doing a little trespassing?”
“Yep. Is that wine glass for me?”
“No.”
“Who’s it for, then?”
She shrugged. “Always a good idea to have a spare.”
Caleb smiled at her wit, and a moment later, so did she—a soft killer of a smile that came so easily, he thought the wine must have helped it along.
“Hank go to bed early?”
“Henry. Yes. Twenty-five whole minutes. He was all worn out from the zoo today, poor guy.”
Caleb gestured at the empty chair beside her. “I know we don’t have anything to talk about, but maybe I could get off my feet for a minute?”
She waved a hand, the movement as loose as the smile and ten times more relaxed than she’d been this morning. “Have at it.”
He climbed the three steps and took a seat. Without asking, Ellen poured him a generous glass of wine and handed it over.
Since he’d last seen her, she’d put her hair up in a knot with a Number 2 pencil stuck through it. A bunch of strands had escaped to cling to her neck. It made her look half-undone, which made him think about undoing her the rest of the way.
One direction he really didn’t need his mind to go.
He tried the wine. It was better than the sour, grape-juice-tasting Communion fare they’d served at church when he was a kid—his permanent comparison standard. “Not bad.”
She looked pointedly at his fingers, which held the glass in an awkward grip. He always worried he’d break the stems off. “I’m going to guess you’re not a wine guy.”
“Afraid not.”
“You don’t have to drink it. Camelot has enough wine guys already. I’m not trying to convert you.”
“No, I’ll drink it.” He’d drink ditch water if it gave him an excuse to sit here and talk to her.
Ellen raised one knee to balance a bare foot on the lip of the chair. In place of the skirt she’d had on earlier, she wore a pair of loose black pants that left her calves bare and pooled up on the thigh of her bent leg. He had some trouble dragging his eyes away from all that pale, smooth skin.
Tall woman. Long legs. Ellen looked pretty damn good all over.
And he was ogling her, blatantly, and at great length. Smooth.
She tugged her pants back over her knee and quirked her mouth in a way that suggested she found his attention amusing.
Everything about her was so casual tonight, it was throwing him off his game. He’d come over here prepared to do battle with Amazon Ellen, and instead he got this woman with the butter-soft body and the seductive smile. The one he’d met this morning, very briefly, before he started talking security and she’d hardened up on him.
The most intriguing woman he’d met in a long time. Fun to talk to, if you liked getting sassed. A hell of a lot of fun to look at.
Since moving home, he’d been too distracted to think much about women. When had he last been on a date? In Germany, maybe. Jesus, that would make it almost two years ago. Pretty shoddy record.
Army life and relationships didn’t mix well, and his personal life had been on hold for a long time.
Now he mentally extended the period of stasis for another few months. He had a business to build, a family to worry about. He needed to stop thinking about Ellen’s legs—hot though they were—and focus on the job. The key would be to ignore the nice unfurling buzz he was getting just from sitting here next to her.
“So how was your day?” he asked.
“Fine.”
Nothing in the way she said it made him think it was true. He prodded, “Yeah?” and got another quarter-smile out of her.
“No. It was a death march. You?”
“Pretty much covers mine, too.”
“What happened?”
He tipped his glass her way. “You go first.”
Ellen drank her wine and rested her head against the chair back, watching the clouds. The sun had sunk behind the house, but dusk was a good half hour off yet. “You don’t care about my day.”
It wasn’t unkind, the way she said it. Only matter-of-fact.
“Well, I don’t know. Maybe I do. You haven’t told me about it yet. Could be exciting.”
The gray top she’d changed into clung to her breasts when she shifted in the chair, and he found himself staring again. She had a body built for sin, ripe and softly rounded as a peach.
“. . . and you were here for that.”
Caleb blinked. He’d lost the thread of the conversation. Down Ellen’s shirt.
“Sorry, I was here for what?”
“The vulture.”
“What vulture?” He’d have remembered birds of prey. He wasn’t quite that hopeless.
“Jamie calls the photographers vultures.” She spun her index finger around in a circle. “Because they’re always hovering around.”
“Looking for fresh kills to pick at?”
“Exactly.”
He decided against pointing out that his team was keeping the vultures at bay. She wasn’t inclined to be appreciative, and he wanted her to like him before he started trying to talk her into accepting more security.
Hell, he just wanted her to like him.
“So what made today a death march?”
She frowned, her eyes losing focus as she thought about her answer. “Lot of work. I spent a couple hours on the phone this afternoon with somebody I was hoping would take fifteen minutes. Ran out of time to do what I wanted.”
“Which was what?”
She looked at him sidelong. “Nothing important.”
He let it drop. “So this was a client you were talking to?” Carly had told him that Ellen was an entertainment lawyer with a firm in Columbus, but she worked from home most of the time.
“No. Pro bono, I guess. A fifteen-year-old singer who’s about to sign a bad deal with a record company. I practically had to get down on my knees to convince her and her mother to agree to wait a day or two until I’ve reviewed the whole contract and talked to the corporate counsel.”
“What’s the matter with the contract?”
“They way they’ve written it, she’ll record an album, they’ll send her on a few tours, and if she doesn’t make a killing, the label will cut her loose in three years owing them money. It happens all the time. Everything about the industry is upside down, so they make the contracts greedier and greedier. And the artists go along with it, because they all want to be big stars.”
“Why doesn’t her mom stop her?”
“The mothers are usually half the problem.”
The tension in her voice made him wonder if her own mom had been like that, pushing Jamie’s career along. If so, what had it meant for Ellen? Nothing good.
“How old were you when your brother got famous?”
She showed him her profile and drank some more of her wine. He’d just about decided she was going to take a pass on the question when she said, “I was in college. But he signed his first record deal when we were fifteen, just like this girl—Aimee Dawson’s her name. It took four lawyers six years to get Jamie out of that contract. Came really close to wrecking his whole career.”
“But he made it, right? After he got out of the contract?” Dumb question. Of course he had, or his face wouldn’t be on magazine covers all the time.
She nodded. “And I went to law school.”
He nodded, figuring he was starting to get the measure of Ellen Callahan. “So you planned to do this all along? Work for musicians, I mean. Because of what happened with your brother.”
“Yeah, though I didn’t expect to end up in Ohio. I was lucky. When I found out I’d be moving to Camelot right after law school, I landed a summer associate’s job with the firm I work for in Columbus. Minchin and Prague. They represent a lot of the best athletes out of OSU, and so they had the best team in the state to mentor me in what I do.”
“Anybody I’ve heard of?”
“At Minchin and Prague?”
“The athletes. I went to OSU.”
She smiled. “I can’t say.”
“Too bad. So they taught you the ropes and then you just, what, went out on your own?”
“No, I commuted to Columbus six days a week for three years.”
A hundred and twenty miles a day. Ellen took her work seriously. “Long commute.”
“It got a little old, yeah.” She made a face. “Not so great for my marriage, either. But then Henry came along, and I had to figure out something else. Now they kind of let me do my own thing. They take a big chunk out of the hours I bill to cover overhead and association fees and malpractice insurance, all that good stuff.”
“And you get to stay here in Camelot.”
She sipped her wine and settled more deeply into her chair, staring down the slope of her front lawn to the trees that bordered her property. “Yeah. I have to show up in the office for a week every quarter or so, and I still do some negotiations in Columbus or even every now and then out in L.A. or New York, but for the most part, I get to work from home.”
The contentment in her voice mingled with the wine he swallowed and put a warm glow in his veins. “You like it here.”
“Here is great.”
Caleb rolled the bowl of his wine glass back and forth between his palms and admired her tidy little slice of the good life. In his peripheral vision, he could see the ball of her foot on the deck chair, so he admired her red toenails, too.
Sexy woman, sexy toes. Sexy convictions.
Ellen was a crusader. She protected the weak and the foolish for a living. No wonder she didn’t want to be protected herself. A woman like that wouldn’t relish the thought of admitting vulnerability.
He thought of how she’d looked, marching across her lawn to dump tea on the photographer this morning. Gutsy. She’d make a hell of a soldier.
They had more in common than he’d guessed.
“Good for you,” he said. “Fighting the good fight.”
“I thought so.” She polished off her wine and poured herself another glass. “Although now Jamie keeps sending me divas to rescue. Plus, the money really sucks.”
“Being evil always pays better.”
“Yeah.” She smiled at him, and for the first time there was nothing held back. No edge. This was Ellen with her defenses down—bright, warm, and inviting.
Caleb hadn’t been prepared for the smile, but even if he had, he wasn’t sure he could have done a damn thing about the way it affected him.
Too easily, he could imagine those lips kiss-swollen and soft. The silky, tangled mess of her hair spread over his pillow, and the contrast of her pale skin against his dark sheets. The hot, slick welcome of her body.
Rein it in, Clark.
He set his glass on the ground and interlaced his fingers behind his head, going for casual. It was time to get down to business. “So, Ellen,” he said, glancing over her shoulder to where the security light was mounted below the soffit. “You have a replacement bulb for that light?”
Ellen did a mental double-take.
At least, she hoped it was only mental. If Caleb had seen evidence on her face of the psychic slap he’d just delivered, she’d be monumentally embarrassed. But there was no way for him to know that she’d been lost in thoughts of how nicely the sleeves of his white dress shirt pulled tight across his biceps, was there? It would be her little secret.
“For the floodlight?” she asked.
“Mmm-hmm.”
“Yeah, I have one inside.”
“Mind if I replace it?”
His innocent question sent her thoughts down a twisty path. She’d tried to change the bulb herself once, but it had turned out to be a little too high to reach even from the top rung of the ladder, and a lot too tippy.
Caleb would be able to reach. He could help.
It drove her crazy, having that bulb out. Sometimes she felt as though the stupid thing were mocking her, public evidence of her inability to handle her own household maintenance.
But the relief she felt at the idea of having Caleb take care of it made her antsy. She had to be on her guard against that feeling, to remain wary of reassigning agency from herself to a man. Be sufficient. That was the lesson of her relationship with Richard, the conclusion she’d drawn from the first twenty-seven years of her life.
“Ellen?”
Caleb was staring at her, his brows drawn together. He’d asked her if he could change her light bulb, and she was sitting here pondering it as if the fate of the world rested in her hands.
“No,” she said.
“Is that no, you don’t mind, or—”
Abruptly, she stood. “I’ll get the bulb.”
Inside the house, she rooted through the storage closet and wondered what her problem was. Insanely sensitive about that house, Jamie had said. But it wasn’t about the house, really. She just didn’t know where to set boundaries between herself and other people anymore.
Strike that. She didn’t know where to set boundaries between herself and men. Especially this man.
Still, it seemed pretty clear she didn’t need to hold the line at light bulbs.
She went into the garage and came out carrying the bulb and the stepladder. Caleb jumped up. “Let me get that.”
And she did. But her brain had to force her fingers to let go.
“So how was your day?” she asked as he leaned the ladder against the house. She needed the distraction, needed to make this small moment of male home improvement feel unimportant in order to counteract the fact that her armpits were damp with anxious sweat that made very little sense.
This was a light bulb, not the first domino in a chain. Every decision would be hers to make, individually and on her own timeline.
He couldn’t take that away from her. And if he tried—well, then he would deserve to find out how hard she could fight. Right now, he wasn’t her enemy. He was a nice guy offering to change the light bulb over her front porch.
Caleb threw her a lopsided grin as he ascended. “Well, it started off pretty good. I got a new client this morning.”
“Oh?”
“Yeah. Some rich pop star’s mistress, the way I understand it. And his pampered sister. But here’s the trouble, see?” He looked down at her, and just being the focus of his dark-brown gaze made her feel interesting. “Would you hand me the bulb?”
Ellen blinked.
“Over there?” He pointed.
Gangly as an ostrich, she rushed to pick it up from where he’d set it down. When she handed it to him, he laid it on the top step of the ladder and carried on being charming and helpful.
“The sister wouldn’t let me in her house, and the mistress has an eccentric grandmother who cornered me with photo albums and scrapbooks.”
“Nana was there?”
Carly’s eighty-four-year-old grandmother had recovered slowly after breaking her hip last year. She’d decided to move into an assisted living facility in Mount Pleasant, turning her house over to Carly, who’d needed a refuge after her marriage broke up. But as much as Nana relished the social opportunities of her new living situation, she still spent a lot of time over at Carly’s. She claimed she needed time off from all the “old people.”
“Yes, and she was in fine form.” He reached up and unscrewed the burned-out bulb, the movement so effortless, Ellen wanted to cry.
“What, she doesn’t like you?” she asked. “I’d think you’d be exactly Nana’s type.”
“No, Nana loves me. She’s loved me since Carly brought me home in the fourth grade and I ate an entire plate of her chocolate-chip cookies.”
“Her chocolate-chip cookies are awful.”
“I know. But she kept offering them to me, and my mom always says it’s impolite to refuse food at a stranger’s house, so I kept eating them and praying for rescue.”
From four feet above her head, he smiled his dazzling smile. With the color leaching out of the sky, he looked as though he’d been lit from the inside, his teeth whiter and his skin darker than they had been this morning. Phosphorescent, almost, his bright shirt and charcoal slacks an afterimage burned onto her retinas.
He climbed down, picked up the ladder and the broken bulb, and carried them into the garage as if he owned the place.
Ellen gazed into the gathering twilight and focused on breathing.
She’d braced herself for a fight tonight, but the tussle this morning had left her so tired, and he was so much easier to be around than she’d remembered. She hadn’t been ready for this . . . what? This casual rapport. He made her feel safe, and feeling safe worried her.
Paging Dr. Freud.
She sank into her chair and willed herself to relax. It had taken her so long to bring the Dawsons around this afternoon, she’d missed her chance to watch the movie. By the time Henry fell asleep, she’d been ready to hang up her gloves. Couldn’t she just sip her wine and look at the empty front lawn and let him steer for a while? It was nice, sitting on her porch and talking to Caleb. He was good company.
Also, disconcertingly hot, and dangerous to her peace of mind.
And he wanted to put up a fence.
He came back out and sat beside her.
“So what were you and Nana looking at?” Ellen asked.
“Primarily the album from her lecture tour in the Netherlands. Nineteen seventy-three, she said.”
“Is that the one with Bruno and all the mustaches and leather?”
“For an hour.”
Ellen smiled, but this time the smile was mostly for Nana, so she didn’t have to second-guess it. Carly’s grandmother had traveled the world as a feminist lecturer and professional consciousness-raiser in the late sixties and early seventies before moving to Camelot to take a faculty position at the college and make a home for her orphaned granddaughter. She looked like a sweet little old lady, but in fact she was as mouthy and lascivious as a frat boy, and about ten times as liberated.
“And then I spent the afternoon in the office giving myself a headache over a contract I had to sign and fax back to Breckenridge.”
“What’s wrong with it?”
“Nothing, it turns out. It just took me forever to understand it.”
“Not your forte, huh?”
“I’m no good with paperwork. Anyway, to top it off, tonight I had dinner with my whole family.”
“That’s bad?”
“That’s just Wednesday night. I love them, but they find a different way to drive me crazy every week.”
She fought back all the other questions she wanted to ask. How big was his family? Did he have brothers and sisters, nieces or nephews? A girlfriend?
Her curiosity had no shame. She couldn’t remember the last time she’d cared so much about the mundane details of someone else’s life. There was nowhere this intense wanting-to-know could lead that she had the freedom to follow.
“It sounds kind of nice,” she said. “To have all that family around.”
He laced his fingers behind his head, resting his elbows against the chair back. “It has its moments. Does that mean you don’t? Have family or somebody around, I mean?”
“Just Jamie, when he comes to visit. And my ex’s mom, I guess. She takes care of Henry a few days a week. She’s sort of family. Both of my parents are gone.”
“What about the ex, does he help out?”
“He’s an alcoholic.”
Caleb made a pained face, a standard response to her confession about Richard. He was probably thinking the standard thoughts and would soon offer one of the standard platitudes. What a shame. How hard for you.
It had been hard, but the alcohol had been the least of her problems when she was married to Richard.
One time, she’d embarrassed him at a dinner party by admitting she’d never read Ulysses. He’d had a few too many drinks, and he’d launched into a monologue that began with a few witty jokes at her expense and ended with a dissertation on her shortcomings. It went on so long that she’d fantasized about standing up and dumping her dinner in his lap. She’d imagined herself walking out, hiking half a mile home in the dark in her heels. Locking him out of the house until he sobered up.
She’d done nothing. Not that night, and not for days afterward. Finally, when it seemed possible it could be funny, she’d told Jamie.
Verbally abusive, Jamie had said. Never good enough for you. You should leave him.
But those were all Jamie’s words, and she hadn’t been able to absorb them, to believe them. Part of her had understood the logic behind her brother’s hatred for Richard, but she hadn’t known how to make it her own logic, her own hatred. Not until Henry came along.
In the divorce, she’d gotten the house and a custody agreement that allowed Richard three hours’ supervised visitation with Henry each week. Richard had gotten everything else. Ellen considered it a victory.
Caleb leaned forward, resting his elbows on his knees. Ellen waited for his sympathy, but it wasn’t what she got.
“No boyfriend?” he asked.
Surprised and grateful, she made a snorting sound of dismissal, the sort of accidental pig noise she was always embarrassing herself with. “No.”
Caleb rubbed his finger and thumb over his jaw, looking ponderous but with mischief in his eyes. “A girlfriend, then.”
“Come on, I’m not gay,” she protested. “Just, you know, divorced. A mom.”
“You say that like it’s the same thing as ‘washed up.’”
It is.
“Camelot’s a hard place to be thirty and single,” she pointed out. “All these college girls running around are tough on the ego.”
“They’re kids. They could hardly compete with you.”
When she glanced over, he was smirking at her. Served her right. She’d fished pretty deep for the compliment.
Caleb’s smirk was dead sexy.
Her libido growled and started pacing back and forth across her lower belly.
Don’t look at him, Ellen told herself, but her furtive eyes snatched tidbits to catalog. Shoulders so broad, he just about filled the whole chair. His throat where he’d unbuttoned his shirt. The shadow of stubble on his neck and jaw.
Here was a species of man she had no experience with. She’d always gone for the Heathcliff types, men with wild hair and deep thoughts. Army guys didn’t do it for her. Or they never had before.
Oh, not good. Not good at all.
She couldn’t have him. There was no room in her life for any man, let alone one this . . . big. Even if she had the feminine wiles to capture his attention, what would she do with him?
You’d roll right over and let him take charge.
And then she’d be back at square one, weak-willed and malleable, chained to the whims of another man who didn’t want or respect her enough. No, thanks.
When Jamie had said she should find a boyfriend, he hadn’t meant this at all. Her brother had been thinking of somebody bland and amiable, a Little League coach who’d buy her penne with marinara and give her a peck on the cheek when he dropped her off at home. Whereas Ellen’s interest in Caleb was more of a restless urge for clutching, desperate, sweaty coupling. She wanted, for the first time in three years, to have actual, physical, hot-as-hell sex. With a man.
Not remotely in the cards. But if it were, would he go for it? Was Caleb merely being nice, buttering her up so he could try to slap a fence around her house or whatever it was he thought needed doing?
Her intuition said no. Of course, her intuition had allowed her to marry Richard. She had no reason to trust instincts with such a shitty track record.
Ellen let the back of her head hit the chair with a solid thunk and polished off the rest of her wine. The muddled, murky sip at the very bottom of her glass matched the inside of her head, which suggested she’d already had more wine and more Caleb than were advisable for one evening. She should probably call it a night.
“So were you in the military?”
Whoops. Go to bed, woman.
“What makes you ask?”
“You have that whole bossing-people-around thing going on. And the . . . you know. The physique.”
Oh, dumb. Dumb statement, dumb question, dumb Ellen.
Caleb grinned, and she flushed all over—pink heat in her chest, her cheeks. The tip of her nose, even.
“I was in the military police.”
The military had police? Why had she even asked? She could barely tell one branch of the military from another, much less remember what they all did.
Her confusion must have been obvious, because he said, “It’s part of the army. MPs deal with law-and-order stuff. Like security for soldiers—protecting convoys, bodyguard details for some of the big shots, training and mentoring police in Iraq and Afghanistan. Prison facilities for detainees, too.”
“You did all that?”
He nodded. “Most of it. Convoys, the first time I was over in Iraq, and then personal security detail for an ambassador in the Green Zone on my second deployment. Iraqi Police the third time.”
“I guess this must all seem like small potatoes after that.”
“A mission’s a mission.”
“I’m not your mission.”
“Sure you are.” He didn’t smile, but his eyes crinkled up at the corners. Playful. “Operation Ellen Callahan.”
“But they always have fancier names than that. Like ‘Desert Eagle’ and ‘Storm Shield.’ ‘Operation Storm Ellen.’” She realized belatedly that she’d just made herself sound like a bunker he needed to crack open and conquer.
“Catchy.”
“Thanks. So what brought you back here, then?”
“Family stuff. And I thought my job was basically done. Not in Afghanistan, maybe, but Iraq was my war. Second time I was over there, it was a complete clusterf*ck—” He glanced at her. “Sorry. It was a mess.”
“You can say ‘f*ck.’”
He smiled. “Still rude, though. My mother would have a fit. Anyway, it was a mess. We got shot at so often when we ran the ambassador out Route Irish to the airport, it became routine. But by the last time I was over there, in Najaf, civilians were walking the streets again. It’s wasn’t totally safe, but it was a lot better. And then the war wrapped up, and the army started focusing too much attention on bullshit again and not enough on training soldiers for combat. So it seemed to me like, time to go, you know? My family needed me, and my platoon really didn’t anymore. Iraq didn’t.” He paused. “Plus, I was really done getting shot at.”
Ellen smiled. “I promise not to shoot at you.”
“Good. That’ll be a help.”
They were silent for a while. Crickets chirped. Ellen tried to think about Caleb in combat, but her brain shied away from the desert.
“Do me a favor,” he said.
“Do I owe you a favor?”
“No. That’s why it would be a favor. Tell me why you don’t want me here.”
Oh, but I do.
“This house is mine. I don’t want . . .” She didn’t want anybody to take it from her—didn’t want it to be altered in any way that made it less hers. But she could hardly explain that to him in a way that made any sense, and certainly not without spilling a whole bunch of painful truths about her life with Richard that she’d rather keep to herself.
She started over. “Look, I don’t need security. There’s no real risk. These vultures”—she waved her hand around as if they were everywhere, which was sort of silly, since surely they were all in their hotel beds now, or sleeping in dead trees or whatever—“have been circling Jamie for the last twelve or thirteen years. I’m not afraid of them. I’m not going to give them more power than they deserve.”
He didn’t move, but she could feel him lean in closer. Not with his body, so much, but with his attention. “I can understand that.”
“You can?”
“Sure. But is it possible, hypothetically, that this is a different situation than you’ve been in before? Because it’s happening here, in Camelot, and it involves your next-door neighbor as well as you and Hank?”
“Henry.” Hank was a nickname for a grown-up, tobacco-spitting baseball player, not her baby. “I don’t see why that changes anything. It doesn’t make them dangerous. It just means they’re a bigger hassle.”
“Want to hear what the situation looks like to me?”
“Not especially.”
He shook his head, the smirk back on his lips.
“What?”
“You’re kind of a pain in the ass.”
“Only when large, obnoxious men get all up in my face.”
He grinned. Those white teeth and crinkly-cornered, laughing eyes had probably felled dozens of women. She wondered what kind of man he was, what kind of lover. Whether he’d earned that cocksure smile, or if it was an affectation that would only disappoint.
“Fair enough. You don’t want me to crowd you. You like doing things your own way, and the last thing you need is some strange man following you around, messing up your systems, protecting you from danger you don’t even believe is real.”
Perceptive, too.
“I get all that,” he said. “And I think, within reason, it’s healthy and perfectly fine. But here’s the part that’s not fine. You have hardware on all your doors that’s not worth a damn. A photographer could drive out toward Cedarburg, take the gravel road into the cemetery, and end up just behind those woods out back, and then he could walk up to your back windows and take a picture of you and your son playing in the living room. Or he could wait until dark and break in and pull a knife on you, or a gun.”
An ugly thought. She didn’t want his ugly thoughts taking up residence in her head. “Why would anybody want to do that? I’m a lawyer, not a celebrity. I’m not interesting to them. I live in Camelot for a reason. I like not having to lock the car doors when I run into the market for some milk. I don’t want to worry about men with knives in my living room.”
“You don’t have to worry about it. You just have to let me worry about it.”
She crossed her arms, already fatigued. He was more difficult to spar with than she wanted him to be. That brick wall of a body came accompanied by an agile mind, which made Caleb Clark a thoroughly inconvenient man to butt heads with. “What do you want from me?”
“I want a car at the end of your driveway, regular patrols of the perimeter, deadbolts, motion-sensitive floodlights, blinds, an alarm system, and a fence.”
“Jesus.”
“It’s not as bad as it sounds.”
“That’s good, because it sounds awful, and you haven’t even been inside the house yet.”
“None of it’s going to bother you, day-to-day. You’d put up with a couple hours of installation, and then you could go back to ignoring it all, and I could sleep at night.”
“As if I’m keeping you up.”
“Not yet, but I feel like you have the potential.”
She didn’t know quite how to take that. The insistent drumbeat his remark set off between her thighs suggested one interpretation, but rationally it wasn’t the most likely one.
Not that she had much rationality left. At some point in the last few minutes, she’d crossed the line that divided pleasant, alcohol-infused drowsiness from blurry, weary, and done.
Ellen stood up and gazed down at Caleb for one long, fathomless moment.
Bodyguard, she reminded herself. Bad, bad idea.
“I’m going to bed now.”
“In the morning, I want to install new deadbolts on your doors.”
She sighed. “If I’ve managed to make it through the night without getting slain in my bed, we’ll see how I feel about it then. At the moment, the answer is no.”
“I’m also going to go ahead and tell the a.m. shift they can pull the car into your driveway. I want a separate team on Carly’s place. If anything weird happens, it’ll be easier to deal with if I’ve got four men and two vehicles here.”
Did she care whether the SUV parked on the street or in her driveway? She was pretty sure she had, earlier, but she couldn’t remember why.
“Fine. That’s it, though. Don’t push your luck.”
He stood up, putting him much closer than she’d been ready for. Close like that time in the market. Whoa close.
Her lips parted on a hitched inhale that might have been nothing but might have been an invitation. She wasn’t exactly sure, because with his face six inches from hers, she couldn’t think straight. His dark, devilish eyes blanked out her brain, and she didn’t want to think, anyway. She just wanted him to do things to her—to remind her what it felt like to let somebody else lead. He’d be good at it. He was tall and strong, and he smelled like fabric softener and wine and man.
Kiss me, she thought.
But he didn’t. He backed up, and she hadn’t been ready for that, either. She’d unconsciously shifted her weight to the balls of her feet, and as he retreated down the first of the porch steps, she lost her balance and swayed into him, planting both hands on his chest.
His firm, hot, way-out-of-her-league chest.
Get a grip, she told herself, but her libido had no claws, and the situation was slippery—a bizarre combination of socially awkward and inconveniently arousing. Just when she ought to have been letting go, she clutched at his shirt.
Caleb took her wrists in his hands and gently tugged until she released him. He backed farther down the steps as he lowered her arms, eyes on his shoes, his thumbs brushing over her knuckles just before he dropped her hands.
“Better if I don’t,” he said to his feet.
Right.
Too humiliated to reply, she shrugged. He made a squinty, wrinkle-nosed face that conveyed regret and embarrassment, and she wished she might miraculously disappear, but it didn’t happen.
“Goodnight, Caleb.”
When he nodded and turned to go, she hoped to have the self-discipline not to watch him all the way down the driveway, but she found, to her disappointment, that she didn’t.