chapter Seven
With a happy shriek, Henry streaked into the front hallway wearing nothing but a diaper. When he spotted Caleb standing behind the screen door, about to knock, he did an abrupt about-face and ran back to his mother, hiding his face against her thigh.
Caleb pulled the door open and leaned his shoulder against the jamb. “Still breathing this morning, I see.”
“Yep. The Huns must be waiting to invade some other night.” Ellen’s lighthearted joke matched his attempt at humor, but her eyes flashed defiance. No soft Ellen this morning. She was ticked.
Welcome to the club, sweetheart.
When he’d pulled into Carly’s driveway only to find both houses empty, he’d been mad enough to punch something—mad at Ellen and Carly for not taking the situation seriously, and furious with himself for not anticipating that they would do something like this.
But the fury had burned off quickly. In security, there was next to no such thing as a perfectly submissive client. Nobody enjoyed feeling powerless, and the result was a hundred different kinds of sabotage. He should have guessed Carly and Ellen would leave without telling him. What better way to thumb their noses at the whole situation?
Bring them back, he’d ordered when Sean had called to say he’d spotted them outside the bookstore, and Sean had done it. He’d reported that there had been a man with Ellen, touching her. A disagreement. There had also been a photographer. Sean had given Caleb the plate number, but Caleb didn’t need to run it. He’d already had Katie do that first thing this morning.
All Caleb had needed to do after he talked to Sean was make a couple of calls.
Ellen lifted Henry onto her hip.
“You going to introduce us?” Caleb asked.
“This is Mr. Clark,” she said to Henry. “Can you say hello?”
The boy buried his face in his mother’s neck. “No.”
“Figures,” Ellen said.
“He can call me ‘Caleb.’”
“I’ll be surprised if he calls you anything at all. He’s kind of shy around new people. Is that a bag full of unpickable locks?” The question was casual, the tone anything but. She was performing for Henry.
“There’s no such thing as an unpickable lock. This is a bag full of locks that are going to be a big improvement on the ones you’ve got. You planning to tell me what happened downtown?”
“No.”
As much as he wanted to press, he knew that if he did, Ellen would kick him out. She had every right to. It was her house. Plus, he’d deserve it if he questioned her judgment in front of her son.
“Nice place,” he said instead.
It was. What he could see of it, anyway. Too comfortable to be called fancy, Ellen’s home had vaulted ceilings and an airiness that made his Prairie-style ranch seem cramped and small by comparison. Like the yard, she kept it clean and tidy—no small feat considering she had a toddler.
“Nice try.”
“What’d I say?”
“You’re sucking up so I’ll invite you in.”
“I’m trying to give you a compliment.” He lifted his toolbox a few inches. “You care where I start?”
“I haven’t said yes to the locks yet.”
“Say yes now.”
She stared at him, her nostrils flaring slightly. Breathing shallow and fast. “No.”
Damn it, why did she have to be so territorial? What rational person resisted replacing old, weak locks with newer, better ones?
Whatever was going on with Ellen, it wasn’t rational. He’d made his case last night, and she’d brushed it off. For some reason, she didn’t want to believe she might be in danger.
She was, though. Or she could be. When Katie had checked the plates on the photographer’s brown sedan this morning, she’d come up with expired tags registered three years back to a Martin Plimpton of Georgia.
It was entirely possible that the man Caleb had run off Ellen’s property wasn’t the same Martin Plimpton who had outstanding warrants in Illinois for burglary and assault, but the safe thing to do was to assume he was. Caleb had put a phone call in to the Mount Pleasant police. Unfortunately, he didn’t have a lot of faith they’d be able to find Plimpton and bring him in for questioning. It was up to Caleb to make sure Ellen, Henry, and Carly were safe.
If he told Ellen about Plimpton, would she change her mind and let him install the locks? Maybe. Maybe not. He wasn’t inclined to share the information until he knew one way or the other whether the photographer from yesterday was the same guy. He’d asked Katie to keep digging.
Meanwhile, the locks had to go in. He propped the screen door open and unpacked his drill and one of the deadbolt kits.
“What are you doing?”
“I’m going to start right here.”
“You can’t drill holes in my house without my permission.”
“Actually, I probably could. But you’re going to give me your permission.”
She flushed. “I’ll call my brother and have you fired.”
“For installing locks you need?”
That flummoxed her temporarily, but she rallied quickly. “I’ll call the police.”
“You could do that. They might be on my side, though.” He turned away from her, opened his toolbox, and found a tape measure.
When she spoke again, it was in a whisper. “You’re no better than the rest of them.”
Caleb dropped his laid-back guy act and took a good, long look at her. She was absolutely furious, which he’d expected. He figured that in Ellen’s emotional universe, he was doing the exact same thing as the photographer from yesterday—invading her space and ignoring her wishes. But unlike Plimpton, Caleb had a good reason.
What he couldn’t understand was why she looked so goddamn hurt.
Caleb took a deep breath and let it out. He’d fouled this situation up on day one, but there had to be a way to fix it. Had to be a way to talk her into letting him do this without stepping on one of her emotional land mines.
Though it would sure help if he knew where the mines were.
“Ellen, if you tell me no again, I’ll go,” he said quietly. He met her eyes and made sure she knew he was telling the truth. “It’s your house. I told you I worked for you, and I meant it.” She crossed her arms. “But listen, we’re not talking about a big change here. We’re talking about a couple of locks. One more key you have to put on your keychain, and a bolt you have to flip closed at night. That’s all. It’s nothing. It’s like the porch light. Something I can do that you can’t, and I want to help you with it.”
Ellen stared at him for a long time. “Fine,” she finally said, before turning her back on him and taking Henry into the kitchen. Caleb told himself that was what he wanted, that he’d won this round.
He didn’t feel particularly victorious.
The work was familiar, and he let himself start to relax as he did it. He tried sorting through what had just happened, what he felt about her, but he thought about all the wrong things. The way she’d smelled last night, like wine and cinnamon. Her merlot-stained lips. Those slender white hands on his chest.
In the long moment before he’d walked away from her porch, she’d seemed so ripe and sweet, he’d wanted to do more than kiss her. He’d wanted to have her, to imprint himself on her. To lose himself in all that softness and make her his own.
Maybe some people would chalk a moment like that up to the wine or to temporary insanity, but he couldn’t bullshit himself. He’d only had one glass, and there was nothing temporary about this insanity. His attraction to Ellen wasn’t going away.
Neither was he.
But their nonrelationship was about to get a lot more complicated. If her reaction to the locks was a fair barometer, by mid-afternoon Ellen probably wouldn’t even be speaking to him anymore. Which dramatically reduced the odds he’d need to repeat last night’s painful exercise in self-control.
Caleb drilled out the cylinder hole. It dropped to the deck with a puff of sawdust. As he swapped the big hole saw for a smaller one, Henry peeked at him from the kitchen.
“That man is?” Henry asked. Ellen came up behind him and laid one protective hand on his shoulder.
“That’s Caleb, honey. I already told you that.”
“Doin’?”
“He’s installing a new lock on the door.”
“Cabe has a drill!”
“Yep, he has a drill.”
“Use it for?”
“He’s making a hole for the lock to go in.”
“Henry do it. Henry use a drill.”
“No, sweetie, you need to stay over here with Mama.”
But Henry was a toddler—his mother’s denial was all the provocation he needed to wiggle out of her grip for a closer look. When the bit punched through for the bolt hole, Caleb backed it out and offered up the warm plug of wood to Henry, who took possession of the treasure with a huge, dimpled smile. Apparently all it took to get on Henry’s list of people worth cozying up to was the right tools.
Caleb wished Ellen were that easy.
“You want to help out, buddy?”
“You don’t have to do that,” she protested. “He’ll just get in the way.”
“Nah, it’s fine. I have nephews. They always want to help when I’m fixing things.” And it always makes Amber like me better when I take her kids off her hands for a while.
Fishing around in his tool chest, he found the small pair of safety glasses. “If you want to stand close, you have to wear these to keep your eyes safe. Can I put them on you?”
A solemn nod from Henry. Caleb slid the glasses over his ears. “There you go. Now have a seat. I need somebody to look at these directions and tell me what I’m supposed to be doing.”
Henry plopped down on the threshold and began paging through the instruction book with a serious expression, stopping every now and then to ask “This is?” or “That is?” He soaked up Caleb’s explanations with an impressive attentiveness for such a little guy.
“How old did you say he is?”
Ellen lingered near the kitchen, clearly unable to decide what to do with herself. She was still angry, but he guessed she didn’t want to spoil Henry’s fun without a good reason. “He turned two in May.”
“Good vocabulary for a kid his age.”
“Yeah, talking is pretty much his primary function.”
“Want your steamroller,” Henry said.
“It’s in your room, Peanut.”
Henry left and came back a minute later with an assortment of plastic construction trucks, which he put to work in the sawdust.
“You can go do something else,” Caleb told Ellen. “If he gets bored and starts causing trouble, I’ll holler.”
She didn’t want to. It was written all over her face. She wanted Caleb to leave her house alone, leave her kid alone, leave her alone.
Whereas what he wanted to do was burrow as deep into her life as he could get.
Insane, he told himself. You met her yesterday.
But sometimes life didn’t make a hell of a lot of sense. Caleb had spent enough time in combat to get used to the idea that there weren’t any rules, really. There was just life. And life was for the living.
“I promise not to let him run around with the screwdriver,” he said.
She sank to the floor with her back against the kitchen doorjamb, eyes fixed on him. “I guess I’m not willing to take my chances.”
“Suit yourself.”
Caleb chiseled out a mortise and screwed in the latch plate. Henry made rumbling diesel-engine sounds and crashed his trucks into one another.
Cute kid. He had Ellen’s blond hair and round cheeks, but those big blue eyes must have come from his daddy. Who Caleb really needed to check out.
Ellen’s ex was on his to-do list, but the list kept getting longer. He’d lost most of the morning to the plumbing job over at the apartments, and then to the runner Carly and Ellen had decided to take. By the time he was done with these locks it would be noon, and he still had to chew out Carly and replace the lock on her back door, plus find an hour to get over to Ellen’s mother-in-law’s place and figure out what it would take to keep Henry safe over there for the weekend.
With Carly shut tight in her house and Callahan out in L.A., the vultures were going to get restless. Caleb wouldn’t put it past them to start poking their beaks where they didn’t belong. He wouldn’t put much of anything past them.
And then there was Plimpton.
Too many variables for him to let Ellen take her safety for granted. Too much to be on guard against. She needed defenses more foolproof than her temper. Which was why this afternoon, a couple of guys were coming over to install floodlights and an alarm system on her house whether she wanted them or not.