Along Came Trouble: A Loveswept Contemporary Romance (11 page)

He polished off the sandwich and looked up. Carly was watching him, her hands folded over her protruding stomach.

“Does it hurt?” she asked.

“What?”

“All those rusty wheels grinding around in your head as you try to relearn how to think for yourself.”

Carly liked to remind him that soldiers were mindless drones whenever she got the chance. “Very funny, Short Round.” He stood up. “Thanks for lunch.”

For a pregnant woman she moved fast, blocking him with her belly before he could cross the threshold. “Don’t even think about leaving without saying, ‘You’re right, Carly.’ ”

Giving her his best confused look, he asked, “What are you right about?”

“Ellen.”

He smiled. “Get out of my way, Carly. I’ve got work to do.”

Watching Caleb saunter down the driveway, Carly brushed off her hands.

There. Good deed for the day: done and done
.

Caleb obviously had the hots for Ellen. Ellen just as obviously had the hots for Caleb. Now they could get their rocks off, and Carly would get bonus points from the Universal Matchmaker for hooking them up. Some day, after baby Wombat was born and she’d lost her pregnancy weight, the Universal Matchmaker would send her somebody to love in exchange. Fair was fair.

The Wombat kicked, and she rubbed the contact spot on her belly. “Yeah, I know. That’ll be the day, eh, kid?”

Love didn’t play fair, and Carly had never believed in any power beyond herself. She made her own luck. Just lately, she’d made herself an impressively shitty streak.

She returned to the kitchen and started gathering up the dishes and putting away all the sandwich fixings. It still felt weird to be in this kitchen without Nana. Like Nana
was
the kitchen, and without her here, Carly was bumbling around in an empty shell. She didn’t feel big enough to fill the place up.

“Good thing I’m getting bigger every day. Pretty soon, I’ll be spilling out the windows like Alice in Wonderland.”

The Wombat had no comment. Maybe he—or she—had gone to bed. Like a cat, the Wombat took a lot of naps, awakening primarily to kick her in uncomfortable places or, just as she was drifting off to sleep, to get the hiccups for forty-five minutes. Because there was nothing quite so sleep-inducing as a torso full of Mexican jumping beans.

She squirted soap into the sink and began running some warm water over the dirty plates and her breakfast cereal bowl.

She’d told Nana she was going to buy a dishwasher, but she couldn’t bring herself to do it, any more than she could bring herself to replace Nana’s radioactive-green dish soap with something environmentally friendly. It didn’t feel right to change anything, not when this was the only home she’d ever known. She wanted to preserve it like a museum so the Wombat could grow up here, surrounded by all of Nana’s things.

As if her grandmother’s love had soaked into the walls and the cabinets and the carpeting. The Wombat could breathe it in, but only so long as Carly didn’t throw away Nana’s collection of chipped coffee cups or her huge-ass microwave from 1987.

If Baby Wombat was indeed ever born—and Carly still had a hard time believing that a living, breathing human baby was at the end of this bizarre ride known as pregnancy—she figured she could use all the help she could get.

Two months to go, and she’d be a mother. You’d think it would have sunk in by now. She’d wanted this for so long—couldn’t remember a time in her life when she hadn’t wanted it—
and now that it was actually happening, she often felt as though it were happening to someone else.

Some of her online infertility friends had warned her about this strange period of unreality called pregnancy. The battle to conceive became all-consuming, and then it happened, and you didn’t know what to do with yourself or how to think anymore. Your head space got completely warped by the experience of being not-pregnant.

It had certainly warped her marriage. The endless blood draws and progesterone injections took a lot out of even the most solid, dedicated, mutually infatuated couples, and she and Mitch hadn’t been one of those. Not by the end, at any rate, and probably not even on the day she married him.

The other dads-to-be had shown up for appointments with books and iPhones and crossword puzzles, offering their quiet, steadfast support to the women they loved. Mitchell hadn’t shown up at all, but he
had
unfailingly offered color commentary as he’d plunged that 22-gauge needle in her ass.

Christ, honey, this is depressing. How much longer are you going to keep this shit up?

I’m running out of places to stick this thing, babe
. Pause. Chuckle.
That’s what
she
said
.

Holy crap, Carly, did you know this syringe was made by a company called Wang? That’s just all kinds of wrong
.

At least he wasn’t the Wombat’s biological father. After refusing tests and putting her through three years of Clomid hot flashes and headaches, Mitchell had finally consented to have his sperm checked out, only to confirm her suspicion that she wasn’t the only one with second-rate reproductive organs.

A sensible person might have concluded that a biologically related child wasn’t in the cards, but nobody had ever accused Carly of being sensible, and Mitch seemed to take the sperm motility number as a personal affront to his manliness. She went through three rounds of IVF with donated sperm and a husband who cracked tasteless jokes and skipped appointments. Mitch lost forty pounds and bought a new wardrobe. At some point in the middle of round three, he told her it was their last hurrah. He didn’t want to do it anymore.

Then it worked.

Then he left.

Two months after she finally succeeded in getting pregnant with another man’s sperm—clinic-approved, cleaned, and sanitized, thankyouverymuch—Mitch packed two bags and jetted off to screw surfer girls in Baja.

Good riddance
, Nana had said when Carly told her. And Carly had cried. But the tears didn’t last as long as she’d expected.

She ought to have known better than to have married a man named Mitchell. It was like
marrying a Duane or a Conrad. Born losers, all of them. Marrying Mitch had been a form of late-adolescent rebellion. At twenty-two, she’d taken the plunge into matrimony as a way of thumbing her nose at Nana’s Second Wave feminist stance on patriarchy.

Stupid of her to try to rebel. She should have used Nana’s life as a template. Her grandmother had more fun than anybody Carly had ever met. If she’d followed Nana’s lead, maybe she’d be in Amsterdam right now with some hot guy named Sven, working her way through the Kama Sutra positions one at a time, instead of pregnant and trapped in Nana’s house with Caleb Clark for a protector.

She gave the Wombat a pat. “Don’t take it personal, Wombat. I still want you.” Before Jamie, her life had focused down to the point that the Wombat was the
only
thing she’d wanted. Jamie had helped remind her there were other things in life than babies and needles, scumbag husbands and online friendships.

Sex, for example. Fun. Music.

She pulled a plate from the soapy water in the sink and began to wash.

At least on the name front, she’d done better with Jamie Callahan. Not that he was marriage material, but he did have a great name. A girl could be confident that a guy named Jamie Callahan would show her a good time.

And oh, man, had he ever shown her some good times. Once, he’d even made her see stars—honest-to-goddamn stars circling her head after a colossal orgasm, and he hadn’t even been nailing her into the headboard. Jamie had been far too considerate of her delicate condition to nail her into anything. It hadn’t kept him from nailing
her
, over and over again, but he’d been a real sweetheart about it. A raunchy, clever, dirty-minded sweetheart.

She took her hands out of the warm dishwater and dried them off so she could fan her face. Bad idea to think about Jamie. Thinking about Jamie either made her hot or it made her cry, and sometimes it did both at the same time. She’d almost cried in front of Caleb, which would have sucked. Caleb had never seen her cry, and he wasn’t going to. He was a good guy and a good friend, but he wasn’t
that
sort of friend.

Jamie was that sort of friend
.

“Oh, shut up,” she told herself, exasperated. Jamie was over. The fight they’d had about her blog was stupid, but it had needed to happen.

Jamie Callahan smiled like a god, and he had some fantastic moves in the sack. He’d made her laugh like she hadn’t laughed in years. And for four incredible months, he’d made her dancing-in-the-fucking-tulips happy. But he was the kind of boy you played around with for a little while and then sighed over after he broke your heart. He wasn’t
serious
.

Jamie had been Impulsive Mistake #786, the latest in a lifetime of failures to look before she leapt. She’d sailed over the cliff, thinking, despite knowing better, that maybe this guy would
catch her, because she really was a complete moron. Naturally, she’d broken both legs.

“De nada,”
she told the Wombat. “That’s Spanish. You say it to mean ‘You’re welcome,’ but it really means, ‘It’s nothing.’ Learned that from my worthless prick of a husband.”

It’s nothing
. The bruised heart. The memories that weren’t fading yet. The way she’d cry whenever one of Jamie’s songs came on the radio.
De nada
.

“Don’t you worry about Mama, Wombat. When you’ve taken as many falls as I have, you learn to pick yourself up and dust off your own butt.”

The Wombat acknowledged this wisdom by kicking her in the kidneys.

“Ugh.” She rubbed her back with one hand as she put the last plate on the draining board. “Dish it out, you little weenie. I can take it.”

She
could
take it. She could take getting kicked by the Wombat and losing Jamie and a thousand times worse if she had to.

And if sometimes, late at night, she wished she didn’t have to, well, tough.

She made her own luck.

Chapter Nine

“Sweetie, that fire truck is huge, and you haven’t played with it for a week. You’re not taking it to Grammy Maureen’s house.”

“Henry take that one.”

“No, not that one either.”

Ellen scooped her son’s last four clean T-shirts out of the drawer and added them to the bag. The Thursday afternoon packing-for-Grammy’s had simplified as Henry grew out of the tiny-baby stage, but it remained a challenge due to his newfound desire to “help” by bringing her countless precious objects that he insisted had to come with him. Tongs from the kitchen. All of his fire trucks from the living room play area. The plunger from the bathroom. No, no, and
eww
.

She zipped the bag shut before he could come up with anything else and carried it out to drop it beside the front door, where she saw a man standing behind the screen.

This time, it wasn’t Caleb. It was an older guy in a blue uniform shirt that said “Bill” over the breast pocket, and behind him the tallest, skinniest, palest, Abraham-Lincoln-lookingest sidekick she’d ever laid eyes on.

“Hello!” Bill said cheerily. “You must be Mrs. Callahan. We’re going to have to shut off the power for a while to get these lights installed, and then for the alarm we’ll have to turn it on and off a few times. Can you show me the way to the master switch, or do I need to have a poke around myself?”

Henry meandered out of his room, caught sight of the strangers, and wrapped his arms around Ellen’s bare leg.

“You—” she began. “What—”

Scrambling. Her brain was half a beat from figuring out what was going on, but apparently her emotional intelligence had an edge, because emotionally she’d already moved on from confusion to irritation, and something like full-blown outrage waited not so patiently in the wings.

“Not to worry. A lot of women don’t know where to find the shut-off. We’ll have a look ourselves. You’ll just want to turn off the television and computers and such before we flip it.” He reached for the handle on the screen door and pulled it open a few feet.

“Out,” she managed to say, her voice thick and choked. “Get off my porch.”

“Mrs. Callahan?”

Her thinking brain caught up. “You’re not installing any lights on my house. Or any
alarm system. Get off my porch. Please.” She picked up Henry, opened the screen door, and stepped outside. Bill and the Human Cadaver eased back to the top step. Bill’s jovial smile had faded slightly. He plucked a piece of paper from his pocket and inspected it, then looked up at her house number.

“This is 334 Burgess, isn’t it? Mr. Clark sent us here to do the installation. Said it was a rush job, had to be done today.”

She pitched her voice as close to civil as she could manage—which wasn’t terribly close—and said, “This is not Mr. Clark’s house. It’s mine. You don’t have my permission to install anything, nor do you have my permission to continue standing on my porch. This is the third and final time I’m going to ask you to get off my property. If you’re not gone in five seconds, I’m going to call the police and tell them you’re trespassing. Is that clear?”

Bill and the circus freak backed all the way down the steps. “Yes, ma’am, that’s clear. I’ll just call Mr. Clark.”

“It won’t make any difference.”

He glanced at her over his shoulder as he scuttled to the work van. “We’ll call Caleb,” he said, loud enough so she knew she was meant to hear it, and then both of them ducked inside and left her standing on her front porch, hand on one hip, toddler on the other. Glowering.

“Cabe is?” Henry asked, unaffected by her mood.

“I don’t know, Peanut, but I have a feeling we’re going to find out.”

The van backed past the Camelot Security SUV to park on the street, and then the workmen and the security men formed a huddle near the bottom of the driveway, talking to one another and looking up at her intermittently, as if she were the enemy and they needed to regroup to come up with a superior plan of attack.

Bring on the cannons, fellas. Bring on the catapult, and that big log thing they use to bust down the doors
. She was in the mood to fight for her castle. Hell, she was in the mood to dump a big cauldron of tar on the handsomest, most annoying man in Camelot, Ohio.