Along Came Trouble: A Loveswept Contemporary Romance (19 page)

She sighed. This discussion was absurd, but as much as she’d like to pretend it wasn’t happening, it was. She’d have to bend on something if she wanted to come to an agreement with him. She had to come to an agreement with him if she ever wanted to have sex with him again. She had to have sex with him again, or she’d curl up in a ball and die.

“Fine. Yes. You can sleep over on the weekends, theoretically. You’re not sleeping over tonight, though.”

“Excellent. See, we can do this.” He grinned, and she looked around for something to throw at his head. Nothing available but her naked body. She’d save that for a later stage of the negotiations.

All business again, Caleb carried on. “Next point. I want getting-to-know-you conversations. You don’t. I’ll stipulate you can ask me any question you like, at any time, and I’ll answer it.”

“I don’t want to ask you questions.” She really didn’t. Much. She refused to be curious about Caleb. She didn’t want to hear all his stories, including the story of that scar on his hip that looked like it must have been horrifically painful to acquire. She didn’t wonder what he did to stay in such amazing physical shape or how he’d gotten to be so good with kids. Where he lived, house or apartment. She bet he had a house. He seemed like a house kind of guy. How he’d decorated it. If he’d ever been married. What his bed looked like.

Shit
.

“Asking me questions is your prerogative,” he said. “But you have to give me a chance here. How about you let me ask you personal questions, but you only have to answer two out of three?”

“That’s ridiculous. I’m not a game show.”

“Or you let me ask them for half an hour a day, but that’s all?”

She crossed her arms. “No.”

“I can ask questions in the bedroom, but no other place?”

“No.”

“Really? I thought that was a good offer. Huh. Give me a second to think.”

She was already wavering. What was the harm in letting him ask a few personal questions? She wasn’t such a secretive person, after all. She’d told Carly her life story over a bottle of wine soon after they met.

“You can have one a day,” she offered.

“One per orgasm.”

“Yours or mine?”

“I was thinking yours.”

“You think I’m going to have more than one orgasm a day, on average?” What a heady notion. Three climax-free years followed by a veritable monsoon season.

“You’ve had three since I showed up with the pizza.”

Fair point. Three orgasms, three questions?

It would be worth it for the orgasms.

“One question per orgasm, but you can’t save them up.”

“The orgasms?”

“The questions. If you don’t ask your question within five minutes, your time expires.”

He stroked his chin, producing a delicious, piratey rasping noise. “I want longer than that. If you only give me five minutes, it’ll ruin the afterglow. I’ll have to lie there thinking about questions when all I want to think about is how you just blew my mind.”

She rolled her eyes. What sort of man talked about the afterglow and fought fiercely for sleepover rights? She’d question his masculinity, except … yeah. No. He could probably make her come from forty paces, just by saying her name the right way.

“You can have twenty minutes.”

“Two hours.”

“Half an hour.”

“Ninety minutes.”

“An hour.”

“Okay, an hour,” he said. “You want some pizza?”

“Yes.”

He left the room and returned with a box. They carried on, eating cold pizza while they argued. He’d said it would be easy, but he’d lied. It took them another forty minutes to hammer out the contract, and Caleb was absolutely ruthless. She never wanted to meet the man across a conference table. He pushed and pushed to get what he wanted, and when that didn’t work he tried to charm her into changing her mind, and if that failed he did his level best to outsmart her. She’d never come up against such a worthy opponent in her life. He put her University of Chicago classmates to shame.

It was kind of fun.

“So we have a deal?” he said at last.

“Let’s hear it.”

One more time, he ticked off each item on his fingers. “Lots of sex. Sleepovers allowed, but only when Henry’s not home. Dates to be negotiated on a case-by-case basis, but not this
weekend, and not if they interfere with your work.”

She interrupted him. “And both parties to agree they’re meaningless.”

He shook his head. “I’m not agreeing to the meaninglessness of anything, Ellen. You think what you want. I’ll think what I want.”

“And never the twain shall meet.”

“We’ll see about that.” Touching his ring finger, he said, “I can ask you personal questions, but only one per orgasm, and no saving them up to ask a bunch at once. I have to ask them within an hour, or they expire. You can ask me personal questions whenever you want—”

“But I won’t.”

“—and I’ll answer them. Quit interrupting me. I can interact with Henry as I see fit, under your supervision, provided I promise not to become his new best friend and then abandon him, which I would never do anyway, because it would be cruel. Oh, and I’m not allowed to give him presents.”

“You’re not allowed to give either of us presents.”

“Right. All gifts are forbidden. Did I miss anything?”

“We’re not going to call it ‘making love.’ ”

He sighed. “You’re going to make a thing out of that?”

“Yes.”

“All right. What do you want to call it, ‘nookie’?”

She laughed. Even when she was exhausted, wrung out from lack of sleep and a stressful day, from hot sex and waging war, Caleb could make her laugh. She liked him. He was a good guy. A sexy, funny, smart, solid guy. Also, a piranha.

“I was thinking ‘boffing.’ ”

He rose onto his hands and knees and started crawling toward her. “Yeah, because that’s sexy. C’mere, baby. I wanna boff you.”

She giggled. “How about, ‘Let’s make whoopie’?”

“Sounds like you want to bake a cake.” He straddled her thighs and kneeled above her. “I want to play hide the bone.”

“That’s gross.” She smacked his chest, and he captured her hand in his.

“I promise, it wouldn’t be gross. It would be a lot better than gross.” Kissing her fingertips, he added, “But we’re out of condoms, and you need some sleep. I’m going to head home. In just a minute.”

He took her head in his hand and kissed her, gently and slowly and quite thoroughly, and by the time he was done she was ready to let him call it whatever he liked if he’d just stick around for some more of it. But he was already pulling away.

“It’s been a pleasure negotiating with you, Lawyer Callahan. I’ll be back in the morning.”

She watched him put on his shirt. Watched his capable fingers work the buttons, untie his empty shoes, put them on, and lace them up again. He smiled at her from the doorway, telling her to lock up after him, and she smiled back and sank down the headboard into the pile of pillows behind her and stared as he disappeared down the dark hallway.

Two thoughts chased each other around in her head.

When they’d been negotiating, he could have kissed her like that anytime he wanted, and she would have given in. But he hadn’t.

And also, now that he was leaving, she really didn’t want him to go.

Caleb stopped at the end of the drive to talk to Cassie and Eric. He’d tucked his shirt in before leaving the house, but given the fact that Ellen had come outside scantily clad earlier and then the two of them had disappeared indoors … Well, it was none of their business anyway.

“Everything quiet out here?”

Cassie yawned. “It’s been a nonstop party since you went in there, boss. Chicks with Mardi Gras beads, guys rolling pony kegs down the street. You wouldn’t believe it.”

Frowning, Eric said, “We had a couple cars down here to turn around, but that’s it.”

A mid-career cop Caleb had lured off the force, Eric took the job seriously. Cassie was younger, one of Katie’s friends, lively and smart. He’d wondered before if he’d made the right decision hiring her. Eric had never complained, and Cassie did have some experience working as a mall cop, but Caleb suspected she talked too much, and when she was talking, she wasn’t watching and listening, which is what he paid her to do.

“Call me if anything out of the ordinary happens.”

Cassie’s lips twitched. “Like any more pizza deliveries?”

He stared at her until she started to squirm. She needed to learn to keep her thoughts to herself.

“We’ll call,” Eric said, breaking the tension.

“All right.”

He walked home in the dark, wondering if tonight he’d made the best or the worst decision of his life.

Too soon to say. It was often like this when you led from the front. You had to make tough calls, and you didn’t get the feedback you needed to evaluate them until it was far too late to use it.

For now, he’d done the only thing he could do. He wouldn’t let Ellen keep him at arm’s length, but he’d promised himself he wouldn’t manipulate her, either. She needed him honest and direct. She needed to be treated as an equal.

That didn’t mean she always needed to get her way.

He had some maneuvering room. She was a tough negotiator, but she’d started from a weak position. He’d asked for everything but her hand in marriage, figuring that if he presented a long list of demands and she began by saying no to all of them, he’d end up getting at least half of what he wanted. He’d done a little better than half.

The question now was whether he could use the leverage he’d gained to win Ellen over. To make her see him as more than just a lover.

He hoped so, because being Ellen’s lover would never be enough. He wanted more. He wanted everything.

Chapter Fifteen

Caleb eased into consciousness smiling, thinking about Ellen before he even got his eyes open.

It made a nice change. Most mornings, he woke up hungover from nightmares. Moments of indecision with terrible consequences. Bodies he’d found, deaths he blamed himself for. The explosion on Route Irish that had ripped everything apart.

He didn’t like to dwell on the memories, but he didn’t want to forget, either. Forgetting was its own kind of betrayal.

But this morning, he had the luxury of not even worrying about it. He ran seven miles instead of five, and he could have done ten easy if he hadn’t needed to get to work. It felt great to move. Everything felt great.

Back home, he put on coffee for Katie. By the time he’d showered and dressed, she was nursing a mug at the kitchen table.

“House looks nice,” he commented. The kitchen was immaculate.

“I cleaned last night while you were out getting lucky.”

Camelot relished gossip as much as the next small town, but this was ridiculous. Katie had been asleep when he got home. “What makes you think I was out getting lucky?”

“Cassie sent me a text when you went inside with Ellen.”

“So maybe I kept my hands to myself.”

“You were whistling while you got dressed.”

“It’d never hold up in court.”

“I’m still waiting for your denial.”

Caleb bent over and finished tying his shoes. “Keep waiting.”

“What ever happened to ‘I’m not allowed to notice how hot she is’?”

“I reconsidered my position on that.”

“Huh.” Katie folded her arms on the table and leaned forward to rest her chin on her hands. “She must really be something if you’re throwing over your principles.”

“I’m not throwing over my principles. Carly helped me see I was thinking about the situation all wrong.”

“You took advice from Carly? She of little impulse control and even less good sense? Wow. Now I really want to meet this woman.”

He hadn’t taken advice from Carly. Not exactly. She’d simply nudged him toward understanding the error of his ways. He was relying on his own judgment, and it was solid.

Wasn’t it?

It always had been before. In Camelot, though … he wasn’t as sure as he wanted to be. “Do you think it’s unethical? Me and Ellen?”

“You have some kind of security guard code I don’t know about? Some secret oath that says you won’t sleep with your clients?”

He shook his head. Shouldn’t have asked. She’d have a field day with this one.

But Katie surprised him. “No,” she said after a long pause. “It’s probably okay. You’re both consenting adults, and she’s not, like, traumatized by fear or anything. If she were under major stress, then maybe you’d have to worry about the Stockholm syndrome thing, but this is just some guys with cameras hanging around, and I bet she’s used to that. I think it’s fine.”

His shoulders dropped, releasing tension he hadn’t noticed he was holding. “Thanks. Listen, you get anything else on Martin Plimpton yet?”

“Nope, but I still have to call a few of the names you gave me.”

“Let me know if you find something.” He tucked his shirt into his slacks and fastened his belt. Katie looked him over and wolf-whistled. “You look good in black. Kind of a Johnny Cash thing.”

“Shut up.” At least his sister was back to her usual smart-ass self.

Sticking his wallet in his pocket, he grabbed his phone and his keys off the counter and crossed to the garage door.

“The Man in Black. Sing us a song, Johnny.”

“Shut up, Katie.”

“Or like a magician. Mr. Mysterious. Shaazam!”

“I’m leaving now.”

“Knock ’em dead, Cowboy. Oh, and stop by the apartment later. Mom has some work for you.”

“Okay. You making dinner?”

She nodded. “You’re not going to be with your piece of action?”

“Jesus, Katie. Her name’s Ellen. She’s a lawyer. She has a kid. She’s not my piece of anything.”

Katie laughed. “Bring her home for dinner, then.”

“Not tonight. I’ll be back around six.”

As the door closed behind him, he heard Katie singing in a low, wavery voice, “Because you’re mine, I walk the line.”

Now he was going to spend the whole day with that song in his head, wondering if wearing a black shirt with black slacks made him look like an idiot.

Sisters. What a pain in the ass
.

Nowhere in Camelot could a man buy condoms by the box at seven in the morning. It was one of the drawbacks of small-town life. He made the ten-mile drive into Mount Pleasant to a convenience store, where he also picked up orange juice and some doughnuts. Did Ellen eat doughnuts? She’d tucked into the pizza last night like the sort of woman who didn’t waste her time counting calories. He liked that.