Along Came Trouble: A Loveswept Contemporary Romance (27 page)

Caleb now owed favors to a lot of people.

Meanwhile, Katie had been throwing together schedules, printing out lists, programming new numbers into Caleb’s cell, and figuring out how to wake up anybody he wanted to talk to who wouldn’t pick up the phone. Which sometimes meant waking up those people’s neighbors, their siblings, or their Aunt Carol and having them do the legwork.

Half the village of Camelot met the sunrise bleary-eyed and irritable, but on alert. Caleb started another pot of coffee for Katie, showered, threw on some clothes, and toasted bagels and scrambled eggs for breakfast. He was going to need the fuel.

Katie trudged into the kitchen, still wearing her pink pajamas, slippers, and dark circles under her eyes that were totally his fault. Couldn’t be helped. He needed her.

“You look way too awake,” she said. “Don’t you even require sleep?”

In Iraq, he’d gone days without sleeping when necessary. Some far-off part of him registered the fatigue, but it was easy to ignore. Pleasurable, even. It had been a long time since he’d had this much on his plate, and the sense of purpose, the tension, came as a relief. Such a clarifying thing, to have a mission and obvious obstacles in the way. All he had to do was take them out, one by one. “I’m fine. You going to be okay alone in the office today?”

“Don’t worry about me. I’ll hang in.”

Sliding a plate onto the table for Katie, he pointed her toward a chair and began shoveling in his own breakfast standing up.

“I need to head over to Burgess in a few minutes to meet Tony and the fence crew,” he
said. “You want me to drop you off?”

“No, I can walk. You’d better get over there to talk to your woman before a bunch of strange men in hard hats start operating a posthole digger on her front lawn.”

“She’s going to be mad enough to spit.” He didn’t like where he’d had to leave things with Ellen last night, and when it came down to it, he didn’t like what he was about to do, either—strong-arm his way into getting that fence up whether she wanted it or not.

Who was he kidding? No way would she want it.

But he’d promised himself he wouldn’t let the way he felt about Ellen interfere with the way he did the job. She needed the fence.

Katie had asked him three times in the past few hours if there was any possibility he was going overboard on the security. There was. There was a pretty strong possibility, actually. But he had a bad feeling—a feeling that told him that for every guy with a shady past who’d been skulking around the village last week, there would be a dozen more today—and he wanted to be prepared.

He’d learned never to ignore that gut-level unease. It had saved his life a few times.

“I’m sure you’ll charm your way back into her pants soon enough,” Katie said.

“Knock it off.” The rebuttal came out sharper than he’d intended, and when he looked up at Katie, she was staring at him with wide eyes. “Sorry. I didn’t mean to yell.”

“You didn’t say! How was I supposed to know when you didn’t say?”

“What are you talking about?”

“This thing with Ellen. It isn’t casual for you, is it? You’re serious about her.”

“Yes,” he admitted.
Hell, yes
.

“I thought—well, you’re
sleeping
with her, Caleb. Don’t you think that’s a mistake, if you’re serious about her?”

“What do you mean?”

“You said she has a kid. How old?”

“He’s two. Henry.”

“So tell me this—do you want to marry Ellen Callahan and raise Henry with her? You want the whole shebang?”

He’d known Ellen for a couple of days. It shouldn’t be possible for him to answer this question yet. Shouldn’t be, but it was. Another gut feeling—that she was the right one, she and Henry. His future. “Yeah.”

Katie stood up, walked over, and smacked him on the side of the head, hard. “Then what the hell are you doing sleeping with her? Don’t you have any idea how this is supposed to work? You’re supposed to be taking her out to dinner and romancing her for, like, three months before you get her into bed. You’re supposed to
respect
her.”

“I do respect her.”

“No, you obviously don’t, or you’d be doing this right.”

She shoved his shoulder, and he rubbed at the side of his head.
What the hell?
Katie never hit him. She rarely challenged him like this, with her lips set in a white line and her hands on her hips. She looked furious.

She looked wounded, too, as if his behavior had personally offended her.

Christ, it probably had. Maybe to Katie, what he was doing with Ellen looked as screwed up as what Levi had done to her.

It wasn’t like that.
He
wasn’t like that. He respected Ellen, and damn it, he’d tried taking it slow. Ellen hadn’t gone along with the plan.

“I
do
respect her,” he said a second time. “This wasn’t my idea. She wouldn’t go out with me.”

His intentions had been pure. Pure-ish. Until Ellen walked out on the porch in those shorts and lured him inside. The memory made his lips curve into an ill-timed smile.

“Quit smiling, Caleb. This isn’t good. It’s really bad.”

“What are you talking about?”

“You’re a booty call for this woman. She doesn’t take you seriously.”

“Sure she does.”

But he didn’t have as much confidence in the statement as he’d have liked.

Katie shook her head. “Single moms get lonely. I know—some of my friends have kids. One minute they’re young and hot, and then they have a baby and they hardly ever wash their hair anymore, and men look right through them. That’s Ellen’s life, and then you come along, Mr. Sexy Security Guard, and she thinks, ‘I can get some action, and it doesn’t have to mean a thing.’ So she leads you to bed by your dick, and of course you go for it, because you’re a guy.”

“Jesus, Katie,” he said. Frustrated, because his sister had it all wrong. Ellen was—well, hell, he didn’t know for sure. She didn’t want a boyfriend, but that didn’t mean she was using him for sex. He was going to change her mind about the whole relationship situation. He just needed some time. “That’s not what it’s like. I swear.”

Katie crossed her arms and lifted her chin. A challenge. “So ask her to dinner on Wednesday. Bet she won’t come.”

She wouldn’t. He knew better than to even ask. That wasn’t good, was it? That suggested maybe Katie knew what she was talking about. “We’re not doing Wednesday dinner again. It sucked too much last week.”

“I already invited everyone. We’re going to have a cake for Clark’s birthday.”

Amber’s oldest was turning ten.
Shit
. No skipping the Wednesday dinner, then. “I have to buy him a present.”

“I already got one for you. You’re going to have to wrap it, though.”

He glanced at the clock. It was already nearly eight. He had to hustle. “Thanks. I need to go. If Tony’s guys get there before I do, I’m in trouble.”

Katie’s parting jab followed him out the door. “You’re already in trouble, Buster. You’re in huge trouble.”

At eight, Jamie called up the steps to the loft, “So when do you think I should go over there?”

“Not yet. It’s too early. She could still be asleep.”

Carly would be up, no question. But she was grumpy in the morning. Ten would be better. Nana would have her fed by ten.

Ellen scrolled through her in-box and sighed. She had a lot of work to do, but it was hard to concentrate with Jamie pacing around downstairs, making her worry. Plus, there was this piercing beeping noise coming from outside, like the sound the garbage truck made when it backed up. Henry had a dump truck that made that noise, and she hated it so much she’d sent it to Grammy Maureen’s house. But this was no plastic dump truck. No, this was something big, and the beeping kept drilling her between the eyes. It was giving her a headache.

It sounded like a construction site out there. But how could that be? She didn’t have any neighbors but Carly, and if Carly were getting work done, Ellen would know about it.

A solid crack ripped through her office, followed by a big crash into the underbrush. A tree had fallen over. Unless she was very much mistaken, a tree had fallen over
in her front yard
. Ellen sprang out of her office chair and moved to the other side of the loft, where she could get a view out the clerestory windows.

There was a huge truck in her driveway, the back of it filled with silver chain-link and a pile of galvanized posts. Half a dozen men in hard hats and work boots were walking all over her front lawn, and they’d just felled a good-sized cottonwood tree at the property line. Caleb was standing on her leprechaun in the driveway with one hand on his hip, pointing in the direction of the downed tree and talking to a guy in an orange vest. Gesticulating like he owned the joint.

“You bastard,” she said through her teeth. “You promised me.”

I wouldn’t dream of it
, he’d told her. Not Caleb. Caleb would never try to mess with her, push her around, manipulate her.

He wouldn’t dream of doing that. Except whenever the hell he felt like it.

She didn’t stop at the door to put on her shoes. The giant truck had somehow managed to spray gravel onto her driveway, and it bit into the soles of her feet, which made her even angrier. Her driveway was not supposed to have gravel on it. Or a giant truck. And those men were not supposed to be trampling her lawn, and—

“So help me God, if they cut down that tulip tree, I am going to kill you, Caleb. You stop
them. You stop them right this second.” She stomped her foot, and a big, sharp rock stabbed her in the heel so hard she yelped and picked her foot up off the ground by instinct, holding it in both hands as she hopped around. “Ohhh, mother of all that is holy, that
hurt
. That really fucking
hurt
!”

Caleb reached out to steady her.

“No! Don’t touch me. Don’t even think about it.” She took one hand off her foot and pointed down the drive. “Tree. Deal with the tree. I planted that tree myself, and if those men cut it down I will sue the pants off you.”

“I thought you were going to kill me.”

“I’ll do that, too.”

“I’m harder to kill than you might think.”

“I’ll do it when you’re sleeping.”

Caleb’s lips twitched, amused by her threat or her fury. She wanted to squeeze his neck until his head exploded.

When he said, “That sounds like fun” and Anonymous Hard-Hat Man chuckled, she lost all semblance of control over the stream of invective coming out of her mouth.

She called Caleb every bad name she could think of, and then she did a 180 so she could call Hard Hat some names, too, but he’d wisely moved off to stop a third guy with a chainsaw from attacking her tulip tree. So she ended up spinning in a circle with her jabbing finger out, ready to poke at Caleb some more. He caught her wrist and lowered it, and for some reason she let him.

“Ellen,” he said, very quietly.

She wasn’t going to answer him. It seemed she’d run out of swear words to call him, so now she’d go the other way. She wasn’t speaking to Caleb. She was breathing at him through her nostrils like a pissed-off bull, but she was
not
speaking to him. He’d promised not to play her, and then he’d turned right around and played her, and she was sick of it. Sick of being messed around with by men, sick of being treated as if her opinion didn’t matter. This was her
house
. It was the only thing she had. He was ruining her whole front yard, and he hadn’t even asked for permission so she could tell him N-O, no.

“Ellen, honey, I’m sorry. It’s really important.” Caleb trapped her with his eyes, which were humble and very unhappy. Also, kind of bruised and tired-looking, because he’d never gone to bed.

He was still the handsomest thing she’d ever seen. And she didn’t give a damn.

“It’s really important that I have the world’s ugliest fence put up around my house at eight o’clock on a Saturday morning?” So much for not talking to him. She had things she needed to say.

“Yes.”

“Because there are, what, seven cars out there by the road, with people in them who might want to take Jamie’s picture?”

“They’re coming,” he said. “Your brother snuck back into town in a way that’s gonna make a fantastic story for the press as soon as they figure out what happened. Which they will any time now. A whole lot more of them are coming. And the fence is only temporary.”

She met his eyes. He really did look sorry. But the thing was, it didn’t matter if more of them were coming, or if it was all Jamie’s fault. That was not the issue. The issue was between her and Caleb. “You
promised
me.” To her horror, her voice broke as she said it.

“Whatever they ruin, I’ll fix it later. This is just temporary—one fence around your property and Carly’s both, to help me keep them out. I have to do this to protect you.”

He reached for her face, and she batted his hand away. “Don’t touch me.”

“Ellen. Come on. This is my job.”

What did he want her to do, forgive him? Say,
Oh, well if it’s your job, I absolve you?
Not going to happen. He’d pretended to care what she wanted. All that negotiation crap over the security lights, and all that negotiation crap in the bedroom. But he didn’t have any real interest in what she wanted, any more than Richard ever had. He’d told her brother he was her boyfriend even when she’d said flat-out she didn’t want a relationship, and now he’d invited a bunch of bristly-jawed jackasses onto her property to cut down her trees and surround her beautiful house with something ugly.

Caleb was supposed to be fun. Having an affair with him was supposed to be something she was doing for
herself
. This was not remotely fun.

“You can’t have it both ways, Clark. Protect me from the ravening hordes if you want to, but don’t expect me to like it. Don’t expect me to thank you for it, either.”

She turned her back on him and stomped toward the house as best she could in bare feet. More of a hobbling mince than a stomp, unfortunately, because her feet felt all chewed up. Her everything felt all chewed up.