Along Came Trouble: A Loveswept Contemporary Romance (6 page)

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 wineglass 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 lightbulb, 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 lightbulbs.

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 lightbulb, 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 lightbulb 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.