Along Came Trouble: A Loveswept Contemporary Romance (7 page)

Paging Dr. Freud
.

She sank into her chair and willed herself to relax. It had taken her so long to bring the Dawsons around this afternoon, she’d missed her chance to watch the movie. By the time Henry
fell asleep, she’d been ready to hang up her gloves. Couldn’t she just sip her wine and look at the empty front lawn and let him steer for a while? It was nice, sitting on her porch and talking to Caleb. He was good company.

Also, disconcertingly hot, and dangerous to her peace of mind.

And he wanted to put up a fence.

He came back out and sat beside her.

“So what were you and Nana looking at?” Ellen asked.

“Primarily the album from her lecture tour in the Netherlands. Nineteen seventy-three, she said.”

“Is that the one with Bruno and all the mustaches and leather?”

“For an
hour
.”

Ellen smiled, but this time the smile was mostly for Nana, so she didn’t have to second-guess it. Carly’s grandmother had traveled the world as a feminist lecturer and professional consciousness-raiser in the late sixties and early seventies before moving to Camelot to take a faculty position at the college and make a home for her orphaned granddaughter. She looked like a sweet little old lady, but in fact she was as mouthy and lascivious as a frat boy, and about ten times as liberated.

“And
then
I spent the afternoon in the office giving myself a headache over a contract I had to sign and fax back to Breckenridge.”

“What’s wrong with it?”

“Nothing, it turns out. It just took me forever to understand it.”

“Not your forte, huh?”

“I’m no good with paperwork. Anyway, to top it off, tonight I had dinner with my whole family.”

“That’s bad?”

“That’s just Wednesday night. I love them, but they find a different way to drive me crazy every week.”

She fought back all the other questions she wanted to ask. How big was his family? Did he have brothers and sisters, nieces or nephews? A girlfriend?

Her curiosity had no shame. She couldn’t remember the last time she’d cared so much about the mundane details of someone else’s life. There was nowhere this intense wanting-to-know could lead that she had the freedom to follow.

“It sounds kind of nice,” she said. “To have all that family around.”

He laced his fingers behind his head, resting his elbows against the chair back. “It has its moments. Does that mean you don’t? Have family or somebody around, I mean?”

“Just Jamie, when he comes to visit. And my ex’s mom, I guess. She takes care of Henry
a few days a week. She’s sort of family. Both of my parents are gone.”

“What about the ex, does he help out?”

“He’s an alcoholic.”

Caleb made a pained face, a standard response to her confession about Richard. He was probably thinking the standard thoughts and would soon offer one of the standard platitudes.
What a shame. How hard for you
.

It
had
been hard, but the alcohol had been the least of her problems when she was married to Richard.

One time, she’d embarrassed him at a dinner party by admitting she’d never read
Ulysses
. He’d had a few too many drinks, and he’d launched into a monologue that began with a few witty jokes at her expense and ended with a dissertation on her shortcomings. It went on so long that she’d fantasized about standing up and dumping her dinner in his lap. She’d imagined herself walking out, hiking half a mile home in the dark in her heels. Locking him out of the house until he sobered up.

She’d done nothing. Not that night, and not for days afterward. Finally, when it seemed possible it could be funny, she’d told Jamie.

Verbally abusive
, Jamie had said.
Never good enough for you. You should leave him
.

But those were all Jamie’s words, and she hadn’t been able to absorb them, to believe them. Part of her had understood the logic behind her brother’s hatred for Richard, but she hadn’t known how to make it her own logic, her own hatred. Not until Henry came along.

In the divorce, she’d gotten the house and a custody agreement that allowed Richard three hours’ supervised visitation with Henry each week. Richard had gotten everything else. Ellen considered it a victory.

Caleb leaned forward, resting his elbows on his knees. Ellen waited for his sympathy, but it wasn’t what she got.

“No boyfriend?” he asked.

Surprised and grateful, she made a snorting sound of dismissal, the sort of accidental pig noise she was always embarrassing herself with. “No.”

Caleb rubbed his finger and thumb over his jaw, looking ponderous but with mischief in his eyes. “A girlfriend, then.”

“Come on, I’m not gay,” she protested. “Just, you know, divorced. A
mom
.”

“You say that like it’s the same thing as ‘washed up.’ ”

It is
.

“Camelot’s a hard place to be thirty and single,” she pointed out. “All these college girls running around are tough on the ego.”

“They’re kids. They could hardly compete with you.”

When she glanced over, he was smirking at her. Served her right. She’d fished pretty deep for the compliment.

Caleb’s smirk was dead sexy.

Her libido growled and started pacing back and forth across her lower belly.

Don’t look at him
, Ellen told herself, but her furtive eyes snatched tidbits to catalog. Shoulders so broad, he just about filled the whole chair. His throat where he’d unbuttoned his shirt. The shadow of stubble on his neck and jaw.

Here was a species of man she had no experience with. She’d always gone for the Heathcliff types, men with wild hair and deep thoughts. Army guys didn’t do it for her. Or they never had before.

Oh, not good. Not good at all
.

She couldn’t have him. There was no room in her life for any man, let alone one this … big. Even if she had the feminine wiles to capture his attention, what would she
do
with him?
You’d roll right over and let him take charge
.

And then she’d be back at square one, weak-willed and malleable, chained to the whims of another man who didn’t want or respect her enough. No, thanks.

When Jamie had said she should find a boyfriend, he hadn’t meant
this
at all. Her brother had been thinking of somebody bland and amiable, a Little League coach who’d buy her penne with marinara and give her a peck on the cheek when he dropped her off at home. Whereas Ellen’s interest in Caleb was more of a restless urge for clutching, desperate, sweaty coupling. She wanted, for the first time in three years, to have actual, physical, hot-as-hell sex. With a
man
.

Not remotely in the cards. But if it were, would he go for it? Was Caleb merely being nice, buttering her up so he could try to slap a fence around her house or whatever it was he thought needed doing?

Her intuition said no. Of course, her intuition had allowed her to marry Richard. She had no reason to trust instincts with such a shitty track record.

Ellen let the back of her head hit the chair with a solid
thunk
and polished off the rest of her wine. The muddled, murky sip at the very bottom of her glass matched the inside of her head, which suggested she’d already had more wine and more Caleb than were advisable for one evening. She should probably call it a night.

“So were you in the military?”

Whoops. Go to bed, woman
.

“What makes you ask?”

“You have that whole bossing-people-around thing going on. And the … you know. The physique.”

Oh, dumb. Dumb statement, dumb question, dumb Ellen
.

Caleb grinned, and she flushed all over—pink heat in her chest, her cheeks. The tip of her nose, even.

“I was in the military police.”

The military had police? Why had she even asked? She could barely tell one branch of the military from another, much less remember what they all did.

Her confusion must have been obvious, because he said, “It’s part of the army. MPs deal with law-and-order stuff. Like security for soldiers—protecting convoys, bodyguard details for some of the big shots, training and mentoring police in Iraq and Afghanistan. Prison facilities for detainees, too.”

“You did all that?”

He nodded. “Most of it. Convoys, the first time I was over in Iraq, and then personal security detail for an ambassador in the Green Zone on my second deployment. Iraqi Police the third time.”

“I guess this must all seem like small potatoes after that.”

“A mission’s a mission.”

“I’m not your mission.”

“Sure you are.” He didn’t smile, but his eyes crinkled up at the corners. Playful. “Operation Ellen Callahan.”

“But they always have fancier names than that. Like ‘Desert Eagle’ and ‘Storm Shield.’ ‘Operation Storm Ellen.’ ” She realized belatedly that she’d just made herself sound like a bunker he needed to crack open and conquer.

“Catchy.”

“Thanks. So what brought you back here, then?”

“Family stuff. And I thought my job was basically done. Not in Afghanistan, maybe, but Iraq was my war. Second time I was over there, it was a complete clusterfuck—” He glanced at her. “Sorry. It was a mess.”

“You can say ‘fuck.’ ”

He smiled. “Still rude, though. My mother would have a fit. Anyway, it was a mess. We got shot at so often when we ran the ambassador out Route Irish to the airport, it became routine. But by the last time I was over there, in Najaf, civilians were walking the streets again. It wasn’t totally safe, but it was a lot better. And then the war wrapped up, and the army started focusing too much attention on bullshit again and not enough on training soldiers for combat. So it seemed to me like,
time to go
, you know? My family needed me, and my platoon really didn’t anymore. Iraq didn’t.” He paused. “Plus, I was really done getting shot at.”

Ellen smiled. “I promise not to shoot at you.”

“Good. That’ll be a help.”

They were silent for a while. Crickets chirped. Ellen tried to think about Caleb in combat, but her brain shied away from the desert.

“Do me a favor,” he said.

“Do I owe you a favor?”

“No. That’s why it would be a favor. Tell me why you don’t want me here.”

Oh, but I do
.

“This house is mine. I don’t want …” She didn’t want anybody to take it from her—didn’t want it to be altered in any way that made it less
hers
. But she could hardly explain that to him in a way that made any sense, and certainly not without spilling a whole bunch of painful truths about her life with Richard that she’d rather keep to herself.

She started over. “Look, I don’t need security. There’s no real risk. These vultures”—she waved her hand around as if they were everywhere, which was sort of silly, since surely they were all in their hotel beds now, or sleeping in dead trees or whatever—“have been circling Jamie for the last twelve or thirteen years. I’m not afraid of them. I’m not going to give them more power than they deserve.”

He didn’t move, but she could feel him lean in closer. Not with his body, so much, but with his attention. “I can understand that.”

“You can?”

“Sure. But is it possible, hypothetically, that this is a different situation than you’ve been in before? Because it’s happening here, in Camelot, and it involves your next-door neighbor as well as you and Hank?”

“Henry.” Hank was a nickname for a grown-up, tobacco-spitting baseball player, not her baby. “I don’t see why that changes anything. It doesn’t make them
dangerous
. It just means they’re a bigger hassle.”

“Want to hear what the situation looks like to me?”

“Not especially.”

He shook his head, the smirk back on his lips.

“What?”

“You’re kind of a pain in the ass.”

“Only when large, obnoxious men get all up in my face.”

He grinned. Those white teeth and crinkly-cornered, laughing eyes had probably felled dozens of women. She wondered what kind of man he was, what kind of lover. Whether he’d earned that cocksure smile, or if it was an affectation that would only disappoint.

“Fair enough. You don’t want me to crowd you. You like doing things your own way, and the last thing you need is some strange man following you around, messing up your systems, protecting you from danger you don’t even believe is real.”

Perceptive, too
.

“I get all that,” he said. “And I think, within reason, it’s healthy and perfectly fine. But here’s the part that’s not fine. You have hardware on all your doors that’s not worth a damn. A photographer could drive out toward Cedarburg, take the gravel road into the cemetery, and end up just behind those woods out back, and then he could walk up to your back windows and take a picture of you and your son playing in the living room. Or he could wait until dark and break in and pull a knife on you, or a gun.”

An ugly thought. She didn’t want his ugly thoughts taking up residence in her head. “Why would anybody want to do that? I’m a lawyer, not a celebrity. I’m not
interesting
to them. I live in Camelot for a reason. I like not having to lock the car doors when I run into the market for some milk. I don’t want to worry about men with knives in my living room.”

“You don’t have to worry about it. You just have to let
me
worry about it.”

She crossed her arms, already fatigued. He was more difficult to spar with than she wanted him to be. That brick wall of a body came accompanied by an agile mind, which made Caleb Clark a thoroughly inconvenient man to butt heads with. “What do you want from me?”

“I want a car at the end of your driveway, regular patrols of the perimeter, deadbolts, motion-sensitive floodlights, blinds, an alarm system, and a fence.”

“Jesus.”

“It’s not as bad as it sounds.”

“That’s good, because it sounds awful, and you haven’t even been inside the house yet.”

“None of it’s going to bother you, day-to-day. You’d put up with a couple hours of installation, and then you could go back to ignoring it all, and I could sleep at night.”