Along Came Trouble(100)

“I’m still on duty.”

She reached over and pried his phone out of his hand. After fiddling with it for a while, she got it turned off. “I’m clocking you out.” She set it on the ground, poured a glass of wine, and handed it over.

He took a deep breath and let it out slowly. No way could he leave his phone off all night, but he could give it half an hour or so. Long enough to drink a glass of wine and see what he could do about fixing the mess he’d made.

“Thanks.” Their fingers met briefly when he accepted the glass, and he had to remind himself not to extend the contact. Not to slide his hand up her arm and pull her close.

The light shut off, plunging them into darkness. Fireflies lit erratic paths in the air. He’d missed fireflies. The army had sent him all over the world, but nowhere else seemed to have fireflies except Fort Leonard Wood, where he’d gone for MP school. At eighteen, the sight of lightning bugs in Missouri had made him homesick.

“Can I ask you a question?” he said.

“I don’t owe you any answers right now.” She sounded amused.

He could probably have her owing him an answer inside of ten minutes, but that wasn’t where he wanted to go with this encounter. Katie was right—he had to ease up on the physical stuff if he expected Ellen to take him seriously.

“Can I ask anyway?”

She must have run her finger around the rim of her glass, because it made a low, melodic sound. “Yes.”

“Did Richard kiss you this afternoon?”

“What?”

“Did he kiss you? He looked like he was going to.”

“He looked like he was going to strangle me.”

“Before that. When he was over here.”

She turned toward him, but it was too dark to read her expression. He heard her take a drink, and then there was a long pause. “No,” she said. “He didn’t kiss me. Why, were you jealous?”

“No comment.”

She smiled then, a flash of white teeth. “How unpleasant for you.”

It had been. The jealousy had dissolved when he overheard her attack Richard at Maureen’s, but the situation still didn’t sit right with him. Ellen’s ex wanted something from her, and whatever it was, Caleb wasn’t positive it was over.

“What did he come here for?”

“I’m not sure. He told me he wanted me back. Maureen made it sound like the pictures were some twisted kind of stunt to win my affection.”

“There any chance that’s going to happen?”

She drank her wine and made him wait a long time for an answer. “He looked right through me and said I was his lodestar. I don’t want to be a lodestar. Not his. Not anybody’s.”

Considering Caleb only halfway knew what the word meant, he thought he didn’t have much to worry about there.

They were silent for a while. His vision had compensated for the darkness some. Enough for him to watch her chest rise and fall beneath her dark T-shirt and to admire the smooth lines of her legs crossed at the ankles. Her feet were bare again. He wondered what she had against shoes.

“I owe you an apology,” she said. “For the fence.”

“That’s funny. I thought I owed you one.”

“You already apologized,” she said. “Now it’s my turn. You were right. We needed the fence. I don’t know how you knew we would, but you did. So thank you. Though if you ever try to pull something like that again, fair warning, I’m going to stop speaking to you.”

An apology and a thank you. Huh. Maybe he hadn’t screwed up absolutely everything today. But he was about to.

“Ellen, I think we’d better not see each other anymore. Not until after this job’s done.”

It hurt more than having the shrapnel removed from his hip, but he gritted his teeth and let the statement stand.

She stiffened, and for a moment she didn’t seem to breathe at all. Then her chest rose again, and she said in a decent approximation of her normal tone, “What makes you say that?”

“It turns out I’m not any good at mixing business with pleasure. If the fence didn’t make that clear, then what happened this afternoon did. I’ve been thinking about you too much when I ought to be thinking about the job.”

Katie had been right the first time. He’d thrown over his principles for Ellen. He’d made the wrong call, and the result was his unacceptable failure to protect Henry. If he hadn’t been so caught up in her, he’d have seen the situation more clearly. Followed up with the police and been a more active part of the Plimpton investigation. Something.