Along Came Trouble(16)
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.”