Along Came Trouble(30)

“Quit mocking me, Shrimp Boat. I’m not worrying about Richard. Not like you think, anyway. What I meant was, is he dangerous?”

“I know what you meant. You’re checking out the competition.”

Caleb reached for the new cylinder, wondering if that was what he’d been doing. And whether Richard Morrow was any kind of competition. “Checking out her ex is part of the job. There’s nothing between me and Ellen.”

Carly rolled her eyes. “Try again. I know what ‘nothing’ looks like on you. This is not nothing. You’re interested.”

“What’s going on with you and her brother?”

“Clumsy as ever on the misdirect, Killer, but I give you points for trying. Tell you what. I’ll go first, but then it’s your turn. Deal?”

It might help to get Carly’s opinion on the Ellen situation. He wasn’t doing such a stellar job of managing it on his own. “Deal.”

She started adding a layer of pickles to the sandwiches. “Ellen introduced us. It was your typical fairy-tale deal. He was Prince Charming. I was Cinderella. I gave him a tour of the house. I had sex with him in the laundry room, like, forty minutes after we met.”

Impulsivity had always been part of Carly’s appeal. And her Achilles’ heel.

“I fell for him. I thought . . . I don’t know. I was stupid. The whole thing seemed romantic. Maybe it was the pregnancy hormones. We had a few good months, on again, off again. But then that picture turned up online, and he got really upset. When they found my blog, it was like he really thought about the situation we were in for the first time, and he tried to take it out on me. Like it was my fault.”

She put down the pickles and gripped the edge of the countertop hard enough to turn her knuckles white. For half a second she met his eyes, and he was shocked by the raw pain he saw there.

Then she starting slicing a tomato, and Caleb pretended not to notice she was struggling not to cry. She wouldn’t want a hug or kind words from him right now. Carly didn’t do sentimental.

“What blog?”

“It’s nothing, just part of this infertility community thing. I made friends on there. We write about . . . you know, everything. Sometimes when people lose babies, it’s good therapy, but most of the time we just talk about mundane stuff. Joke around. It’s like a support group. And I never used his name. I didn’t know this was going to happen. I’ve never—”

She shook her head, unwilling to continue that train of thought. With a sniffle, she rubbed her nose with the back of her hand. She squared her shoulders and banished the vulnerability, then looked at Caleb again. “And he yelled at me for it, the prick. So I told him to take a hike.”

Some things never changed. He’d spent the better part of the past fifteen years away, seeing Carly only every now and then when he was on leave. She and her husband had been living in Westerville, a bedroom community of Columbus that was a fifty-minute drive from Camelot. Caleb had e-mailed her, talked to her on the phone sometimes, but their friendship had mostly lapsed until he’d moved back home.

But here they were in Nana’s kitchen, and she was dealing with being kicked in the heart the same way she had when her prom date dumped her for another girl—just as brave, and just as fierce.

“You want him back?”

“Hell, no.”

Just as stubborn, too.

“Your turn, champ,” she said. “What’s the deal with you and Ellen?”

Caleb tried on the new strike plate for size. Too big. He reached for a chisel. “She came on to me last night.”

“Ellen did? Seriously?”

“Not like she climbed onto my lap or anything. There was just this . . . moment. Like a moment of opportunity, okay? An invitation. But I didn’t take it.”

“Why not?”

He frowned. Wasn’t it obvious? “I’m supposed to be protecting her.”

“So?”

“So I can’t sleep with her.”

“Because?”

“Because it would be unethical.”

Carly put their plates on the table. “That’s the stupidest thing I’ve ever heard. Go wash your hands.”

Caleb ignored her and fit the new strike plate into the space he’d opened up for it. Finishing the installation was a two-minute job, so he did it while Carly stared at him.

There was nothing stupid about thinking it would be unethical to take Ellen to bed. Was there?