Along Came Trouble(31)
No. He was trying to do the honorable thing. The practical thing.
He put his tools away and washed his hands. At the table, he took a bite out of his sandwich. As he’d expected, it was weird. She’d used two different kinds of bread, and he must have been looking somewhere else when she’d put potato chips in it. Who did that?
“What’s so stupid about it?”
She lifted the bread off the top of her own sandwich and stuck in a few more chips. He must have made a face, because she said, “What? It wasn’t crunchy enough.”
Then she leaned forward and pinned him in place with her keen blue eyes. “You’re not Ellen’s personal bodyguard, right? You got hired to keep photographers off her lawn. It’s not as if there are assassins with nunchucks after her. You’ve got the guys at the end of the driveway, you make her lock the doors at night, and who the hell cares what the two of you get up to between the sheets? It’s not like you signed a contract promising not to sleep with her.”
It was certainly a different way of looking at the situation.
He took another bite of the sandwich, which was actually pretty good. Tasty, even.
Caleb didn’t like thinking of his role as basically that of a human NO TRESPASSING sign, but Carly had a point about the nunchucks. Compared to what he’d done in the army, this job was a cakewalk, with next to no potential for physical danger. Yes, there was Plimpton—if that guy was even the felon Plimpton, and not some completely different person—but all the evidence so far suggested Plimpton was here to take pictures, just like the others. The folks outside Ellen’s house had no reason to hurt her or anybody else. They just wanted to make money off the scandal surrounding Carly and Jamie. Ellen was right—she wasn’t interesting to these people.
And Carly was right that his mission was to put measures in place to keep the danger at bay, not to provide personal, physical protection. He’d told Ellen two or three times that he wasn’t a bodyguard. On this job he didn’t even carry a weapon, because he’d been instructed not to. Jamie Callahan didn’t want guns anywhere in the vicinity of his nephew.
Nor did Caleb’s contract with Breckenridge say a thing about how he was meant to conduct himself on duty. Nothing in writing specified he couldn’t have a personal relationship with Ellen, any more than it said he couldn’t have lunch with Carly.
Breckenridge expected him to use his judgment, same as the army had. He’d been promoted to command his own platoon on the basis of his ability to lead from the front and make sound decisions.
Could he protect Ellen and pursue a relationship with her at the same time?
He’d assumed the two goals were incompatible because in the army, he’d get his ass handed to him if he’d even looked sideways at a woman under his protection, whether she was a fellow soldier or a detainee.
But this wasn’t the army. This was Camelot, Ohio.
Jamie Callahan wanted Carly and his family kept safe and out of the tabloids. That was Caleb’s mission. He wouldn’t let harm come to any of them. But provided he didn’t let his attraction distract him from the mission, where was the harm in getting close to Ellen?
Of course, since yesterday morning, he’d rejected her, pissed her off by walking all over her objections, and sent a crew to do work on her house without her permission. By the time he saw her again, she might not be all that eager to get cozy.
He polished off the sandwich and looked up. Carly was watching him, her hands folded over her protruding stomach.
“Does it hurt?” she asked.
“What?”
“All those rusty wheels grinding around in your head as you try to relearn how to think for yourself.”
Carly liked to remind him that soldiers were mindless drones whenever she got the chance. “Very funny, Short Round.” He stood up. “Thanks for lunch.”
For a pregnant woman she moved fast, blocking him with her belly before he could cross the threshold. “Don’t even think about leaving without saying, ‘You’re right, Carly.’”
Giving her his best confused look, he asked, “What are you right about?”
“Ellen.”
He smiled. “Get out of my way, Carly. I’ve got work to do.”
Watching Caleb saunter down the driveway, Carly brushed off her hands.
There. Good deed for the day: done and done.
Caleb obviously had the hots for Ellen. Ellen just as obviously had the hots for Caleb. Now they could get their rocks off, and Carly would get bonus points from the Universal Matchmaker for hooking them up. Some day, after baby Wombat was born and she’d lost her pregnancy weight, the Universal Matchmaker would send her somebody to love in exchange. Fair was fair.