Along Came Trouble(81)

Hallelujah.

Of course, he wasn’t supposed to eat doughnuts. He was supposed to stay fit and attractive, lest he lose his appeal to the thirteen-to-thirty-five demographic. He grabbed the whole box and carried it over to the table.

“These are unreal,” he said after polishing off the second one. The orange juice wasn’t half bad, either.

“They’re just convenience-store doughnuts,” Ellen said, giving him a skeptical glance over the top of her reading glasses.

“Did you have one yet?”

“No.”

“Eat one, and then tell me it’s not the best thing you’ve ever tasted.”

Ellen picked a glazed chocolate doughnut out of the box and ate it, dropping crumbs onto her contract. Then she picked another one out of the box, and he had a third. “These are pretty damn good,” she conceded.

“Who’s the contract for?”

“Aimee Dawson.”

“You’re amazing.” He’d known he could count on Ellen to help the girl out. “What’s going on with you and Caleb?”

She looked up, and Jamie smiled. “See what I did there? Misdirection. You were supposed to just spit it out without thinking.”

“Spit what out?”

Shrugging, he said, “I don’t know. Whatever there is to spit.”

He was going for nonchalant, but the truth was he was intensely curious about the man he’d found in his sister’s kitchen last night. As far as he knew, Ellen hadn’t dated anyone since her divorce, and she’d never dated anyone in her life like this Caleb guy. If you did a lineup of every Y-chromosome Ellen had ever gone out with, Caleb would stick out like a chorus dancer with a limp—the one fella with a buzz cut, hard muscles, and testosterone to spare in a sea of skinny guys with too much hair, too much ego, and not nearly enough appreciation for Ellen.

She turned her attention back to the contract. “It’s a casual thing,” she said. “He’s fun.”

“Fun” wasn’t the first word that had come to mind when he’d laid eyes on Ellen’s bodyguard. The first word was probably “whoa.” He would hate to meet Caleb Clark in a dark alley. Other words that had suggested themselves included “intense,” “serious,” and “tall.” Also, “surprisingly comfortable wandering around half-naked in Ellen’s kitchen.”

Plus, Caleb hadn’t sucked up at all. Not a single Jeez, it’s incredible to meet you or I have all your albums or I saw you play the Super Bowl halftime show. Instead, he’d had the balls to chew Jamie out for the way he’d treated Carly.

A month ago, he might have resented that, but these days he saw the flip side. What had he ever done to earn Caleb’s respect? Nothing. So why should he get it?

He was learning to appreciate people who had no tolerance for celebrity bullshit—or any kind of bullshit, for that matter. People like Carly.

He reached for another doughnut. It was too early in the morning to start thinking about Carly. He’d been up half the night thinking about her. He’d thought about Carly every freaking waking moment since the day he left Camelot. In a few hours, he was going to have to go over there and face her, but until then he wanted to distract himself with his sister’s love life, which couldn’t possibly be as catastrophically screwed up as his own.

“You’re going to make yourself sick if you keep eating those,” Ellen said.

“Since when do you sleep with guys for fun?”

“Do you really want to talk about my sex life?”

She was giving him her ice princess look, challenging him to drop it. She did this whenever he poked too hard at something she considered personal—turned it into a thing he wouldn’t want to know about. Anytime he’d tried to get her to talk about what a complete jackass Richard was, she’d go all, Jamie, you don’t want to hear about that. How was your concert?

Ellen liked to keep herself to herself. He’d always let her get away with it. But that was bullshit too, wasn’t it? And it seemed likely that the first step toward becoming a better man was to eliminate as much bullshit from his life as possible. Including Ellen bullshit. If she wanted to hold his hand and help him through his problems—which she most certainly did, seeing how fixing his problems was one of the great pleasures of her life—she had to tell him about hers, too. Fair was fair.

“Yeah, let’s talk about your sex life,” he said. “Is it any good?”