Along Came Trouble(82)

Her cheeks went hot pink in about three seconds. Wow. He hadn’t seen Ellen blush like that in a long, long time. Maybe not since she’d met Ricky Martin backstage when she was fifteen and spilled her drink all over his crotch.

He grinned. “I’ll take that as a yes. So do you like this guy, or is he just a plaything?”

“Jamie!”

“What? There’s nothing wrong with having a plaything. You’re all grown up, Ellen. You can have a boy toy if you want to.”

“What’s gotten into you?”

“What’s gotten into you?” Besides Caleb Clark.

He was crude enough to think it, but not to say it.

“Nothing.” She stuck out her bottom lip and blew air up her face, ruffling her hair. He hadn’t seen her do that in a long time, either. Ellen was reverting to adolescence. She had it bad for this guy.

“It’s nothing,” she insisted. “Carly says he’s a womanizer. A girl-in-every-port type, you know? I just wanted to be that girl for once in my life.”

As he chugged orange juice from the plastic bottle, he studied her. Her eyes kept darting around, first to the contract, then to her hands, to his face, out the window. Either Ellen was lying to him or she was lying to herself.

“You’re having totally awesome, totally meaningless sex with your bodyguard?”

“He’s not my bodyguard, Jamie. But yes. Yes, I am.” She folded her hands primly in her lap and sat up straight, as if her posture could somehow rescue her from the moral bankruptcy of this position.

“But you don’t care about him.”

Now she wouldn’t look at him at all. “I like him,” she told her fingers. “He’s a good guy.”

“Uh-huh. And he doesn’t care about you?”

“Carly says he goes through women like Chiclets, and she’s known him since they were kids.”

“Sometimes guys like that change,” he said. “When they meet the right woman.”

She did meet his eyes then, and he was stunned to see Ellen looking almost as scared as he felt. “Who are we talking about now?”

“Definitely me,” he admitted. “But maybe your boy toy, too. He seemed pretty taken with you.” In truth, the guy hadn’t had much to say on the subject of Ellen except “yeah.” But he’d called her his girlfriend, and from what Ellen was saying, that wasn’t a role she’d asked him to audition for. Plus, when his sister came into the room last night, Jamie had been talking to Caleb, and Caleb had made this face like someone had just smacked him in the forehead with a Louisville Slugger.

Jamie recognized that look. It was exactly how he’d felt the first time he laid eyes on Carly, and every single time she’d walked into a room since then. It wasn’t a dignified look. Kind of gobsmacked. But he had enjoyed seeing Caleb go to pieces over Ellen.

“No,” she said firmly. “He knows what this is.” She was using her lawyer voice. That don’t-mess-with-me tone worked with agents and record-company executives, but Jamie had been born three minutes before Ellen, and it never worked on him.

At least now he’d figured out who she was lying to. Definitely not her big brother. Ellen didn’t seem to have the slightest idea how deep a hole she’d already dug for herself.

Jamie knew, though. He’d been at the bottom of his own personal Love-struck Idiot in Denial pit for long enough that the groundwater had seeped in and started to fill it. When he’d gotten Ellen’s message that Carly and the baby were in danger, the water level rose, and he’d been forced to start swimming. Today, he was going to get out of the damn pit, or he was going to drown.

“Tell you what,” he said with a smile. “Have another doughnut, and we can talk about my problems for a while.”





Chapter Twenty-one



By seven a.m., nearly everyone Caleb knew hated him.

With help from Katie, whom he’d dragged out of bed at around one o’clock, he’d called up every warm body he could find to work shifts on Burgess over the next twenty-four hours. They’d sent extra vehicles to both Ellen’s and Carly’s houses, posted sentries on the far back corner of each lot, and made a pair of guys start walking continuous loops around the perimeter.

The Camelot Police Department had reluctantly agreed to set up a roadblock at the stop sign a block from the cul-de-sac. After some persuading, he’d also managed to get an old friend who worked the airfield in Mount Pleasant to promise to keep him in the loop about how many press planes were landing and when. Amber’s husband, Tony, had agreed to send a Mazzara Construction crew over by eight to hustle up a temporary fence around the perimeter of Ellen’s and Carly’s joined properties.