Along Came Trouble(83)

Caleb now owed favors to a lot of people.

Meanwhile, Katie had been throwing together schedules, printing out lists, programming new numbers into Caleb’s cell, and figuring out how to wake up anybody he wanted to talk to who wouldn’t pick up the phone. Which sometimes meant waking up those people’s neighbors, their siblings, or their Aunt Carol and having them do the legwork.

Half the village of Camelot met the sunrise bleary-eyed and irritable, but on alert. Caleb started another pot of coffee for Katie, showered, threw on some clothes, and toasted bagels and scrambled eggs for breakfast. He was going to need the fuel.

Katie trudged into the kitchen, still wearing her pink pajamas, slippers, and dark circles under her eyes that were totally his fault. Couldn’t be helped. He needed her.

“You look way too awake,” she said. “Don’t you even require sleep?”

In Iraq, he’d gone days without sleeping when necessary. Some far-off part of him registered the fatigue, but it was easy to ignore. Pleasurable, even. It had been a long time since he’d had this much on his plate, and the sense of purpose, the tension, came as a relief. Such a clarifying thing, to have a mission and obvious obstacles in the way. All he had to do was take them out, one by one. “I’m fine. You going to be okay alone in the office today?”

“Don’t worry about me. I’ll hang in.”

Sliding a plate onto the table for Katie, he pointed her toward a chair and began shoveling in his own breakfast standing up.

“I need to head over to Burgess in a few minutes to meet Tony and the fence crew,” he said. “You want me to drop you off?”

“No, I can walk. You’d better get over there to talk to your woman before a bunch of strange men in hard hats start operating a posthole digger on her front lawn.”

“She’s going to be mad enough to spit.” He didn’t like where he’d had to leave things with Ellen last night, and when it came down to it, he didn’t like what he was about to do, either—strong-arm his way into getting that fence up whether she wanted it or not.

Who was he kidding? No way would she want it.

But he’d promised himself he wouldn’t let the way he felt about Ellen interfere with the way he did the job. She needed the fence.

Katie had asked him three times in the past few hours if there was any possibility he was going overboard on the security. There was. There was a pretty strong possibility, actually. But he had a bad feeling—a feeling that told him that for every guy with a shady past who’d been skulking around the village last week, there would be a dozen more today—and he wanted to be prepared.

He’d learned never to ignore that gut-level unease. It had saved his life a few times.

“I’m sure you’ll charm your way back into her pants soon enough,” Katie said.

“Knock it off.” The rebuttal came out sharper than he’d intended, and when he looked up at Katie, she was staring at him with wide eyes. “Sorry. I didn’t mean to yell.”

“You didn’t say! How was I supposed to know when you didn’t say?”

“What are you talking about?”

“This thing with Ellen. It isn’t casual for you, is it? You’re serious about her.”

“Yes,” he admitted. Hell, yes.

“I thought—well, you’re sleeping with her, Caleb. Don’t you think that’s a mistake, if you’re serious about her?”

“What do you mean?”

“You said she has a kid. How old?”

“He’s two. Henry.”

“So tell me this—do you want to marry Ellen Callahan and raise Henry with her? You want the whole shebang?”

He’d known Ellen for a couple of days. It shouldn’t be possible for him to answer this question yet. Shouldn’t be, but it was. Another gut feeling—that she was the right one, she and Henry. His future. “Yeah.”

Katie stood up, walked over, and smacked him on the side of the head, hard. “Then what the hell are you doing sleeping with her? Don’t you have any idea how this is supposed to work? You’re supposed to be taking her out to dinner and romancing her for, like, three months before you get her into bed. You’re supposed to respect her.”

“I do respect her.”

“No, you obviously don’t, or you’d be doing this right.”

She shoved his shoulder, and he rubbed at the side of his head. What the hell? Katie never hit him. She rarely challenged him like this, with her lips set in a white line and her hands on her hips. She looked furious.