Along Came Trouble: A Loveswept Contemporary Romance (37 page)

He would, too. It would one day be possible for him to lay eyes on Ellen without wanting to plead with her or shake her or kiss the living daylights out of her.

Not today.

“How’d it go at the farm?” he asked, hoping to take Katie’s mind off his problems. She’d visited Levi’s mother this afternoon.

Katie half-sat on the window frame opposite him and fiddled with the ring on her thumb. “Pretty good.”

“You told her about being married?”

Katie nodded.

“And wanting a divorce?”

“Yeah. She was a little disappointed.” Katie looked wistful. “She said much as she loves Levi, he doesn’t deserve me, and she wished she’d known she had a daughter-in-law before she had to lose me.”

“Nice.”

“Supernice,” Katie said, pressing the bridge of her nose into the glass and looking down out at the lot. “I kind of wish I’d told her a long time ago. She’d have been a better mother-in-law than Levi was a husband.”

He reached across the space between them and put his hand on her arm, and she lifted her other hand to cover his fingers with her own. She’d be all right, he realized. Better for letting her secret out in the open. Maybe she could move on soon, find some peace with herself. Maybe she could eventually pick a decent guy to love her—somebody who’d recognize what a prize she was.

In the meantime, she had him. Whatever good he was to her, he was here.

She squeezed his fingers and dropped her hand, his cue to let her go.

“Did she give you an address?”

Katie nodded. “You still think it’s okay for me to call Ellen? I mean, just to find out if there’s someone she’d recommend to handle it. I know she’s not a divorce lawyer.”

“It’ll be fine.” Ellen wouldn’t hold their breakup against his sister. It wasn’t in her nature.

Katie stared at him so long, he had to look away. “You need to talk to her,” she said. “You look like you’re going to drop dead from misery if you don’t.”

“No.”

“You need to talk to me, then.”

He stood. “I need to get back to work.” The hospital’s guard shift would change soon,
and he was going to have to introduce himself and explain the drill to a new round of people.

She rose too, blocking his path out of the room. “Don’t be stubborn,” she said. “I’m sorry I gave you a hard time the other day. I can see how you feel about her. I’m sure you can work this—”

“No. I can’t. It’s over.” Ellen didn’t want him. She’d said so. They’d made a mistake—he’d made a mistake, thinking he could have it all. That he’d be what she wanted, and he’d change her mind. He’d made the wrong call. That was that.

Henry walked into the room then, Nana trailing behind at her restricted pace and listening as he told her everything he’d done since arriving at the hospital. “An’ then Henry saw a chair wif wheels, an’ Ma said, ‘No, Henry! No ride in the chair!’ an’ Uncle Jamie said—Cabe! Look, Nana! Cabe is here.”

“How’s it going, Hank?”

“Hank saw a wheelie fing. An’ Nana bought you French fries.”

“Sweet.”

“That is?” Henry asked, walking over and reaching for the borrowed short-wave radio hanging off his belt.

“That’s a radio.”

“Do wif it?”

“You talk to people.”

“Show you,” Henry said, tugging at the radio in an attempt to get it into his possession.

Caleb really did have to get back to work, but he stole a few minutes with Henry anyway, showing him all the buttons and telling him how they worked.

It was against the rules, being friends with Henry. One more violation of the contract he never should have negotiated with Ellen in the first place. One more wrong call.

But he couldn’t help it. He liked the kid.

Isadora Sydney Callahan was the smallest, wrinkliest, pinkest baby Ellen had ever seen, and the second most beautiful. For such a tiny little thing—not quite four pounds—Carly’s daughter was healthy. Jamie said her hair was red, though Ellen couldn’t see it under the knit cap they’d put on her. Wee Isadora would need a ventilator, but her prognosis was good.

Jamie and Carly were good. All the news was good.

Standing at the NICU window, watching the staff fuss around the incubator, Ellen cried as if her heart were breaking.

Maybe it had to break, to get bigger. To hear him tell it, her brother had a daughter now, which made her an aunt. Her whole life, it had been Ellen and Jamie against the world. Even when she got married, she’d felt that tug of affiliation to Jamie first; she’d never been able to
realign her loyalties completely. When the divorce and Henry came along, her real family had expanded to include one more.

Now Jamie had Carly, and they had a baby, and Carly had Nana, so suddenly Ellen’s family was twice as big. It made her light-headed to think of it.

She really needed to stop sobbing.

She’d been like this when Henry was born, too. Newborns had a strange power. With their chicken legs and frog feet and hoarse, wavery cries, they tugged all the adult planets into new orbits.

It had been such a long day. She and Nana and Katie had taken turns running errands and holding hands and offering worthless advice. As the hours droned by in a flurry of test results and anxious waiting, she’d glimpsed Caleb from time to time, talking on his phone or coordinating with a guy in uniform. He’d come and gone at the periphery, never sitting, never stopping except when Henry tugged on his pants and asked him questions.

She’d been avoiding him. Avoiding being left alone with him, and avoiding thinking about him. But if she was being honest, Caleb had something to do with all these tears, too. Something she was too tired and way too emotional to analyze.

Finally, she got the waterworks under control and pressed her hand to the glass to say goodbye to the baby. Time for Aunt Ellen to find Henry and go home. She had an ache in her chest only her son could soothe.

Not wanting to call Maureen, she’d left Henry with Katie and Nana hours ago, when the nurses were prepping Carly for her C-section and Ellen had gone with Jamie to help him get ready for the operating room. Katie had reassured her that she had lots of practice taking care of her nephews. She’d programmed her number into Ellen’s phone, promising to keep Henry with her and put him to bed if necessary.

Henry hadn’t minded the separation. As soon as Katie showed him the Matchbox car in her purse, she’d become his new best friend.

It was two in the morning, but Ellen checked the visitor’s lounge anyway. The room was dark and empty. She reached into her purse for her phone, intending to call Katie, and then she saw him. In the far corner, nearly hidden from view, Caleb sat slumped in a chair, his temple against the wall. He cradled her son against his chest. Henry’s face was buried in Caleb’s armpit, and both of them had the loose-limbed sprawl of deep sleep.

Caleb’s dark head and Henry’s light one. Raw male power and the round, bunched muscles of toddlerhood. They were beautiful together.

She couldn’t have asked for a sharper knife to cut through her confusion.

She’d been kidding herself. There was the man she loved, holding the boy she loved. This was what she wanted. Everything she wanted. A new family, with Caleb. Their family.

Ellen took a deep, shaky breath and crossed the room.

How was it even possible that she’d fallen in love with him? When could it have happened? She flipped through her memories, but she couldn’t find the moment. Maybe there hadn’t been one moment. Maybe they’d built up—Caleb smirking across the flower bed the morning they met. Caleb sitting on her porch and making her smile while she fantasized about tying him up. Caleb letting Henry help him install the new deadbolts. Caleb inside her the first time, and the feeling she’d had that this was the most perfect, most right thing she’d ever done.

Caleb standing behind her, one hand on her hip as she confronted Richard at the end of the driveway.

Caleb sleeping in a chair with her son at the hospital.

Caleb keeping her safe. Keeping all of them safe.

God, how stupid could she be? How messed up and frightened and
stupid
, not to have known what she was throwing away?
I want my life back
, she’d told him, as if he were to blame for the chaos that had come to her in the past few days. She’d attacked him for the fence when really it was Jamie’s fault she needed it. Caleb was on
her
side. He’d brought her safety and confidence and joy in the midst of all the craziness. He’d offered her himself, and she’d turned him down.

She was crying again. She rummaged in her purse for another tissue.

“What’s the matter?” Caleb asked, his voice scratchy and deep. When she looked up, his eyes were open, but it was too dark to read them.

“Nothing.” Everything. “Just a little emotional. Long day.”

He looked down at the top of Henry’s head, then back at her. “I guess you’ll want to take him home.”

“Yes. Thanks for—thanks for keeping him company.”

“No problem.”

Caleb stood up. She stepped close to take Henry, who stirred but didn’t wake. Tucking her son’s arms around her neck, she felt the heat of Caleb’s body on Henry’s skin while Caleb’s breath on the side of her neck made her break out in goose bumps. It was so intimate, this transfer of her son from one safe harbor to another, and she wanted to linger in the moment. To close her eyes and absorb Caleb’s heat and strength, storing it for all the cold months ahead.

He stepped back and crossed his arms. He had his soldier face on. “I’ll walk you to your car.”

Her heart hammered insistently, and she felt suddenly, giddily like a teenager again, standing backstage at one of Jamie’s shows and mooning over some headliner. A girl with a crush, wondering what to say and when. How to find the right words to open up all the possibilities she’d dreamed about.

Only there never were any right words, were there? There were just the regular ones, and they were worthless in this situation. She’d used him, gotten him in trouble at work, and thrown him away. He didn’t even seem angry with her. He seemed flat, totally emotionless, and she couldn’t imagine the route that would take them back to where they’d been this morning so she could have a do-over.

She didn’t know how to change, anyway. How to be somebody different, someone less freaked out and protective of her independence and her heart. Even if he wanted her, what could she give him? What did she have left, at the end of the day, that was worth sharing?

They descended together in the elevator and traversed the empty lobby of the hospital. Caleb was as hard and cold as the polished industrial floor, and she couldn’t come up with anything to say or do that wouldn’t slide right off him.

She didn’t know this Caleb. She only knew the warm, funny one. The sexy, wicked one. The bossy, frustrating one. This one was a stranger. She couldn’t think how to talk to him.

At the car, he waited as she buckled Henry into his seat with fumbling fingers. When she emerged from the back, she nearly walked into him, he stood so close behind her. She tried to meet his eyes, but he was looking over the top of her head, watching the hospital entrance. He had his hands in his pockets, and everything about him said
keep out
.

“Drive safe,” he told her. And then he took a few steps away and watched, impassive as a statue, as she started the car and backed out of the parking spot.

She ran out of tissues on the way home.

Chapter Twenty-nine

Caleb wiped his sweaty forehead on the sleeve of his T-shirt and muttered curses at whoever it was who’d sold his father these skylights for the apartments. They were the wrong skylights, designed for roofs with a steeper slope. They’d been wrong when his father installed them twenty-odd years ago, and since he’d never had the money to replace them, they were still wrong, but older now, and therefore even less adequate.

They leaked, and he and his dad caulked them. They caulked them before the snow, checked and caulked them again in the spring, and then when the skylights leaked in the summer rain anyway, they climbed up on the asphalt shingles in the 95-degree heat and sweated buckets doing it a third time. Caleb had been caulking these fucking skylights since he was in high school. If he ever managed to make any money, the first thing he was going to do was replace them. Maybe replace the roofs while he was at it.

Scraping the old caulk out of a seam with a screwdriver, he slipped and banged his hand against the shingles, opening up the cuts in his knuckles. He swore and threw the screwdriver into the parking lot, which only succeeded in making him feel like an asshole.

He was such an asshole. A pathetic, angry, sweaty asshole who couldn’t stop thinking about Ellen and how sad she’d looked at the hospital, even though what he really needed to be thinking about was how to save his company or find some other way to keep his family afloat.

Ellen didn’t need his comfort or anything else he had to offer. Ellen wanted him to back off, and damn it, that was what he’d done.

He took off his shirt and wrapped it around his hand, which was bleeding freely. Again.

The extension ladder shuddered against the side of the building, and after a moment his father’s head poked over the top, cap first. Today’s cap advertised the feed store in Mount Pleasant. Red, which meant he was feeling jaunty.

Derek Clark hauled himself onto the roof with a grunt and dropped the screwdriver next to Caleb. “You lost this.”

“Thanks.”

“Pissing-pile-of-crap skylights got your goat?”

“More or less.”

“Happens.” His dad sat down beside him. “Sometimes I dream about burning this place to the ground for the insurance money. Then I could rebuild it without the skylights.”

“Why don’t you do it?”

“Too risky. I’d have to notify all the tenants in advance, or somebody could get hurt.”

“You’re too nice for your own good.”

“Don’t I know it?” His father rummaged around in the knapsack he’d carried up with him and pulled out two bottles of beer and an opener.

“Now you’re talking,” Caleb said.

“Thought you might be thirsty.”

Caleb eyed the bag. “How many you got in there?”