Flirting With Disaster (41 page)

“No way. This packing job is a thing of beauty. You and Katie are going to open the
truck up in L.A., and nothing will have moved an inch.”

“Fifty bucks says something b-breaks.”

“You’re on.”

Caleb jumped down from the back of the truck, and Sean followed him. He pulled the back gate most of the way down and stowed the ramp. “Can you bring my truck up here?” he asked, digging the keys out of his pocket. The SUV was parked out on the road to leave room for the U-Haul. “I’ll wheel over the trailer.”

“Sure.” Caleb caught the keys and walked toward the street.

Sean peeled off in the opposite direction and met Katie coming toward him, a box in her arms. He grabbed the box and glanced at the label. Katie’s Sharpie scribble read “Light Bulbs. Hammer.”

“Seriously, ssweetheart? Your brother just bet me fifty bucks nothing was gonna b-break. I’d hate to take his m-money before we’re out of the driveway.”

“It won’t break. I used hot pads to keep the light bulbs away from the hammer. It’ll be fine.”

“I thought we’d loaded all the boxes already.”

“That’s the last one,” she said. “It’s stuff we’ll need in the apartment right away—light bulbs and paper towels and hot pads. Duct tape. Trust me, you’ll be glad we have it.”

“You know apartments usually c-come with light bulbs, right?”

“Yeah, smart-ass, I know. But when we finally get there and somebody’s stolen all of them when they moved out, you’re going to be the one thanking me. ‘Oh, Katie,’ you’ll say. ‘What would I ever do without you?’ ”

He ducked his head to kiss her smiling lips. “Oh, K-katie,” he said. “What would I ever do without you?”

“Lucky for you, you don’t have to find out.”

He walked with her down to the truck, where he raised the gate again and found a safe spot for the box. “I think you m-might have a slightly distorted view of how ghetto this apartment is going to be.”

“You said it was ‘kind of run-down.’ ”

“Yeah, but I was thinking of it in comparison to my house in San Jose. It’s actually more of a c-condo than an apartment.” A two-thousand-square-foot condo in a nice, safe neighborhood
within walking distance of the private college where Katie would be taking classes while he got the L.A. office of Camelot Security off the ground.

Two years. That was the plan. Sean had agreed to launch Camelot’s new L.A. branch while Katie finished her bachelor’s in psychology, and then they would move back home so she could go to grad school at OSU. She wanted to be a therapist. She’d been practicing on him, much to his dismay.

It was one thing to try to confront the legacy of his past and another thing altogether to live with a woman who came after him with theories from all the psych books she’d started devouring. Last week, she’d analyzed his dreams. This week, she was fascinated with a book about maternal abandonment. Needless to say, Sean displayed all the classic symptoms of an abandoned child.

He displayed all the classic symptoms of everything.

“You know, the more I hear about this apartment,” she said, “the more I think it was a really bad idea to let you surprise me with where we’re going to live.”

She’d been so busy with summer classes and helping Caleb expand the downtown office, he’d flown out to L.A. to scout apartments on his own, hoping to make at least this one thing easier for her. Katie had a tendency to think she could and should do everything herself. The better Sean got to know the Clarks, the more obvious it became that it ran in the family.

“You’ll like it,” he promised.

She put her arms around him. “I would like a cardboard box if you were living in it. But I didn’t want you to spend too much money.”

Katie never wanted him to spend too much money. Ever since he’d sold his house and his share of the company and rolled the profits into an investment in half of Camelot Security, she’d been convinced he was a pauper. He’d tried to explain to her that he had some money in the bank, a too-generous IRA, and a savings account to boot, but she now divided the world into “people with private jets” and “everybody else.” In Katie’s book, everybody else didn’t waste money on movers. Everybody else packed their own boxes and rented a U-Haul.

He didn’t mind the work, so he played along. But his indulgence of Katie didn’t extend to finding a truly run-down place for them to live in. He was taking her away from her home, even if only temporarily, and he sure as hell intended to make sure she was safe and comfortable and happy in the substitute he’d found them in Los Angeles.

“Don’t worry,” he said. “I’ll make sure I have enough m-money left over so you can open your therapist’s office after graduation.”

“I want it to be a really nice office.”

“I’ve got some extra ssaved up for swanky leather furniture for the waiting room.”

“Thank you.” She kissed his cheek and made a face. “Yuck. No offense, but you’re kind of gross.”

“Yeah, I need to shower. When’s everybody getting here?”

“Little more than half an hour.”

He smeared his sweaty, grimy arm all over hers. “You’re not so clean yourself. Want to shower with me?”

Katie laughed and squirmed away from him, wiping her arm on her shirt. “Not a chance. Caleb’s here, and Ellen’s supposed to be back from the grocery store with Henry any second. I’ll bathe alone, thank you. I don’t want a three-year-old to find us getting it on in the bathroom.”

“I didn’t say anything about g-getting it on.”

“I know your ways, Owens. Now hurry it up. I’m going to get the steaks marinating while you make yourself decent.”

“Yes, ma’am.”

A reverberating smack pulled his attention away from the sight of her swaying backside as she walked toward the house. Caleb sat in the driver’s seat of Sean’s SUV three feet away, his arm out the window and his palm against the door where he’d hit it to get Sean’s attention. “Quit smiling at my sister like an idiot and tell me where you want the truck.”

“I n-need you to turn around and come in the other way,” he said. “I’ll roll the hitch over, and you can b-back onto it.”

It took them twenty minutes to get the truck latched shut, the hitch attached, and the SUV backed onto the trailer. By the time Sean made it out of the shower, dressed, and stepped into the backyard, the lawn was full of people.

Katie’s older sister, Amber, was playing grab-ass with her husband, Tony. Their three sons sat around a picnic table with plates of food, the eldest wearing earbuds and ignoring the gathering, the youngest chattering with his grandmother. Ellen and her son, Henry, chased Tony and Amber’s dog around, trying to reclaim the Frisbee clamped in its mouth.

Katie’s dad and Caleb stood over by the grill, which still smelled like lighter fluid from
when Katie lit it over an hour ago. Judah stood talking to Jamie and Carly, while a serious Ben guided Carly’s toddler around the yard, her hand clutching on his finger, her footsteps wobbly.

Sean kept looking until he found Katie bent over the flower bed where he had spread his mother’s ashes in the spring. She was calling something to Judah and absentmindedly pulling a weed. She wore a yellow dress that made her look as if she’d been formed from shafts of sunlight.

Sean paused on the top step, reluctant to step out into the middle of this boisterous, affectionate collection of family and friends.

Katie called it “only-child syndrome.”
You didn’t get enough unconditional love as a kid, so you don’t feel like you deserve it
. But it wasn’t that he didn’t deserve all of this. It was more that he didn’t know yet what he was supposed to give back in order to repay all he’d taken.

He’d left behind a life that now seemed cold and empty, and he’d replaced it with this one—a backyard full of people holding beers and paper plates, talking, laughing. All of them here to celebrate the move, even though the move meant he was taking Katie away.

Katie caught sight of him. “About time you showed up,” she called. “Everybody’s been asking after you.”

He stepped down and crossed the yard to her. “Sorry. Trailer took longer than I expected, and I loaded our bags in the t-truck after I showered.”

“We’re ready to go, then?”

“After the party’s over and cleaned up.”

“Ellen said they’ll clean up. We’re not supposed to worry about anything.”

Sean nodded. Ellen and Caleb were going to keep the keys to the house. They’d make sure everything stayed in good shape until he and Katie moved back into the place a few years down the road.

The idea of keeping the house had unsettled him at first. He’d planned to build her something new, something bigger and flashier and free of memories, but then they’d spent hours removing wallpaper, tearing up carpet, repainting. Sean and Caleb had refinished the wood floors in the spring and replaced the kitchen linoleum with tile.

It was a different place now, harboring memories of his mother but not overflowing with them. It was his and Katie’s house, the present they’d made together and the future they planned.

And he was a different man.

He caught her waist and pulled her closer. When her hands came up to his chest, the sun winked off the diamond on her finger, a satisfying reminder that Katie didn’t get her way on everything. Most of the time, he got what he wanted, too. The wedding would be next summer, here in Camelot, and for the honeymoon they were going to go back to Paris.

Turned out Katie had a thing for chocolate croissants.

“Are you worrying, ssweetheart?” he asked.

“No, I’m excited.” She wound her arms around his neck. “I haven’t had an adventure in a while.”

“No grizzlies this time. Not much of an adventure for a woman with your p-pedigree.”

“I’m sure you’ll keep me on my toes.” She pulled his head down for a kiss, and he let the smell and taste of her wrap around him. Fresh, lemony perfume, sun-warmed skin, cherry lip balm. His Katie.

“I promise to bring you b-back in one piece.”

“I promise to make you. Are
you
worrying?”

He wasn’t. It had taken him a few weeks to figure out just what he was doing, because the feeling was new and unfamiliar.

He thought he might be
anticipating
.

Sean kept catching himself looking forward to things. The challenges of starting up the new office and establishing the social media monitoring service he’d dreamed up last winter. The petty arguments he and Katie would probably have as they figured out how to make the condo into a home, the disagreements and compromises and make-up sex.

The moment when she spotted the framed
Star Wars
poster he’d already hung up in their bedroom.

This was the life he wanted, the life they’d made together. It was better than he’d dared hope.

“No, I’m not wuh-worrying. I’ve got my d-dream girl with me.”

“Lucky girl,” Katie said.

“No,” he corrected. “Lucky me.”

I’ve had a soft spot for stuttering heroes ever since I read Stephen King’s
It
as a kid—and I read it over and over and over again. So I’d like to dedicate this book to King, with thanks for all the hours of entertainment and inspiration, and an extra-big helping of gratitude for that wonderful, grieving Stuttering Bill.

Like just about everything Sean says,
Flirting with Disaster
didn’t come out smooth and perfect on the first go-round. There was a baby in the first draft, for one thing. (No, it wasn’t Sean and Katie’s.) Also, someone got shot. Bonus points for guessing who! The story changed a great deal between the first and last versions, and I owe a debt of gratitude to everyone who read it for me and gave me feedback that helped me improve it. Faye Robertson and Gina L. Maxwell were early cheerleaders. Their enthusiasm for the very idea of a stuttering hacker hero built my confidence.

My agent, Emily Sylvan Kim, and my editors at Random House, Sue Grimshaw and Angela Polidoro, made excellent revision suggestions, as did many of my writing friends and critique partners. Amber Lin and Serena Bell both managed to be really excited about the book when I most wanted to drown it in the bathtub. Courtney Milan, Del Dryden, Meg Maguire, Carrie Herring, Charlotte Stein, and Anna Cowan all offered supportive comments and general buoying. There are really no words to express how necessary all of this help is to a writer, so I’ll just have to say “Thank you, you wonderful, wonderful women, you.”

Any remaining mistakes or horrid errors—intentional or not—are, of course, my own.

Photo: Mark Anderson, STUN Photography

R
UTHIE
K
NOX
graduated from Grinnell College as an English and history double major and went on to earn a Ph.D. in modern British history that she’s put to remarkably little use. She debuted as a romance novelist with
Ride with Me
—probably the only existing cross-country bicycling love story yet to be penned—and followed it up with
About Last Night
, which features a sizzling British banker hero with the unlikely name of Neville.
Flirting with Disaster
is the third book in her Camelot series, which kicks off with
How to Misbehave
, followed by
Along Came Trouble
. Ruthie moonlights as a mother, Tweets incessantly, and bakes a mean focaccia.