Megan Frampton (33 page)

Keisha and I had speculated more times than I cared to remember about just what kind of person Hugh’s new girlfriend was. Morbid speculation on my part, and rampant curiosity, I guess, on hers. Anyway, we’d decided she was smart enough to suss out Hugh was vulnerable, but not smart enough to realize he usually had to rely on others to help him through the rough spots. I’d had a lawyer friend do a Lexis-Nexis search on her and discovered her age (younger), her address (tonier), and her profession (more professional). Now we were taking bets on when she’d wise up and dump him.

“I dunno,” I said. “Hugh can be pretty sweet when he’s needy.”

Keisha’s moment of silence spoke of her derision more than her words would have.

“All right,” I admitted, raising my hands in a gesture of defeat. Not that she could see me. “I fell for his ‘find my keys’ puppy look. Anyway, enough about him. What am I going to do?” I tried to keep my voice steady.

“Is Starbucks hiring?” Keisha replied in a matter-of-fact voice.

“Fuck you,” I said in my most outraged tone. I didn’t think it would fool her for a moment.

It didn’t. She laughed. “Well, you do have that English degree. You could teach.”

“Don’t you need more than a B.A.?”

“Not to substitute teach, I don’t think. It could help you out for a little while. Maybe some tutoring?”

“In what, romance novels?”

“You
could
finally put that English literature degree to good use.”

“Like the way you’re using your film degree?”

“Ouch, that’s cold.” Keisha had moved back to Cottonwood, California, to take over managing her father’s art cinema when he had gotten too old and tired to do it all by himself. She loved her job, even if it was as much about Goobers as Godard, so my teasing her wasn’t nearly as mean as it sounded.

The idea took hold in my brain. “I
was
pretty good at figuring out the leitmotifs and recurrent imagery and all that mumbo. Although teaching probably pays about as much as Starbucks.” I began to feel a ribbon of excitement thread through my body.

“You’d probably like the clientele a little more. And the hours would be good for Aidan.”

“It’s an idea. A damn good idea, actually. Glad I thought of it.”

She snorted. “Why do you have to pay that Dr. Lowell anyway? Just send me a wad of cash each week and I’ll hear all your problems.”

“You already hear them for free.”

She gave an exaggerated sigh. “You’re right. Good thing I like you so much.”

“Bye, hon. Love you.”

I hung up and found my latest book—
Love’s Scoundrel
, or something like that, and headed to bed, stopping in to check on my son one last time.

And I swore, as I kissed Aidan’s fragrant cheek, I would not let anything I wanted go unchecked again.

Molly Hagan is overwhelmed.

Her husband left her for a younger, blonder woman, her six year-old son is questioning her authority, and now, so is she. In order to pay her Brooklyn rent and keep her son supplied with Pokemon and Legos—not to mention food and clothing—she has to get a job. Fast.

So when an old friend offers Molly a copywriting position at a new bakery, finding romance is just about the last thing on her mind. But the sexy British pastry chef who’s heading up the bakery has other thoughts. And so does Molly when she meets the chef’s intimidating business partner—who also happens to have a secret that might prevent Molly from getting her own Happily Ever After.

Available wherever books are sold, or call 1-800-331-3761 to order
.

“Get out of my yard!” Ellen shouted.

The weasel-faced photographer ignored her, too busy snapping photos of the house next door to pay her any mind.

No surprise there. This was the fifth time in as many days that a man with a camera had violated her property lines. By now, she knew the drill.

They trespassed. She yelled. They pretended she didn’t exist. She called the police.

Ellen was thoroughly sick of it. She couldn’t carry on this way, watching from the safety of the side porch and clutching her glass of iced tea like an outraged southern belle.

It was all very well for Jamie to tell her to stay put and let the professionals deal with it. Her pop-star brother was safe at home in California, nursing his wounds. And anyway, this kind of attention was the lot he’d chosen in life. He’d decided to be a celebrity, and then he’d made the choice to get involved with Ellen’s neighbor, Carly. The consequences ought to be his to deal with.

Ellen hadn’t invited the paparazzi to descend. She’d made different choices, and they’d led her to college, law school, marriage, divorce, motherhood. They’d led her to this quiet cul-de-sac in Camelot, Ohio, surrounded by woods.

Her choices had also made her the kind of woman who couldn’t easily stand by as some skeevy guy crushed her plants and invaded Carly’s privacy for the umpteenth time since last Friday.

Enough
, she thought.
Enough
.

But until Weasel Face crushed the life out of her favorite hosta—her
mascot
hosta—with his giant brown boot, she didn’t actually intend to act on the thought.

Raised in Chicago, Ellen had grown up ignorant of perennials. When she first moved to Camelot, a new wife in a strange land, she did her best to adapt to the local ways of lawn-mowing and shade-garden cultivation, but during the three years her marriage lasted, she’d killed
every plant she put in the ground.

It was only after her divorce that things started to grow. In the winter after she kicked Richard out for being a philandering dickhead, their son had sprouted from a pea-sized nothing to a solid presence inside her womb, breathing and alive. That spring, the first furled shoots of the hosta poked through the mulch, proving that Ellen was not incompetent, as Richard had so often implied. She and the baby were, in fact, perfectly capable of surviving, even thriving, without anyone’s help.

Two more springs had come and gone, and the hosta kept returning, bigger every year. It became her horticultural buddy. Triumph in plant form.

So Ellen took it personally when Weasel Face stepped on it. Possibly a bit too personally. Swept up in a delicious tide of righteousness, she crossed the lawn and upended her glass of iced tea over the back of his head.

It felt good. It felt
great
, actually—the coiled-spring snap of temper, the clean confidence that came with striking a blow for justice. For the few seconds it lasted, she basked in it. It was such an improvement over standing around.

One more confirmation that powerlessness was for suckers.

But then it was over, and she wondered why she’d wasted the tea, because Weasel Face didn’t so much as flinch. Seemingly unbothered by the dunking, the ice cubes, or the sludgy sugar on the back of his neck, he aimed his camera at Carly’s house and held down the shutter release, capturing photo after photo as an SUV rolled to a stop in the neighboring driveway.

“Get
out
of my
yard
,” Ellen insisted, shoving the man’s shoulder for emphasis. His only response was to reach up, adjust his lens, and carry on.

Now what?
Assault-by-beverage was unfamiliar territory for her. Usually, she stuck with verbal attack. Always, the people she engaged in battle acknowledged her presence on the field. How infuriating to be ignored by the enemy.

“The police are on their way.”

This was a lie, but so what? The man had already been kicked off her property once this
week. He didn’t deserve scrupulous honesty. He didn’t even deserve the tea.

“I’ll leave when they make me,” he said.

“I’m going to press charges this time.”

The photographer squinted into his viewfinder. “Go ahead. I’ll have these pictures sold before the cops get here.”

“I’m not kidding,” she threatened. “I’ll use every single sneaky lawyer trick I can think of to drag out the process. You’ll rot in that jail cell for days before I’m done with you.”

And now she sounded like a street-corner nut job. Not the kind of behavior she approved of, but what was she supposed to do? It was already too late to give up. If she stopped pushing, he would win. Unacceptable.

A tall man stepped out of the SUV. One of her cedar trees partially blocked the view, but she caught a glimpse of mirrored sunglasses and broad shoulders.

“You’re going to be so sorry you didn’t listen to me.”

Weasel Face didn’t even look at her. “Go away, lady.”

“I live here!” She hooked her fingers in his elbow and yanked, screwing up his aim.

The stranger at Carly’s must have heard the escalating argument, because he turned to face them. Ellen’s uninvited guest made an ugly, excited noise low in his throat, edged forward, and smashed a lungwort plant that had been doing really well this year.

Ellen considered kicking him in the shin, but she hadn’t remembered to put shoes on before she rushed out of the house. She settled for a juvenile trick, walking around behind him and sinking her kneecaps into the back of his legs. His knees buckled, and he lost his balance and staggered forward a few paces, destroying a bleeding-heart bush. Then he shot her an evil glare and went right back to taking pictures.

“
Leave
,” she insisted.

“No.” He snapped frame after frame of the stranger as he sauntered toward them and Ellen fumed with anger, frustration, embarrassment, disappointment, fear—all of it swirling around in her chest, making her heart hammer and her stomach clench.

By the time the SUV driver reached her property line, she recognized him. In a village as small as Camelot, you got to know who everybody was eventually. This guy hadn’t been around long, maybe a few months. She’d seen him at the deli at lunchtime, always dressed for the office. Today, he wore a white dress shirt with charcoal slacks, and he looked crisp despite the damp July heat.

One time, she’d been chasing after Henry at the Village Market, and she’d turned a corner and almost walked right into this man. They’d done a shuffling sort of dance, trying to evade one another, and for a few seconds, she hadn’t had a single thought in her head except
Whoa
.

Big guy. Very
whoa
, if you went for that kind of thing.

The two invaders assessed each other for a few beats before
whoa
took off his sunglasses and tucked them into his pocket. He stepped around the obstructive cedar tree and extended his hand to Ellen. “Hi. Caleb Clark.”

She shifted her empty glass from one palm to the other, gripping the slippery surface too tight because an eddy of uninvited relief had turned her arm muscles into limp, noodly things. “Ellen Callahan.”

Caleb’s hand was big and warm, a work-roughened paw that went with the low voice and the hard body. He could be anybody, here for any reason, but a zingy little pulse low in her belly declared that the cavalry had arrived, and the cavalry was really something. It annoyed her—one more primitive, irrational feeling to cope with on top of all the others.

Caleb pumped her arm up and down once, a strangely formal ritual. He didn’t let go of her hand. A mischievous smile crept over his lips. “You’re a scary woman, Ellen Callahan,” he said. “If I were this lowlife piece of shit, I’d be quaking in my boots.”

“You’re wearing dress shoes,” she pointed out.

Caleb looked down at his wingtips. “That I am. I also have the good sense not to step on your plants.”

Weasel Face mumbled something to himself that included the words “might as well” and
“Jamie’s sister,” regrouped, and raised the camera to take pictures of Ellen.

She pulled her fingers from Caleb’s grip so she could cover her face. It was hard to be menacing while cowering, but facelessness was her best shot at spoiling the photos. She didn’t want to see herself on the news tonight wearing this particular outfit.

“Get off her property, or I’m going to make you wish you’d listened to her.”

Caleb issued his threat casually, as if he were flicking a speck of dust off his sleeve. When she peeked at him from behind her hand, he wasn’t even looking at Weasel Face. He was watching her. His lips had settled into a confident smirk that established a confederacy between the two of them she hadn’t expected.

She wanted to laugh, except … well, she didn’t. It felt good to be part of his team. Theirs was a temporary, knocked-together army of two, but still, he was driving the bad guy away, and his conspiratorial expression gave her a giddy thrill.

Which made her wonder if she was entirely in her right mind.

The photographer looked from Caleb to Ellen, then back at Caleb. Outnumbered and outgunned, he shrugged. “Whatever.”