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“What did he come here for?”
“I’m not sure. He told me he wanted me back. Maureen made it sound like the pictures were some twisted kind of stunt to win my affection.”
“There any chance that’s going to happen?”
She drank her wine and made him wait a long time for an answer. “He looked right through me and said I was his lodestar. I don’t want to be a lodestar. Not his. Not anybody’s.”
Considering Caleb only halfway knew what the word meant, he thought he didn’t have much to worry about there.
They were silent for a while. His vision had compensated for the darkness some. Enough for him to watch her chest rise and fall beneath her dark T-shirt and to admire the smooth lines of her legs crossed at the ankles. Her feet were bare again. He wondered what she had against shoes.
“I owe you an apology,” she said. “For the fence.”
“That’s funny. I thought I owed you one.”
“You already apologized,” she said. “Now it’s my turn. You were right. We needed the fence. I don’t know how you knew we would, but you did. So thank you. Though if you ever try to pull something like that again, fair warning, I’m going to stop speaking to you.”
An apology and a thank you. Huh. Maybe he hadn’t screwed up absolutely everything today. But he was about to.
“Ellen, I think we’d better not see each other anymore. Not until after this job’s done.”
It hurt more than having the shrapnel removed from his hip, but he gritted his teeth and let the statement stand.
She stiffened, and for a moment she didn’t seem to breathe at all. Then her chest rose again, and she said in a decent approximation of her normal tone, “What makes you say that?”
“It turns out I’m not any good at mixing business with pleasure. If the fence didn’t make that clear, then what happened this afternoon did. I’ve been thinking about you too much when I ought to be thinking about the job.”
Katie had been right the first time. He’d thrown over his principles for Ellen. He’d made the wrong call, and the result was his unacceptable failure to protect Henry. If he hadn’t been so caught up in her, he’d have seen the situation more clearly. Followed up with the police and been a more active part of the Plimpton investigation. Something.
Every time he thought about it, his stomach soured. It could have been so much worse, and if it had been, there would have been no one to blame but himself.
But his bad judgment wasn’t the whole problem. It was worse than that, because he was falling for her, he wanted to build a life with her, and she hadn’t given him a single sign that she felt the same way.
“I want a chance to start over with you,” he said at last. “I want to take you out to dinner and do this thing in the right order. Not—” He faltered. He didn’t k
now how to describe what they’d been doing.
“Not play hide the bone with me the day after we met?”
“Yeah.” Exactly.
She set her glass down on the flagstones and leaned toward him. Their knees brushed, and she splayed her hands over his thighs, high up. “What if I say I want to play hide the bone?”
Ah, hell. Just her playful tone of voice was enough to turn him on. Just the light pressure of her fingers on him. The smell of her hair.
“I’d say I want that, too. But we need to wait.”
Ellen cocked her head to the side and studied him. “When do you expect the job to be done?”
He had no idea. Days? Weeks? Months? Maybe not until after Carly had her baby. Maybe longer. It depended on whether Jamie Callahan decided to stick around and whether Carly decided to let him. Whether Breckenridge fired Caleb for letting the concert go on. Dozens of things would make a difference, and all of them were out of his control.
“I don’t know.”
She stood, and the floodlight clicked on, backlighting her so that Caleb couldn’t see her face, only her shape. She took his wine out of his hand, placed it on the ground, and lowered herself onto his lap, wrapping her arms around his neck.
“I don’t want to wait,” she said. “We have a contract. I’m pretty sure it obligates you to take me to bed now.”
“I can’t, sweetheart. I shouldn’t, and I really can’t. I have to work.”
