AllFreeNovel
Share Us
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 coul
dn’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?”
“That bad, eh?”
He smiled a little. “Just wondering if I should nurse this one or if I can drink it in about four seconds like I want to.”
