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“Small ceremony, hot sand, lots of drinks with little umbrellas in them.” She smiled. “We’ll make a great escape of it.”
“Do you need to escape? I thought we were doing pretty good here.”
“We are. I just like the idea of a new beginning in a new place.”
He dipped his head and kissed her again. “If you like it, I like it.”
Henry came barreling up, dragging the rake behind him. “Fruit snacks,” he said, and dropped the handle strategically between her legs and Caleb’s, forcing them apart.
“I love you,” she told Caleb as she backed up a step.
“Fruit snacks,” Henry insisted.
Caleb grinned in that way he had. That way that told her, the morning they met, that the two of them were a team, and they were in this together, and they were going to have a hell of a lot of fun. “Fruit snacks it is.” He met Ellen’s eyes. “And I love you, too.”
She admired the wedge of his back as he walked inside ahead of her, guiding Henry with a hand on his shoulder.
That first morning, she had thought he was trouble. She was so sure that Caleb had come along to upset her routines, fracture her independence, and she wouldn’t be able to carry on along the narrow path she’d made for herself.
She’d been right. But as it turned out, trouble was exactly what she needed.
Acknowledgments
This book owes its existence to Faye Robertson, who read six thousand words that I’d dashed off in a random outburst of creative effusion and demanded more Caleb, stat. Faye fell in love with him long before I did. I thought I was working on a subplot. Silly me.
I also owe a debt of gratitude to my agent, Emily Sylvan Kim, whose praise for the first draft of this book gave me the courage to turn it into a longer, fuller story. When I set out to write this book, I assumed it would turn out to be a longish category romance. Silly me, redux.
But my editor, Sue Grimshaw, deserves most of my thanks for Along Came Trouble, because Sue did me the immense favor of not liking the book. At all. Her comments upon first reading it guided me through months of rewriting, and they made the book much, much better. Whatever pockets of suckage may remain are my fault, not hers, and are probably a consequence of my being stubborn.
I reserve a heaping platter of gratitude for my good friend Serena Bell, whose conferences via Twitter DM kept me sane during the revision process. It might be possible to revise successfully without a good friend at whom one can incessantly spew one’s neurotic thoughts, but I don’t want to try it. Thanks to Serena, I didn’t have to.
And thanks, finally, to Random House’s Angela Polidoro for her editorial acumen, Meg Maguire for telling me to nix all the nicknames, Ruth Meacham for helping me with the lawyer stuff, Romance Man for complaining about the bodyguard cliché, Jessica Scott for making sure I didn’t say anything excessively stupid about the military, Amber Lin for giving me feedback that inspired one last do-over of the opening chapter, and everyone else who read partial or complete drafts of this novel and offered me impressions and advice. There are rather a lot of you. I’m in your debt.
Oh! And also, Justin Timberlake. Thanks for Jamie Callahan. For the record, I think you’re cute.
Photo: Mark Anderson, STUN Photography
Ruthie Knox 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. She moonlights as a mother, Tweets incessantly, and bakes a mean focaccia.
Read on for excerpts from more Loveswept titles …
Read on for an excerpt from Ruthie Knox’s
How to Misbehave
Chapter One
Friday, July 16, 1999
When the tornado siren began to scream, Amber was alone in the building with him.
Him.
The foreman. The guy with the deep tan and the hard hat and the oh-my-lord arms.
Everybody had a different name for him. One of the lifeguards called him “the Italian Stallion.” A patron had referred to him as “Mr. Yummy.” Rosalie, the weekday receptionist, said his name was actually Patrick Mazzara, and he was trouble.
Amber just thought of him as “him.”
