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She shook her head, unwilling to continue that train of thought. With a sniffle, she rubbed her nose with the back of her hand. She squared her shoulders and banished the vulnerability, then looked at Caleb again. “And he yelled at me for it, the prick. So I told him to take a hike.”
Some th
ings never changed. He’d spent the better part of the past fifteen years away, seeing Carly only every now and then when he was on leave. She and her husband had been living in Westerville, a bedroom community of Columbus that was a fifty-minute drive from Camelot. Caleb had e-mailed her, talked to her on the phone sometimes, but their friendship had mostly lapsed until he’d moved back home.
But here they were in Nana’s kitchen, and she was dealing with being kicked in the heart the same way she had when her prom date dumped her for another girl—just as brave, and just as fierce.
“You want him back?”
“Hell, no.”
Just as stubborn, too.
“Your turn, champ,” she said. “What’s the deal with you and Ellen?”
Caleb tried on the new strike plate for size. Too big. He reached for a chisel. “She came on to me last night.”
“Ellen did? Seriously?”
“Not like she climbed onto my lap or anything. There was just this … moment. Like a moment of opportunity, okay? An invitation. But I didn’t take it.”
“Why not?”
He frowned. Wasn’t it obvious? “I’m supposed to be protecting her.”
“So?”
“So I can’t sleep with her.”
“Because?”
“Because it would be unethical.”
Carly put their plates on the table. “That’s the stupidest thing I’ve ever heard. Go wash your hands.”
Caleb ignored her and fit the new strike plate into the space he’d opened up for it. Finishing the installation was a two-minute job, so he did it while Carly stared at him.
There was nothing stupid about thinking it would be unethical to take Ellen to bed. Was there?
No. He was trying to do the honorable thing. The practical thing.
He put his tools away and washed his hands. At the table, he took a bite out of his sandwich. As he’d expected, it was weird. She’d used two different kinds of bread, and he must have been looking somewhere else when she’d put potato chips in it. Who did that?
“What’s so stupid about it?”
She lifted the bread off the top of her own sandwich and stuck in a few more chips. He must have made a face, because she said, “What? It wasn’t crunchy enough.”
Then she leaned forward and pinned him in place with her keen blue eyes. “You’re not Ellen’s personal bodyguard, right? You got hired to keep photographers off her lawn. It’s not as if there are assassins with nunchucks after her. You’ve got the guys at the end of the driveway, you make her lock the doors at night, and who the hell cares what the two of you get up to between the sheets? It’s not like you signed a contract promising not to sleep with her.”
It was certainly a different way of looking at the situation.
He took another bite of the sandwich, which was actually pretty good. Tasty, even.
Caleb didn’t like thinking of his role as basically that of a human NO TRESPASSING sign, but Carly had a point about the nunchucks. Compared to what he’d done in the army, this job was a cakewalk, with next to no potential for physical danger. Yes, there was Plimpton—if that guy was even the felon Plimpton, and not some completely different person—but all the evidence so far suggested Plimpton was here to take pictures, just like the others. The folks outside Ellen’s house had no reason to hurt her or anybody else. They just wanted to make money off the scandal surrounding Carly and Jamie. Ellen was right—she wasn’t interesting to these people.
And Carly was right that his mission was to put measures in place to keep the danger at bay, not to provide personal, physical protection. He’d told Ellen two or three times that he wasn’t a bodyguard. On this job he didn’t even carry a weapon, because he’d been instructed not to. Jamie Callahan didn’t want guns anywhere in the vicinity of his nephew.
Nor did Caleb’s contract with Breckenridge say a thing about how he was meant to conduct himself on duty. Nothing in writing specified he couldn’t have a personal relationship with Ellen, any more than it said he couldn’t have lunch with Carly.
