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Breckenridge expected him to use his judgment, same as the army had. He’d been promoted to command his own platoon on the basis of his ability to lead from the front and make sound decisions.
Could he protect Ellen and pursue a relationship with her at the same time?
He’d assumed the two goals were incompatible because in the army he’d get his ass handed to him if he’d even looked sideways at a woman under his protection, whether she was a fellow soldier or a detainee.
But this wasn’t the army. This was Camelot, Ohio.
Jamie Callahan wanted Carly and his family kept safe and out of the tabloids. That was Caleb’s mission. He wouldn’t let harm come to any of them. But provided he didn’t let his attraction distract him from the mission, where was the harm in getting close to Ellen?
Of course, since yesterday morning, he’d rejected her, pissed her off by walking all over her objections, and sent a crew to do work on her house without her permission. By the time he saw her again, she might not be all that eager to get cozy.
He polished off the sandwich and looked up. Carly was watching him, her hands folded over her protruding stomach.
“Does it hurt?” she asked.
“What?”
“All those rusty wheels grinding around in your head as you try to relearn how to think for yourself.”
Carly liked to remind him that soldiers were mindless drones whenever she got the chance. “Very funny, Short Round.” He stood up. “Thanks for lunch.”
For a pregnant woman she moved fast, blocking him with her belly before he could cross the threshold. “Don’t even think about leaving without saying, ‘You’re right, Carly.’ ”
Giving her his best confused look, he asked, “What are you right about?”
“Ellen.”
He smiled. “Get out of my way, Carly. I’ve got work to do.”
Watching Caleb saunter down the driveway, Carly brushed off her hands.
There. Good deed for the day: done and done.
Caleb obviously had the hots for Ellen. Ellen just as obviously had the hots for Caleb. Now they could get their rocks off, and Carly would get bonus points from the Universal Matchmaker for hooking them up. Some day, after baby Wombat was born and she’d lost her pregnancy weight, the Universal Matchmaker would send her somebody to love in exchange. Fair was fair.
The Wombat kicked, and she rubbed the contact spot on her belly. “Yeah, I know. That’ll be the day, eh, kid?”
Love didn’t play fair, and Carly had never believed in any power beyond herself. She made her own luck. Just lately, she’d made herself an impressively shitty streak.
She returned to the kitchen and started gathering up the dishes and putting away all the sandwich fixings. It still felt weird to be in this kitchen without Nana. Like Nana was the kitchen, and without her here, Carly was bumbling around in an empty shell. She didn’t feel big enough to fill the place up.
“Good thing I’m getting bigger every day. Pretty soon, I’ll be spilling out the windows like Alice in Wonderland.”
The Wombat had no comment. Maybe he—or she—had gone to bed. Like a cat, the Wombat took a lot of naps, awakening primarily to kick her in uncomfortable places or, just as she was drifting off to sleep, to get the hiccups for forty-five minutes. Because there was nothing quite so sleep-inducing as a torso full of Mexican jumping beans.
She squirted soap into the sink and began running some warm water over the dirty plates and her breakfast cereal bowl.
She’d told Nana she was going to buy a dishwasher, but she couldn’t bring herself to do it, any more than she could bring herself to replace Nana’s radioactive-green dish soap with something environmentally friendly. It didn’t feel right to change anything, not when this was the only home she’d ever known. She wanted to preserve it like a museum so the Wombat could grow up here, surrounded by all of Nana’s things.
As if her grandmother’s love had s
oaked into the walls and the cabinets and the carpeting. The Wombat could breathe it in, but only so long as Carly didn’t throw away Nana’s collection of chipped coffee cups or her huge-ass microwave from 1987.
If Baby Wombat was indeed ever born—and Carly still had a hard time believing that a living, breathing human baby was at the end of this bizarre ride known as pregnancy—she figured she could use all the help she could get.
Two months to go, and she’d be a mother. You’d think it would have sunk in by now. She’d wanted this for so long—couldn’t remember a time in her life when she hadn’t wanted it—and now that it was actually happening, she often felt as though it were happening to someone else.
Some of her online infertility friends had warned her about this strange period of unreality called pregnancy. The battle to conceive became all-consuming, and then it happened, and you didn’t know what to do with yourself or how to think anymore. Your head space got completely warped by the experience of being not-pregnant.
