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She looked wounded, too, as if his behavior had personally offended her.
Christ, it probably had. Maybe to Katie, what he was doing with Ellen looked as screwed up as what Levi had done to her.
It wasn’t like that. He wasn’t like that. He respected Ellen, and damn it, he’d tried taking it slow. Ellen hadn’t gone along with the plan.
“I do respect her,” he said a second time. “This wasn’t my idea. She wouldn’t go out with me.”
His intentions had been pure. Pure-ish. Until Ellen walked out on the porch in those shorts and lured him inside. The memory made his lips curve into an ill-timed smile.
“Quit smiling, Caleb. This isn’t good. It’s really bad.”
“What are you talking about?”
“You’re a booty call for this woman. She doesn’t take you seriously.”
“Sure she does.”
But he didn’t have as much confidence in the statement as he’d have liked.
Katie shook her head. “Single moms get lonely. I know—some of my friends have kids. One minute they’re young and hot, and then they have a baby and they hardly ever wash their hair anymore, and men look right through them. That’s Ellen’s life, and then you come along, Mr. Sexy Security Guard, and she thinks, ‘I can get some action, and it doesn’t have to mean a thing.’ So she leads you to bed by your dick, and of course you go for it, because you’re a guy.”
“Jesus, Katie,” he said. Frustrated, because his sister had it all wrong. Ellen was—well, hell, he didn’t know for sure. She didn’t want a boyfriend, but that didn’t mean she was using him for sex. He was going to change her mind about the whole relationship situation. He just needed some time. “That’s not what it’s like. I swear.”
Katie crossed her arms and lifted her chin. A challenge. “So ask her to dinner on Wednesday. Bet she won’t come.”
She wouldn’t. He knew better than to even ask. That wasn’t good, was it? That suggested maybe Katie knew what she was talking about. “We’re not doing Wednesday dinner again. It sucked too much last week.”
“I already invited everyone. We’re going to have a cake for Clark’s birthday.”
Amber’s oldest was turning ten. Shit. No skipping the Wednesday dinner, then. “I have to buy him a present.”
“I already got one for you. You’re going to have to wrap it, though.”
He glanced at the clock. It was already nearly eight. He had to hustle. “Thanks. I need to go. If Tony’s guys get there before I do, I’m in trouble.”
Katie’s parting jab followed him out the door. “You’re already in trouble, Buster. You’re in huge trouble.”
At eight, Jamie called up the steps to the loft, “So when do you think I should go over there?”
“Not yet. It’s too early. She could still be asleep.”
Carly would be up, no question. But she was grumpy in the morning. Ten would be better. Nana would have her fed by ten.
Ellen scrolled through her in-box and sighed. She had a lot of work to do, but it was hard to concentrate with Jamie pacing around downstairs, making her worry. Plus, there was this piercing beeping noise coming from outside, like the sound the garbage truck made when it backed up. Henry had a dump truck that made that noise, and she hated it so much she’d sent it to Grammy Maureen’s house. But this was no plastic dump truck. No, this was something big, and the beeping kept drilling her between the eyes. It was giving her a headache.
It sounded like a construction site out there. But how could that be? She didn’t have any neighbors but Carly, and if Carly were getting work done, Ellen would know about it.
A solid crack ripped through her office, followed by a big crash into the underbrush. A tree had fallen over. Unless she was very much mistaken, a tree had fallen over in her front yard. Ellen sprang out of her office chair and moved to the other side of the loft, where she could get a view out the clerestory windows.
There was a huge truck in her driveway, the back of it filled with silver chain-link and a pile of galvanized posts. Half a dozen men in hard hats and work boots were walking all over her front lawn, and they’d just felled a good-sized cottonwood tree at the property line. Caleb was standing on her leprechaun in the driveway with one hand on his hip, pointing in the direction of the downed tree and talking to a guy in an orange vest. Gesticulating like he owned the joint.
“You bastard,” she said through her teeth. “You promised me.”
I wouldn’t drea
m of it, he’d told her. Not Caleb. Caleb would never try to mess with her, push her around, manipulate her.
He wouldn’t dream of doing that. Except whenever the hell he felt like it.
