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Except she’d looked a hell of a lot like she was going to let him kiss her.
His mother craned around in the driver’s seat to observe the crowd milling behind them. Since Callahan had given the press conference and declared his intention to lay siege to Carly’s house until she let him in, he and Carly had been waging their battle over Twitter, with Jamie posting sweet compliments in exchange for every bitter, nasty thing she could think of to say about him. All three or four hundred people now behind the barricades were dividing their attention between the two houses and their phones. As Jamie set up his equipment on Carly’s lawn, they watched the action unfold and greeted each new online development with excited chatter.
Caleb wanted very much to punch Jamie Callahan. One solid whack in the jaw would go a long way toward evening the scorecard. The man was making his job hideously difficult. Come to think of it, it would be nice to give Carly a little shake, too, except of course you couldn’t shake a pregnant woman. Or any woman. Couldn’t even chew her out, because she had the blood-pressure thing. Shortie had complete immunity at the moment, the little brat.
Callahan’s record label spoke through Breckenridge, and Breckenridge had been riding Caleb’s ass all day long. This is suicide for his image. Get him inside and keep him there. Take away his phone. Force him to see reason.
As if Caleb were Callahan’s jailer. The truth was, he didn’t have the least bit of influence over the guy. He’d tried talking to him. He’d tried talking to Carly. Both of them had batted him away like a gnat.
So what the hell did Breckenridge think he should do, tie them up? They were grownups, at least technically. If they wanted to air their dirty laundry on television and on the Internet and in every newspaper in the country, they had the right. All Caleb could do was make sure they didn’t come to any harm in the process.
Also, keep the photographers away from the windows, prevent fights from breaking out at the barricades, confiscate alcohol, refuse to let anyone sit down, make sure he had patrols running around the fence line, arrange for porta-potties to be delivered, check and double-check every vehicle that came through, coordinate with the local police to pick up troublemakers, watch over the shift changes, field dozens of phone calls and e-mails and text messages, track who was supposed to be showing up to help Nana take care of Carly, rescue Ellen’s tulip tree, check in on Henry now and then, and suppress the urge to tell Breckenridge to back the fuck off.
Oh, and coordinate for Jamie Callahan to give a public concert for Carly on her front lawn in the hope of getting his foot in the door. Even though green-lighting this asinine gesture might well be the move that cost Caleb his job.
He’d only agreed to help—or at least not actively hinder—because he was a sap, and Carly loved Jamie, even if she was too stubborn to admit it.
All of which meant he really had better things to do than devote 98 percent of his attention to wondering if Ellen had something going with her jerk-off ex-husband. And if Caleb had blown his chance with her this morning or sometime before this morning. If Katie was right and he’d botched this thing with Ellen so bad from the beginning that he wouldn’t be able to fix it.
“What a mess,” his mother said. “Can’t you do something about all these people?”
“What do you think I ought to do about them, Mom?” He didn’t succeed in keeping the annoyance out of his voice. He didn’t even try particularly hard.
She gestured vaguely with one hand, her gold bracelet winking in the sun. “I don’t know. Send them back wherever they came from.”
“Yeah, I’ll get right on that.”
“No need to get snippy with me. It’s just so unseemly. This is not the sort of thing that happens in Camelot.”
His mother delivered most of her condemnations between the lines. What she really wanted him to know was that this media circus was spoiling her pretty little town, and she considered him a failure for not managing to prevent it or clean it up. Never mind that people had a right to assemble wherever they wanted. Never mind that he couldn’t kick the gawkers out of Camelot any more than he could control the weather. This was all his fault.
He’d stopped waiting for Janet Clark to pat him on the back a long time ago, but at least when he’d been in the army, she’d pretended to support the cause. These days, she went back and forth between acting as though the family didn’t need his help a
nd worrying his business would go under and he’d fail to rescue them. Now she’d come up with a new variation—this was the first time she’d seen him at work, and it meant she could also tell him he was bad at his job.
“I’m sure it’ll be over soon enough,” he said.
“I should hope so. I’d like to think you have more important things to do than babysit celebrities.”
Ah. He was bad at his silly job.
Enough. He set the sandwich down and got out of her car, bracing his arms over the door frame and leaning in. “This is happening in Camelot, Ma, unseemly or not. Things happen in life that are unseemly. You don’t have to like them, but bitching about them and wishing they’d go away is counterproductive.”
He wished he were only talking about the job, but both of them knew that wasn’t the case. He was talking about Dad. His volume had risen as he spoke, and an internal warning system told him he was in danger of losing it and chewing out his own mother.
“Don’t use that tone with me, young man. I raised you. I deserve your respect.” She crossed her arms, her eyes flashing.
“You raised me, and you did a good job. How about you quit treating me like a useless kid?”
“I don’t—”
“You do, and I’m done. I don’t need to be handled. I need you to help me take care of you and the rest of this family. Dad can’t do it anymore. I can.”
A bystander in a red T-shirt broke free of the barricade just then and streaked up the driveway, camera in hand. Caleb walked around the front of the car, caught the guy by the upper arm, and yanked it back hard, catching his opposite wrist. Red Shirt obviously couldn’t fight his way out of a paper bag. Within a few seconds, Caleb had the guy’s arms behind his back, high enough to let him know how much it would hurt if he was unwise enough to struggle. Red Shirt sank to his knees, then to the asphalt, where he turned his face to one side and submitted meekly to the pressure of Caleb’s hand pressing his head to the ground.
It felt way too good.
Bryce extended a pair of handcuffs. The sun glinted off the metal, but Caleb didn’t move to take them. Red Shirt had become a prisoner, but Caleb was in the wrong mood to play jailer. He didn’t want to find out what he was capable of on this little sleep and this much frustration.
