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Caleb issued his threat casually, as if he were flicking a speck of dust off his sleeve. When she peeked at him from behind her hand, he wasn’t even looking at Weasel Face. He was watching her. His lips had settled into a confident smirk that established a confederacy between the two of them she hadn’t expected.
She wanted to laugh, except … well, she didn’t. It felt good to be part of his team. Theirs was a temporary, knocked-together army of two, but still, he was driving the bad guy away, and his conspiratorial expression gave her a giddy thrill.
Which made her wonder if she was entirely in her right mind.
The photographer looked from Caleb to Ellen, then back at Caleb. Outnumbered and outgunned, he shrugged. “Whatever.”
He started to move away. Caleb reached out and grabbed his arm. “Memory card.”
The photographer opened his mouth to protest. Caleb’s hand tightened. Weasel Face gave a reluctant nod, pulled himself free, and extracted the card from his camera. Caleb put it in his pocket.
“What’s your name?” he asked.
“Go to hell.”
“Never mind. I saw your car on the street. I’ll run the plates. If I see you in Camelot again, I’m going to make you sorry. And if you step on any more of Ms. Callahan’s plants on your way out, she’s going to make you sorry.”
A prickle of unease walked up the back of Ellen’s neck. Who was Caleb Clark, exactly? She’d assumed he was just a friend of Carly’s, but she knew most of Carly’s friends already.
I’ll run the plates. A cop? She’d never seen him in a uniform. Unless he was a detective—they wore suits, right?
“Go,” Caleb said, and Weasel Face went. He detoured around another lungwort plant on his way out of the yard, then hurried down the drive to the cul-de-sac.
Caleb had dispatched him so easily. He issued commands like he was accustomed to being obeyed. Ex-military? He had the body for it. Rangy and muscular, his build fairly announced, I ran fifteen miles before you got up this morning, and I still have energy left to bayonet the enemy.
It hardly seemed fair.
A moment later, an engine started up with a cough, and the brown streak of the Weaselmobile appeared and disappeared in the gap at the bottom of Carly’s driveway.
He would probably be back. Even if he didn’t return, there were others. They were always out there now, sometimes four or five cars, sometimes more. Waiting for news to happen. Waiting for Jamie to show or Carly to come outside in a bikini and pose for belly shots.
Ellen turned back to Caleb.
He grinned, quick and bright, and she found herself almost smiling back when he raised his hand in the universal invitation for a high five. The slap of his dry palm against her clammy one snapped her to attention.
What had just happened? It wasn’t like her to get so angry or to let herself be overwhelmed. All these amped-up emotions belonged to some other woman.
“Thank you,” she said.
“Not a problem.” He slid his hands into his pockets. Something devilish in his expression made her wonder if he’d seen her marching across the lawn with nothing but a glass of iced tea for a weapon.
She had her shortcomings, but vanity wasn’t one of them. If she’d been able to witness herself taking on the photographer, she’d probably be amused, too. As it was, she felt a little loopy.
Could adrenaline explain why he was leaping into focus this way? Or shock? Everywhere her ey
es went to avoid meeting his, they got caught on some manly detail. The hollow of his throat above the open top button of his shirt, say, or the breadth of his shoulders under all that pristine cotton.
She sucked in a deep breath and got woozy with the clean, woodsy-warm smell of him. His soap, she guessed, and beneath all those pine needles or whatever, a tang of sweat that was all man.
Get ahold of yourself.
Caleb Clark wasn’t hard on the eyes, but he was hardly Apollo. He had close-cropped dark brown hair, olive skin that suggested less-than-completely-white-bread ancestry, and a nice straight nose with a bump in the bridge. Whoa factor aside, he was just a guy who’d helped her out on his way to visit Carly.
Just an ordinary guy with a dimple in one cheek and crinkle-cornered, happy brown eyes that transformed him into a very attractive specimen when he smiled.
A disarmingly attractive specimen. Who had disarmed her.
He seemed well aware of it.
