by Linda Cajio
One time, she’d been chasing after Henry at the Village Market, and she’d turned a corner and almost walked right into this man. They’d done a shuffling sort of dance, trying to evade one another, and for a few seconds, she hadn’t had a single thought in her head except Whoa.
Big guy. Very whoa, if you went for that kind of thing.
The two invaders assessed each other for a few beats before whoa took off his sunglasses and tucked them into his pocket. He stepped around the obstructive cedar tree and extended his hand to Ellen. “Hi. Caleb Clark.”
She shifted her empty glass from one palm to the other, gripping the slippery surface too tight because an eddy of uninvited relief had turned her arm muscles into limp, noodly things. “Ellen Callahan.”
Caleb’s hand was big and warm, a work-roughened paw that went with the low voice and the hard body. He could be anybody, here for any reason, but a zingy little pulse low in her belly declared that the cavalry had arrived, and the cavalry was really something. It annoyed her—one more primitive, irrational feeling to cope with on top of all the others.
Caleb pumped her arm up and down once, a strangely formal ritual. He didn’t let go of her hand. A mischievous smile crept over his lips. “You’re a scary woman, Ellen Callahan,” he said. “If I were this lowlife piece of shit, I’d be quaking in my boots.”
“You’re wearing dress shoes,” she pointed out.
Caleb looked down at his wingtips. “That I am. I also have the good sense not to step on your plants.”
Weasel Face mumbled something to himself that included the words “might as well” and “Jamie’s sister,” regrouped, and raised the camera to take pictures of Ellen.
She pulled her fingers from Caleb’s grip so she could cover her face. It was hard to be menacing while cowering, but facelessness was her best shot at spoiling the photos. She didn’t want to see herself on the news tonight wearing this particular outfit.
“Get off her property, or I’m going to make you wish you’d listened to her.”
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 eyes 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 a hold 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.
“It’s my job,” he said.
So dazzled was she by the smile, it took her a few seconds to hear him, and then a few more to figure out what he had to mean.
It’s my job to drive men like Weasel Face off the lawn.
Oh, crap. She should have known. The black SUV with tinted windows, his body, his self-assurance—Caleb was a bodyguard. Of course he was. “Who do you work for?”
“I work for myself. Camelot Security. But Breckenridge brought me in.”
Breckenridge was the company Jamie used. Which meant that Caleb wasn’t a friend of Carly’s at all. Her brother had hired him. And Ellen knew Jamie well enough to guess he wouldn’t have brought in security just for Carly. Not when he knew exactly how many times Ellen had called the police in the past week.
Caleb was here for her.
“I don’t need you.”
This earned her a smile she found considerably less charming than its predecessors. “Seemed like you did a minute ago.”
“I did, and I already said thanks for that. But I don’t want a bodyguard.”
“I’m not a bodyguard.”
“What are you, then?”
“I’m a security specialist.”
“I don’t need one of those, either.”
Caleb raised his eyebrows and looked pointedly toward the cul-de-sac.
Damn it, he didn’t even need to speak to make her see it. He was right—Ellen had no way of keeping the invaders at bay. Dumping her tea on the photographer had been stupid. If Weasel Face had wanted to, he could have done a l
ot worse to her than just step on her plants.
“Okay, fine,” she admitted. “You have a point.”
Caleb glanced past her to the house, his eyes jumping from one feature to another, panning across the front lawn. Surveying her domain. His lips kept twitching at the corners, as if it took some effort to keep his satisfied expression from crossing over to smug. “When was this place built?” he asked. “Sixties?”
“Mid-seventies.”
“It’s a nice house. If you’ve got the plans, I’m going to need them—architectural drawings, schematics. That’ll make it easier for the alarm installer. We’ll have to find the survey stakes at the property lines, too, or else get a new surveyor out here.”
“Why?”
“How attached are you to this tree?” He started walking toward the front yard, and Ellen hurried to catch up. “It’s not supposed to be that close to the road. The county wants a ten-foot easement along the street side of the property to keep the electric and phone wires clear. Didn’t the guys tell you that when they planted it?”
“No.” She’d dug the hole herself after she bought the tulip tree for Henry’s first birthday. It had never occurred to her that she wasn’t allowed to put it wherever she wanted.
She felt as though she ought to say something about that, but she was having trouble keeping up with him. He walked fast, and her thoughts kept whirling around, a tornado that flung little bits of verbal flotsam toward her mouth, words like no and what? and stop and fuck and help.
“Sorry, I’m not sure … what does the tree have to do with anything?”
“It’s going to mess up your fence line. I can have it moved back, though. No worries. First things first, I’m going to do a circuit around the house. I’d like to see—”
“Stop.” He was getting away from her, his long legs eating up the ground, and an air raid siren had started going off inside her head. “Stop walking. Stop looking at things. And for the love of God, stop talking.”
He actually had the audacity to grin at her again, as if they were still allies, and this was all an enjoyable game rather than the second wave of a hostile incursion.
“There’s not going to be a fence,” Ellen said firmly.
“Your brother is crazy-famous, and you have a kid. You need a fence. I can get it painted any color you want. Or stained. Cedar would look nice with your siding.” Caleb looked at his watch. “Are you free in about an hour? I’m supposed to be meeting with Carly, but after that I’d like to come back by here. In the meantime, it would help me a lot if you could pull together your itinerary for the next few weeks. I need names and contact information for all your friends, too—family, boyfriends, anybody who comes over to play with your son—so I can let my team know who it’s okay to let on the property. Oh, and does your cell phone have a radio function, by any chance?”
Ellen’s fingers had begun to ache deep in the joints, so she opened her hand to stretch them, and the iced tea glass fell onto the lawn. She gawped at it, unable to collect her thoughts over the ringing in her ears.
Trouble. This man was trouble. Far bigger trouble than a few photographers.
Caleb leaned over and scooped up the glass. Then it was in front of her face again with his hand wrapped around it, and her eyes traveled the length of his forearm and over the rolled sleeve at his elbow, up to the rounded cap of his shoulder, his collar and neck, his jawline and that bump in his nose and those twinkling, confident, conspiratorial eyes. Heaven help her, he looked good. Why did misery always come in such attractive packages?
She took the glass from him, and his fingers bumped hers, and it was terrible the way she felt it. Just terrible.
“What?” she croaked.
“Don’t worry about it,” he said. “I’ll get you a new phone with a radio. Comes in handy as a backup. You’ll have to let my team know every time you leave the house, and they’ll decide whether you need an escort. I’ll get that set up by tomorrow morning. In the meantime—”
“Stop,” Ellen whispered.
Not loud enough. You had to be loud—she’d figured that out with Richard. You had to be louder than they were, stronger than they thought you could be, and so mean and cold and unforgiving, they called you names.
She knew how to do this. She’d done it before.
“Stop,” she said, and this time the word came out at a satisfying volume. “You’re not putting a fence up on my property. I’m not giving you schematics. I don’t want your help.”
“Didn’t we already cover this a minute ago?”
They had. But she’d been a fool, and she knew when to change tactics. If she gave this man one more inch, he would take over. She’d seen it with Jamie. One day, she and Jamie had been ordinary teenagers, and the next thing she knew her brother had his own armed escort. He was ostensibly an adult now, but he reported his comings and goings to a team of people who monitored his food, screened his friends, and installed an alarm system in his house that had a habit of going off a three a.m. in irritating bursts of shrieking that no one knew how to stop.
Security guards oversaw Jamie’s whole life. They told him where he could go and when, controlled him, choked him. Ellen couldn’t handle that. Not after Richard.
So she folded her arms over her chest and stood up straighter. Caleb’s gaze locked with hers. Let him try, she told herself. Just let him try.
But he only smiled, his eyes too kind and a bit bewildered. “I’m here to help you. The way I see it, Breckenridge put me under contract, but I work for you.”
“Excellent,” she said. Because it didn’t matter whether he was kind. It only mattered that he would wreak havoc with her life if she let him. “In that case, you’re fired.”
Read on for an excerpt from Karen Leabo’s
Hell on Wheels
ONE
“This will fix you right up,” Victoria Driscoll said as she set a bowl of her homemade chicken soup in front of Amos.
Amos snorted, pulling the afghan tighter around his burly shoulders. “Can it bring a body back from the dead?”
“Now, Professor, you’re not that bad off.”
“How would you know, missy? It’s not your nasal passages that are involved.”
As they both sat down at Amos’s old metal kitchen table to eat the soup, Victoria had to admit the professor looked and sounded pretty bad. Gone was the youthful vigor that usually made him seem much younger than his sixty-eight years. His nose resembled a big Italian tomato stuck onto his face. His already gravelly voice sounded more and more like the grinding of a cement mixer with each passing hour. And he must be feeling as bad as he looked, if his temperament was any indication. Always a little gruff, today he was downright snappish.
“How’s the soup?” she asked brightly. “I know, I’ll make you some orange juice—” She started to get up, but Amos slapped his hand down on the tabletop.
“Victoria!”
“Yes?” she squeaked.
“Stop fussing. You’re making me feel like some senile, feeble old fool. I’d like to believe this angel-of-mercy routine of yours comes from your sincere concern for my welfare—”
“I am concerned.” She meant it. It scared her to see the ageless Professor Cullen looking suddenly like her grandfather.
“But you might not be quite so concerned if our chase trip weren’t starting tomorrow.”
Victoria settled back into her chair and propped her chin on her hand. “All right, yes, I do have an ulterior motive in seeing that you get well. I’m so antsy to get started on our trip, I can’t stand it. We already missed that F-3 storm up in Guyman.”
“And you’ll likely miss a few more before you retire your video camera.” Amos pushed his soup bowl aside. “Missy, I love a tornado as much as you, but if I leave this house anytime in the next week, it’ll be in a pine box. I’m an old man, and I’m sick. I can’t go chasing with you this time.” He shook his head sadly. “Not this time.”
Victoria sighed. “I’m sorry, Amo
s. Of course you can’t jump up from a sickbed and spend sixteen hours a day in a car for two weeks straight.” She was silent for a few moments as she thought about her options. “Maybe I could still switch my vacation.…”
“Now, missy, you don’t think I’d leave you high and dry, do you? I’ve taken the liberty of finding you a substitute chase partner.”
“What? Who?” she asked, automatically suspicious. She’d never considered chasing with anyone but Amos, a world-renowned tornado expert. His experience combined with his uncanny weather forecasting abilities, not to mention his impressive array of electronic gear, had always made her feel safe, even on those occasions when they came face-to-face with a killer storm. The idea of speeding around the countryside with anyone else gave her the heebie-jeebies.
“Now, hear me out. He’s not a meteorologist, but he’s had some experience with storms. He covered Hurricane Andrew for a South Carolina TV station, and, um, oh, yes, he was at that earthquake in Guatemala—”
“Oh, no! You aren’t by any chance referring to that crazy nephew of yours, are, you? What’s his name—Ro … Ro-Something?”
“It’s Roan, and he’s not crazy, just … adventurous.”
“He’s a loose cannon!” Victoria insisted. “I watched that video he sent, remember? Good grief, the man stood on a beach during an F-6 hurricane. He almost got blown to kingdom come. And those other stories you’ve told me! He nearly cooked himself alive when he broke through two police barricades to get closer to that volcano in Japan. And didn’t you tell me he almost got speared to death in Kenya when he photographed some elephant poachers?”
Amos actually chuckled. “ ‘Almost' is the key word.”
“I’m not spending two weeks with him,” she huffed.
“Now, missy, I’ve already invited him. He’s driving in from Mississippi today. He was participating in some rafting race, I believe.”
“Is there anything he hasn’t participated in?”
