Along Came Trouble: A Loveswept Contemporary Romance

by Ruthie Knox

  No, you can’t go to Homecoming, you’ll be tired for your audition.

  College is fine for Ellen—she doesn’t have a career to think about. You have so much lost time to make up for! You need to focus, Jamie.

  He didn’t blame his mother. He’d wanted all of this once—the fame, the concerts, the fans. The girls.

  It was only lately that he’d begun to chafe at what it did to his freedom, the way it turned every opportunity into a Let me check my schedule or I’ll have my assistant get back to you, until he couldn’t even walk out to the car and fly to Ohio to be with the woman he loved—the only woman he’d ever loved, besides his mother and his sister—without being trailed by his manager and reminded, several times, You have a show.

  “Cancel the show,” he’d said to Christina, and her eyes had gone so wide, he’d thought they might pop out.

  “You can’t do that. They’ve sold all the tickets, and—”

  He’d gone off on her then. “I don’t care! Jesus, everybody else cancels when they have a sore throat. I’m thirty years old, and I’ve never canceled a show. I’ve gone onstage with the flu. I went onstage the day after my mom died. I’m not doing it anymore. I don’t care what you tell them. I don’t care what it costs me. I don’t even care if I never sing again. I’m leaving. Cancel the fucking show.”

  Superstar temper tantrum. His first, and he hoped his last. Poor Christina hadn’t deserved the rant, but at least she’d stopped following him.

  He’d kept walking, noticing how heavy his bag was and wondering when he last had to carry it for himself. Sweat plastered his shirt to his back, the cars zoomed by on the busy urban road, and eventually he found Ryan’s number in his phone. Christina must have programmed it in. Somebody had.

  “Can I get you something to drink, Mr. Callahan?”

  “No, thanks.” The flight attendant was new. Younger than him, tall and leggy, wearing a skimpy, retro-style uniform that somebody must have picked out thinking he’d like it. He spent his life surrounded by people who did things the way they thought he’d like them, and all he wanted was Carly, who didn’t give much of a damn what he liked.

  Carly, who made him laugh. Who picked on his clothes, thought his albums were crap, and had told him the first time he played the piano for her that a talented guy like him shouldn’t be wasting his time on pop music.

  Carly, who wanted to be tough but who purred like a cat when he held her and ran his fingers through her hair. The sort of woman who’d rather face down a horde of Vikings than admit publicly to any sort of vulnerability.

  But when they were alone together, she was vulnerable. They both were.

  Carly had become his refuge, his haven. He’d fallen for her without even knowing it was happening. He’d been a brat about the press, a spoiled fucking kid, and when she’d told him to go, he’d walked out without understanding how shamelessly he’d used her.

  Carly and the baby. Ellen said they needed him now. He couldn’t imagine what possible use he would be, but whatever he had to offer her, he was going to be there to offer it. Because he needed them.

  “Just let me know when we’re about to land,” he said. “I’m good for the flight.”

  “Of course, Mr. Callahan.” She smiled, toothy and naive, and sashayed toward the front.

  She probably had a demo in her purse, a CD or a flash drive with a song she just knew would be a hit. Unless she wanted to sleep with him. Or both.

  Most everybody wanted something—everybody but his sister, who’d only ever wanted him to be a good brother and a better uncle. And Carly, who’d wanted him to be a man.

  He’d let her down. She thought he was the kind of guy who didn’t stick—a toy. And she was right. That was the only kind of guy he’d ever been.

  The jet’s engines powered up. Frigid air began pouring from the vents, so cold he could see it. According to Ryan, it was 104 degrees out there. Pointlessly hot. Not the hottest place Ryan had ever been, though. Turned out his driver had done two tours in Iraq. He had a wife and a baby back home in Oakland, and he hoped to quit driving and operate his own limo service someday.

  Jamie had asked Ryan a lot of questions on the drive out to the airport, and Ryan seemed surprised at first, pleased, as if Jamie were bestowing a favor on him instead of the other way around.

  Don’t think that way, Jamie wanted to tell him. I’m nothing special. Barely worth talking to.

  But he was going to figure out how to be different. He was going to learn how to stick, how to be who Carly and the baby needed.

  His life so far had been a matter of setting and meeting the wrong goals, one right after the next.

  Winning Carly back was the first worthy goal he’d ever had.

  Chapter Eighteen

  When Ellen had sent Caleb the text about chocolate sauce, she’d been imagining a scenario like that morning’s: he would show up in her doorway with a bottle of Hershey’s syrup dangling from his fingers, and with one hot look, he’d liquefy her female bits.

  Maybe she would walk backward toward her bedroom, pulling her T-shirt over her head and discarding her shorts along the way. Maybe he would lock up and prowl down the hallway after her, shedding his clothes with a lazy grace that made her wet.

  Wetter, anyway. She’d been wet since breakfast.

  So it was a bit of a letdown when she heard the doorbell and walked as seductively as she could to the front door, only to find him leaning his forehead against the jamb with his eyes closed, looking like someone had just asked him to shoot Old Yeller.

  “What’s the matter with you?” she asked.

  “Nothing fourteen hours of sleep won’t fix.”

  “Another long day?”

  “You have no idea.”

  “Come on in.” She opened the door and noticed the bag of groceries under his arm. “Did you buy all the chocolate syrup in the store?”

  “I bought ice cream,” he said. “I wasn’t sure what you liked, so I got options.”

  He unpacked the cartons on the kitchen counter. Cherry Garcia, vanilla, double-fudge chocolate, sprinkles, Magic Shell, jars of caramel and hot fudge, and a big bottle of Hershey’s syrup. Plus a bag of chips and a six-pack of beer.

  “What’s that?” she asked, pointing to the beer.

  “In case I get thirsty.”

  “You want me to keep your beer in my fridge?”

  “I was hoping.”

  “And your chips in my cabinet?”

  “In case I get hungry after.”

  “After the beer?”

  He lifted his eyebrows.

  “Didn’t I just meet you a couple days ago?” she asked.

  “Yeah, and look how well we’re getting along. We’ll be married by the weekend.” He flashed her a winning, if slightly weary, smile.

  Ellen rolled her eyes and stomped, stomped, stomped on the tiny fluttering, leaping thing in her chest. “You know, you don’t actually have to try this hard to impress me. I already slept with you twice.”

  “I know, but we skipped all the early dates, and I could really use one of those third-date neck massages.”

  “The kind where we watch a movie and then I move back behind you on the couch and rub your shoulders, and you offer to take off your shirt to make it easier, and then before we know quite what happened, we’re making out?”

  “Exactly. But don’t skimp on the massaging. I have to be seduced slowly, like I don’t really want it.”

  “I think you’ve got our roles reversed.”

  Caleb flashed her another smile. “Do I?”

  “You know, you could just ask me for a massage.” She pried the lid off the vanilla ice cream.

  He shook his head. “I swear, Ellen, it’s like you don’t want to be courted.”

  “Right. I don’t want to be courted.”

  When she bent over the silverware drawer for a spoon, he leaned in close and put his mouth behind her ear. “Suck it up. If you want chocolate sauce drizzled all over your nether
regions and licked off, you have to watch the news and flirt awkwardly with me first.”

  Ellen straightened, savoring the molten blush his words ignited. “Fine. But only because I’m going to have a sundae.”

  He brushed his lips over the pulse at the base of her throat. “That’s my girl.”

  Then he kissed her, and she got so distracted by the taste and feel and smell of him, she didn’t remember to say “I’m not your girl” until he’d already walked into the living room.

  “You want a sundae?” she called after him.

  “No, thanks. Nana fed me plenty of junk already.”

  When she made it to the living room, he was already watching the news. If you could call it that. A red-faced pundit pounded on his desk and made snide remarks about people just like her, and Ellen gave up counting how many repellent opinions he’d expressed after the first few minutes. She kept sneaking sidelong glances at Caleb, trying to gauge how much of the rant he agreed with.

  “Quit looking at me like that,” he said.

  “I’m not. Like what?”

  “Like I eat babies.”

  “It’s just …” She wondered how to put it. “This isn’t the news I usually watch.”

  “There’s a shocker.”

  “It doesn’t matter,” she said hastily.

  “Oh?” He didn’t take his eyes off the screen. “I’d expect you to have opinions on this kind of thing.”

  She did have opinions. Health care reform, feminism, global warming, the economy, unions, affirmative action—she’d developed a lifetime’s worth of opinions in the last few years, and sure, they were a lot like the opinions she’d had before, with Richard, but she cherished all of them now, because this time they belonged to no one but her.

  If Caleb’s taste in news programming was any indication, he didn’t share any of them. But that wasn’t the part that worried her. What worried her was that she had a distressingly urgent desire to find out what he thought. To measure the size of the gulf between their views of the world.

  And what would the purpose of that be, if not to determine whether it was bridgeable?

  No bridges, she admonished herself. Caleb wasn’t her boyfriend, and she wasn’t planning to marry him, so it emphatically did not matter if it turned out that they had next to nothing in common.

  “It doesn’t matter,” she repeated aloud.

  “You think this guy is full of shit.” Caleb said it cheerfully, as if the knowledge delighted him.

  “Can we watch the Bogart movie, do you think?”

  “What if I don’t like Bogart?”

  “Oh, don’t. You have to like Bogart.”

  His lips curved into a wry approximation of a smile, and he reached out to squeeze her knee. “I like Bogart. And I don’t agree with everything dick-for-brains here has to say, either.”

  Ellen looked at her bowl. She found a hitherto unnoticed pocket of hot fudge and smiled. At the fudge. Not in relief.

  “But I do agree with some of it,” Caleb added nonchalantly. “Feel free to ask me which parts.”

  “I’m not asking you any questions,” Ellen said. “I don’t want to know. You’re a slab of beef to me, Clark. A bit of stuff.”

  He chuckled and stole the spoon from her fingers. After bending over the bowl to fish a cherry from the melted ice cream at the bottom, he looked up. His face was slightly below hers, drawing her attention to how thick and dark his eyelashes were. Eyelashes like that should have been wasted on a man, but they weren’t wasted on Caleb. He gazed at her and ate the cherry. His eyelashes made the fluttery thing in her heart beat its frantic little wings.

  His eyelashes. Not the warm compassion in his eyes.

  “You do, though,” he said quietly. “You wish you didn’t want to know, but you do.”

  Ellen fixed her gaze on the screen. “Look at that guy’s tie,” she said. “It’s an abomination.”

  Caleb replaced the spoon and retreated to his spot on the couch. “You’re right. You can rest assured that I’d never wear a tie like that.”

  He found her hand and covered it with his own, and Ellen went somewhere in her head where she heard the clink of her spoon against the ceramic ice-cream bowl and felt the cold sweetness dissolve in her mouth. Where the droning of the newscaster’s voice blended with the bold, aggressive images on the screen and the feel of Caleb’s body nearby.

  She went somewhere in her head where she could just be with him, and nothing else mattered very much at all.

  A commercial came on, and he turned to look at her. Before she could even think about it, the question popped out of her mouth. “Who’s your favorite president?”

  “Eisenhower.” No hesitation.

  She had to close her eyes for a second. “It can’t be. No one’s favorite president is Eisenhower.”

  “Mine is. Who’s yours?”

  “Lincoln.”

  “Really? I’d have pegged you for an FDR woman.”

  Ellen made a pfffft noise. “He tried to pack the Supreme Court. No respect for the law. What could anyone possibly like about Eisenhower?”

  “Great general. And he gave that speech warning about the military-industrial complex.”

  “That was a good speech.”

  “Damn straight.”

  “You know you were part of the military-industrial complex, right?”

  Caleb chuckled. “Yep. And you just can’t decide what to think about that.” He spread his arms along the back of the couch and put his sock-clad feet up on the coffee table, and the news came back on. When she’d finished her sundae and set the bowl down on the table, he pulled her against his side before she could even start worrying about where she should settle.

  A let’s-panic-about-choking-hazards segment came on. “You asked me a personal question,” Caleb observed in a low voice.

  “Politics aren’t personal,” she lied.

  “The personal is political. Or so I’ve heard.”

  Ellen elbowed him in the ribs, and he smiled and pulled her back down, half on top of him this time.

  As the so-called news ended and the post-news parade of even more offensive fatheads began, she started to worry that she was enjoying herself too much. Not the politics, but the whole couch-sharing, TV-watching, ice-cream-eating domesticity of the evening he’d created for them. It didn’t violate their contract, but they were definitely becalmed in a gray area here. Had he charted this all out? Had he planned on unsettling her, or was it just the inevitable result of their different priorities for this nonrelationship of theirs?

  She sank lower until she was more or less lying with her cheek against his stomach.

  “This doesn’t bode well for my massage,” Caleb said.

  “Why not?”

  “You’re going to fall asleep there.”

  “No, I won’t.” She pulled the elastic out of her ponytail and let out a contented sigh.

  “You so will. Especially if I play with your hair, which clearly you’re dying for me to do. Girls always fall asleep when you play with their hair.”

  “I’m not like most girls. I was going to strip naked as soon as you walked in the door,” she said, and then yawned.

  “Really? And look at you now. Cuddling and everything.”

  “We’re not cuddling.”

  “All right, Ellen. We’re not cuddling.”

  His fingers sifted through the strands of her hair, arranging, untangling. They brushed her scalp here and there in tiny, soothing movements. Her eyes drifted closed.

  “See, I told you,” he said.

  “Shh,” she whispered. “Shh.”

  As she listened to arrogant ideologues say things she didn’t agree with, she basked in the sensation of Caleb’s fingers raking over her scalp. The last conscious thought she had before she drifted off was that she could get used to being spoiled like this.

  She could get used to Caleb.

  She awoke to the feeling of Caleb vibrating with laughter, his taut stomach bouncin
g beneath her cheek. Ellen sat up, bleary and slightly disoriented.

  “Sorry,” he said. He was grinning like a loon. “This show cracks me up.”

  Ellen turned to see Jon Stewart on the screen. The opening monologue of The Daily Show. “Oh, I like it, too.”

  “How about that? We have something in common besides our favorite sexual position.”

  “You don’t know my favorite position,” she said defensively.

  “Not yet. But whatever it is, I’m sure when I figure it out, it’s going to be my new favorite.”

  She wrinkled her nose, and he leaned sideways and bumped her with his shoulder in a friendly way. They watched The Daily Show for a while, and Ellen began to wonder what exactly they were doing. Weren’t they supposed to have sex? It was getting late—she usually didn’t stay up late enough to catch Jon Stewart, which was a shame, because he was a fox—and she didn’t quite know what to do with Caleb. Send him home? Climb into his lap?

  Meaningless sex sounded so much simpler in theory than it was turning out to be in reality.

  She went to the kitchen for a glass of water. When she came back, Caleb had taken off his dress shirt and slid forward several inches. “How about that neck massage you owe me?”

  “Are you going to take off your T-shirt, too?”

  “Nah, I can’t do that until you massage around the neckline for a minute. Then after you’ve run your fingers about as far under as you can get them, I’ll nervously suggest it might work better with my shirt off.”

  “You’re a stickler for the rules.”

  “I am.” He smiled. So easy with the smiles, this man. She’d never known a man who smiled so much, and it warmed her to her toes each time he did it. He was infectious, and infectious was dangerous for a woman like her—a woman who’d been quarantining herself in the house, holding fast to all the routines that inoculated her against disaster.

  On the other hand, if Caleb was a virus, she’d already caught him.

  Ellen crawled into her spot behind him, straddling his back with her thighs, and laid her hands on his neck. “You don’t have any muscles here,” she said. “Just concrete.”

  “Do your best.”

  So she did. After ten minutes or so, Caleb ventured to say that he should probably take off his shirt, and she approved. His shoulders and neck began to warm and loosen beneath her fingers. Another ten minutes and the quiet pulse of her arousal became more insistent, the dial turning up with every small movement of his back against her stomach, every quiet, completely-not-sexual moan she coaxed out of his mouth with her punishing touch. She could barely see the TV over his shoulder, but she didn’t mind. All her attention was concentrated on the column of muscle bordering the knobs of his spine, the tiny radiating lines she made with her thumbs on his lower back, the trail of bronze skin that turned pink from increased circulation as she left it behind and turned her attention to a new area.