Along Came Trouble (Camelot 2)

But he knew the answer to that question, or at least some of it. Ellen wasn’t bored and ornery, like Carly. She had a chip on her shoulder about her house approximately the size of Texas, and Caleb didn’t think it had much to do with him, or even with the situation. He was merely the one who had to deal with it.

“Did Ellen tell you what her problem is with security?”

“Nope. Is she giving you a hard time?”

“Her default position is ‘Bite me.’ ”

Carly piled slices of salami on top of the Muenster cheese she’d started with. She made odd sandwiches, but they were usually good. “Ellen likes to do everything herself,” she said with approval.

“A one-woman island, huh?”

“Pretty much. She’s good at it, but she juggles a lot. I’m not sure she ever sits down and rests.”

Caleb had seen her rest. She’d seemed like a natural. Just how unusual had that hour on the porch last night been?

He worked the cylinder of the old lock free and dropped it to the floor. “Who was she talking to downtown?”

“Richard.”

“Her ex?”

“Yeah.”

That explained the touching. And the antagonism. “What’s he like?”

Carly gave him an inscrutable look. “He tried to pick me up at the pub once. I’d say he’s smooth as Scotch on the rocks, if you have a thing for good-looking guys whose pickup lines are all from John Donne.”

“Who?”

“A poet.” She gave the plate on the countertop a small, private smile. “You don’t need to worry about Richard.”

“Quit mocking me, Shrimp Boat. I’m not worrying about Richard. Not like you think, anyway. What I meant was, is he dangerous?”

“I know what you meant. You’re checking out the competition.”

Caleb reached for the new cylinder, wondering if that was what he’d been doing. And whether Richard Morrow was any kind of competition. “Checking out her ex is part of the job. There’s nothing between me and Ellen.”

Carly rolled her eyes. “Try again. I know what ‘nothing’ looks like on you. This is not nothing. You’re interested.”

“What’s going on with you and her brother?”

“Clumsy as ever on the misdirect, Killer, but I give you points for trying. Tell you what. I’ll go first, but then it’s your turn. Deal?”

It might help to get Carly’s opinion on the Ellen situation. He wasn’t doing such a stellar job of managing it on his own. “Deal.”

She started adding a layer of pickles to the sandwiches. “Ellen introduced us. It was your typical fairy-tale deal. He was Prince Charming. I was Cinderella. I gave him a tour of the house. I had sex with him in the laundry room, like, forty minutes after we met.”

Impulsivity had always been part of Carly’s appeal. And her Achilles’ heel.

“I fell for him. I thought … I don’t know. I was stupid. The whole thing seemed romantic. Maybe it was the pregnancy hormones. We had a few good months, on again, off again. But then that picture turned up online, and he got really upset. When they found my blog, it was like he really thought about the situation we were in for the first time, and he tried to take it out on me. Like it was my fault.”

She put down the pickles and gripped the edge of the countertop hard enough to turn her knuckles white. For half a second she met his eyes, and he was shocked by the raw pain he saw there.

Then she starting slicing a tomato, and Caleb pretended not to notice she was struggling not to cry. She wouldn’t want a hug or kind words from him right now. Carly didn’t do sentimental.

“What blog?”

“It’s nothing, just part of this infertility community thing. I made friends on there. We write about … you know, everything. Sometimes when people lose babies, it’s good therapy, but most of the time we just talk about mundane stuff. Joke around. It’s like a support group. And I never used his name. I didn’t know this was going to happen. I’ve never—”