At ten, Nana informed him Carly had called him “rather a lot of awful things” and still wasn’t too keen on talking to him.
She steered hi
m toward a chair on the corner of the deck, seemingly oblivious to the cameras flashing, and fed him warm shortbread and a glass of milk. “Do you have a plan?” she asked. “Because I’m starting to think maybe you’re not too bright.”
“Sorry?”
“Well, that’s just it, isn’t it? What are you sorry about? You come all this way from Los Angeles, and you want to see Carly. Who wouldn’t? She’s a very sweet girl. But you can’t just expect her to take you back. You have to win her over. What’s your strategy?”
“I—I guess I thought I’d talk to her, and we could figure it out together.”
Nana shook her head, terribly disappointed. “That’s never going to work. She’ll cut you to pieces.” She patted him on the knee. “You go back to your sister’s house and come up with something. I’ll see you in an hour.”
When she went back in the house, he heard Carly through the open door. “—tell him to take his sorry ass back to L.A. where he can bonk brainless supermodels, and then I’ll—”
Just hearing her voice fired him up. He loved that woman. Maybe he’d been a little stupid about her, but he’d never been in love before, so it had taken him a while to get with the program.
He was entirely with the program now. He just needed a plan.
At eleven, he brought her flowers. He’d had to pick them from Ellen’s garden, which she probably wouldn’t have been pleased about if he’d told her, but she was way too preoccupied with staring out the windows and muttering to pay attention to him. He found a vase under the kitchen sink, arranged the stems as best he could, and carried them over to Carly’s.
Nana took one look at the flowers, pursed her lips, and said, “You’re really not very good at this, are you?”
Screwing up his courage, he said, “Tell her I love her.”
Nana plucked the flowers out of his hands. As she shut the door in his face with a wink, he heard Carly shout, “Tell him he can go to hell!”
He smiled. He was going to marry that woman.
At eleven thirty, his PR guy called and basically forbade him to continue walking over to Carly’s. All the gossip sites were running pictures of him at her front door. The suits said it made him look helpless.
He wasn’t helpless; he was in love. He hung up on the PR guy and grabbed Ellen by the arm, pulling her away from the window. “You have to teach me how to cook,” he said.
At twelve, he took grilled cheese sandwiches and tomato soup over on a tray. It had been the only thing Ellen could show him how to make in half an hour. Cooking turned out to be both difficult and time consuming, which was, of course, why he’d avoided it all these years.
Nana opened the note he’d put on the tray. He’d written out the lyrics to a song about Carly that he’d been working on back in L.A. He had a whole album’s worth of songs about her.
With a smile and a shake of her head, Nana shut the door.
At twelve thirty, Carly reactivated her blog and posted a single sentence: “Jamie Callahan has a pencil dick.”
At one o’clock, the news crews started to arrive. He called a press conference for two.
Chapter Twenty-two
Ellen ate a late lunch on the back patio and tried not to be grateful for the fence.
It was hideous. Big and blue and hideous.
It was also keeping about a hundred people with cameras out of her face so she could sit here in the sun and go over Aimee Dawson’s latest round of contract revisions in peace.
She’d spent a good part of the morning watching the construction workers out the window and thinking murderous thoughts, but her supply of murderous thoughts turned out to be sadly limited. Also, her sense of fairness had forced her to admit that Jamie carried at least half the responsibility for the fence. Maybe 75 percent. As much as she hated it, Caleb was just doing his job.
Before she knew quite how it had happened, she’d started musing about him in a decidedly nonmurderous fashion.
He just looked so damn good out there. So commanding and sexy with his shirtsleeves rolled up—green shirt today, yum—directing traffic, issuing stern warnings when the people gathered by the barricade got out of line. Barking orders into his phone.
Mr. Military again. When he did the Sergeant Clark thing, she had no defenses against him. It made her want to rip his shirt off and push him up against the side of the house and kiss him stupid.