It didn’t help that she knew how he’d smell up close. How his bare skin would be hot satin under her hands. She was furious with him, and yet the thought of never seeing Caleb naked again made her whimper.
The whole situation swamped her with a restless irritability she couldn’t seem to shake.
It was one of those days when the entire universe seemed to be conspiring against her need for Zen-like calm. And she really did need that calm on the weekends. It helped her compensate for the chaos of her Henry days.
Instead, she got Caleb waging a very sexy battle on her front lawn and Jamie calling a press conference to talk about Carly.
And could she just pause for a moment to contemplate the inanity of that? A press conference. To talk about Carly. Her brother had gone off the deep end, but he refused to discuss it except to say, “I know what I’m doing. Possibly for the first time in my life, I know exactly what I’m doing.”
To top it all off, there were an astonishing number of people standing out on Burgess Street staring through the gap in the fence toward her house, waiting for something interesting to happen.
The crowd had grown considerably since Jamie started his win-over-Carly project, especially after Carly called him a pencil dick on the Internet. Some of the people out there were locals who’d wandered over to see for themselves what the fuss was all about, but quite a few appeared to be professional photographers, newscasters, and cameramen. Whenever Jamie left the house, they turned into sharks after chum, pushing against the sawhorse barriers and shouting at him.
Sometimes, they broke loose and started running up the driveway, and then Caleb stopped them and handcuffed them and led them away. It was all pretty crazy.
But back here, she had a sanctuary. Courtesy of one ugly-ass fence and one bossy-ass man.
She sighed.
And then Richard came around the corner, escorted by a very pretty blond security guard, and Ellen wished she hadn’t already wasted her sigh. It would be handy to be able to sigh again. Naturally, Richard would show up again in the midst of all this other insanity. Her life had become a soap opera, and the commercial break had just ended. Time for another segment to ratchet up the dramatic tension.
“Mrs. Callahan?” the woman asked. “Mr. Morrow asked to be allowed to see you. He’s on the list, so I thought it should be okay, but Caleb said all guests are to be escorted.”
“It’s fine. You can leave him with me.” Might as well find out what he really wanted. If Richard was determined to make amends, her utter distaste for his company wouldn’t stop him.
“Thank you, Cassie.” Richard gave the blonde his most endearing smile. “I can find my way out when we’re finished here.”
Cassie smiled back, already besotted, and said, “You’re welcome. Check in with me before you leave, huh?”
“Of course.”
She departed with a rather more pronounced sway to her hips than the situation warranted.
A few women who looked like Cassie had turned up on the front porch over the years, asking for Professor Morrow. How crestfallen they’d been to find Ellen at the door.
She wondered how many of them he’d screwed in their bed. The first thing she’d done after kicking him out was buy a new headboard, a new mattress, and three new sets of sheets.
Richard settled into the cast-iron chair beside her and looked at the fence. “Nice addition.”
“It’s temporary.”
“I should hope so.”
“What do you want?”
It was Richard’s turn to sigh and scrub his hand over his face. Having shaved recently, he lo
oked slightly less haggard than he had the other day. He wore jeans and a white T-shirt, and he filled them out well enough. She could see the appeal if you had a thing for lying, cheating bastards.
For her part, she couldn’t really get past the leather vest. He wasn’t even wearing it, but it was like this ghost presence, teasing the corners of her mouth into a smile. Caleb had been so funny about the vest. Do chicks go for that woebegone poet crap?
The truth was, they did. But she didn’t. Not anymore.
Richard must have thought she intended the smile for him, because he smiled back and relaxed into the chair. “I want us back, Els. I miss you.”
“Oh, please.”
He leaned forward, about to touch her arm, then thought better of it. Instead, he put his elbows on his knees and gazed at her. “I mean it. You were the best thing that ever happened to me. You’re my lodestar, Els. I need you. I want us to be together, with Henry. To be a family.”