Along Came Trouble: A Loveswept Contemporary Romance Read Free

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 at 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.