by Cara Colter
I hope I don’t have to make her hate me too bad.
This was looking good, Ben thought, looking at the call display on his cell phone. Miss Beth Maple was calling him again. Two calls in two days.
Though maybe yesterday didn’t count, since his nephew had been missing. She was kind of obligated to call about something like that.
But even she couldn’t have two emergencies in two days.
He hoped she was calling to tell him about the bubble bath. Though the thought of her telling him such a thing made him want to laugh out loud, because it would be so impossibly not her. Delightful, though, if you were the one she decided to let down her hair for.
Because there was definitely something about her, just beneath the surface. It was as if, as uptight as she seemed to be, she just hadn’t had the right guy help her unlock her secrets. He thought of the line of her lips, wondered what it would be like to taste them, and then found he was the one to feel kind of flustered, like he was blushing, which was impossible. No one who spent eight years in the marines had anything like a blush left in them.
Unless what she had, innocence, was contagious.
And why did that make him feel oddly wistful, as if a man could ever be returned to what he had been before?
The truth was that Ben Anderson had had his fill of hard times and heartaches: his parents had died when he was young; he had lost his sister long before a doctor had told him she was going to die; he’d buried men he had shared a brotherhood with.
He could not ever be what he had been before. He could not get back the man who was unguarded, open to life. Long ago, he could remember being a young boy, Kyle’s age, and every day ended with the words “I love you” to his mom and dad.
He could not be that again.
A memory, unbidden, came to him. His mother getting in the car, blowing him a kiss, and mouthing the words “I love you” because at seventeen he didn’t want them broadcasted down the street.
Ben had not said those words since then, not ever. Was it insane to see them as a harbinger to disaster, to loss? He did not consider himself a superstitious man, but in this instance he was.
“Hello?” he said, aware that something cautious had entered his tone. He was not what she needed.
He was probably not what any woman needed. Damaged. Commitment-phobic.
“There were problems again today at school,” she said wearily.
Considering he had just decided he was not what any woman needed, Ben was inordinately pleased that she had phoned to tell him about her problems! Nice. She probably had a little ache right between her shoulder blades, that he could—
“Kyle put glue on Casper’s seat during recess. Not like the kind of glue we use at school for making fall leaves. I’ve never seen glue like that before.”
Construction-site glue, Ben guessed, amazingly glum she wasn’t phoning to share her problems with him. No, this was all about his problem.
“Casper stuck to the chair. And then he panicked and ripped the seat out of his pants when he tried to get out of the chair.” There was a strangled sound from her end of the phone.
“Are you laughing?” he asked.
“No.” It was a squeak.
“I think you are.”
Silence, followed by a snort. And then another, muffled.
“Ah,” he said. He could picture her, on the other end of the phone, holding back her laughter, trying desperately to play the role of the strict schoolmarm. He wished he was there to see the light in her eyes. He bet her nose crinkled when she laughed.
After a long time, struggling, she said, “There has to be a consequence. And he can never, ever guess I laughed.”
“Oh,” he teased, “a secret between us. This is even better than I could have hoped.”
“If you could be mature, I thought we should talk about the consequence together,” she said, her voice all grade-five schoolmistress again.
“I’ve always thought maturity was a good way to take all the fun out of life, but I will try, just for you.”
“I hope you didn’t suggest the glue to him!”
The truth was he might have, but his and Kyle’s relationship had not progressed to sharing ideas for dealing with the class bully. He decided it was not in his best interest to share that with Miss Maple.
“We have to be on the same page.” Sternly.
“Grown-ups against kids. Got it.”
Silence. “I wasn’t thinking of it that way. As if it’s a war.”
“A football game, then?”
“It’s not really about winning and losing,” she said carefully. “It’s about finding what motivates Kyle. The class has a swim day coming up. I was going to suggest Kyle not be allowed to go. I hope that doesn’t seem too harsh.”
“No less than what he deserves. I’ll let him know.”
“Thank you.” And then, hesitating, “You won’t tell him—”
“That you laughed? No. I’ll keep that to myself. Treasure it. It’s something no grade-five boy needs to know about his teacher.”
“Thank you for your cooperation,” she said formally, and hung up the phone.
Ben went and found Kyle. He didn’t have to look far. Kyle was in his room, the music booming. He was trying to get his frog to eat dead flies.
“Ah, Miss Maple just called. I heard about what you did to Casper.”
“They can’t prove it was me.”
“Yeah, well, you’re not going on the class swim trip that’s coming up because of it.”
“Boo-hoo,” Kyle said, insincerely. Unless Ben was mistaken, rather than seeing his absence on the class trip as a punishment, Kyle was gleeful about it!
Unremorseful, Kyle went back to feeding his frog. Its long tongue snaked out, and the fly he had thrown in was grabbed from the air and disappeared.
“Wow,” Kyle said. “Was that the coolest thing ever?”
Ben thought it was the first time he’d ever seen his nephew look truly happy. Silly to want to call Miss Maple back and tell her about it. Ridiculous to want to hear her laugh again.
If he wanted to hear laughter, he just had to turn on the television.
Except he didn’t have one anymore. It was in Kyle’s room. And besides, listening to a laugh track was going to seem strangely empty after hearing her trying to choke back her chortles.
“Wanna go for ice cream?” he asked Kyle. Too late, he realized he was letting down the home team. Since swimming had been no kind of consequence at all, he probably shouldn’t be taking Kyle for ice cream. It was almost like saying, Go ahead. Glue Casper to his seat. I think its funny.
Which, come to think of it, he did.
“Ripped the whole seat out of his pants?” he asked Kyle as they walked down to Friendly’s, the best ice cream store in Cranberry Corners.
“Yeah, and he had on blue underwear with cowboys on it.”
“Oh, baby underwear.”
And then he and his nephew were laughing, and despite the fact he was letting down the home team, Ben wouldn’t have traded that moment for the whole wide world.
She phoned again the following night.
“I think he was very upset about the swimming being canceled,” she confided in Ben. “Everybody else was talking about it all day, especially Casper. And he was left out.”
Ben remembered Kyle’s gleeful boo-hoo.
“He didn’t even try to do the class assignment, but I’m remiss to punish him again so soon. Just to punish him will make him feel defeated,” she told him. “You have to reward him when he does good things.”
“Look, the only thing he does around here is feed his frog. I can’t exactly reward him for that.”
“I think rewarding him for being responsible for his pet would be good!”
Ben mulled that over. “Okay. I’m going to take him for ice cream.” He hesitated. “Want to come?”
She hesitated, too. “I shouldn’t.”
“Why not? We’re on the same team, right?
I bet you like vanilla.”
“That makes me sound dull.”
“Surprise me, then.”
And she did surprise him, for showing up at all, and for showing up on her bicycle with her hair down, surprisingly long, past her shoulders, her lovely cheeks pink from exertion.
“I didn’t know teachers wore shorts,” Kyle said, spotting her first. He frowned. “That should be against the law.”
Ben agreed. Even though Beth’s shorts would be considered very conservative, ending just above her knee, her legs could cause traffic accidents! They were absolutely gorgeous.
“What’s she doing here?” Kyle asked as she came toward them.
“She’s going to have ice cream with us.”
“Oh,” Kyle said, “you invited her.” He did not sound pleased. He did not sound even a little bit pleased, but what eleven-year-old wanted to have ice cream with his teacher?
She wouldn’t let Ben order for her or pay for her, but he watched closely all the same. When she joined them at a small table outside, she had ordered some hellish looking mix of orange and black.
“Tiger,” she informed Ben. Then she went on to prove that she could more than surprise him. Who would have guessed that watching that prim little schoolmarm licking an ice cream cone could be the most excruciatingly sensual experience of a somewhat experienced guy’s life? When a blob of the quickly melting brackish material fell on her naked thigh, he thought there wasn’t enough ice cream in the world to cool down the heat inside of him.
He leaped to his feet, consulted his watch with an astounded frown. “Kyle and I have to go,” he announced. “School night. That homework thing.”
She should have looked pleased that he was being such a responsible guardian. She would have looked pleased to know he was going if she knew what he was thinking about her thighs. And ice cream. In the same sentence.
He’d annoyed her. Actually, he thought she was more than annoyed. Mad. He didn’t blame her. He’d invited her for ice cream and then ditched her. She might never know how noble his departure had been. It had been for the protection of both of them.
Kyle seemed mad at him, too. When Ben pressed him about his homework, Kyle said, as regally as a prince who did not toil with the peasants, “I don’t do homework.”
And instead of thinking of some clever consequence, to go with the plan, Ben said, “Well, fail grade five then. See if I care.”
Ben Anderson wished his life could go back to being what it had been such a short while ago. Frozen dinners. Guy nights. A home gym in the spare bedroom.
And at the same time he wished it, he missed it when she didn’t call him the next night, or the one after that, either. That either meant the plan was working, or she was giving up.
Or that his foolish mixing of her professional life with her personal one had left her nearly as confused as it had left him. He doubted he’d been forgiven for leaving her in the lurch with her tiger ice cream. Now she had probably vowed not to speak to Ben Anderson again unless Kyle turned her world upside down.
Should he phone her? And tell her he rewarded Kyle every night for feeding and caring for his frog, trying to make up for the fifth-grade-failure comment. But the reward was ice cream, and Ben didn’t think it would be a very good idea to mention ice cream around her for a while.
Besides, after that shared moment of camaraderie over Casper’s unfortunate choice of underwear, Kyle had retreated into a sullen silence.
After a week of trying out excuses in his head to phone her, and discarding each one as more lame than the last, the decision was taken out of Ben’s hands.
The school’s number came up on his cell phone’s display. He knew it could be anyone. The principal, the nurse, Kyle himself. But he also knew it was telling him something important that he hoped it was Beth.
And then was reminded to be careful what he hoped for!
He had to hold the phone away—way away—from his ear. Kyle had been right about one thing. She did have kind of a screechy voice—when she was upset, and she was very upset.
She finally paused for breath, a hiccupping sound that made him wonder if she was crying. He did not want to think of Beth Maple crying.
“Let me get this straight,” he said uneasily. “While you took the class swimming, somebody took a nail and scratched my company name in the side of your car? Are you kidding me?”
He didn’t know why he said that because it was more than obvious she wasn’t kidding. He groaned when she told him what else was scratched in there.
“It sucks to be you.” And of course, Kyle had not been swimming.
“I’ll be there as soon as I can,” he said, and hung up the phone. It occurred to him it was totally inappropriate to be whistling. Totally inappropriate to feel happy that he was going to be seeing her again so soon.
She might be able to make eating ice cream look like something out of the Kama Sutra, but he had just been screeched at! He had already deduced he was not the kind of man who could give a woman like that one thing she needed.
Except she did need to be kissed. He could tell by the way she ate ice cream! And he had it on good authority he was very good at that.
But it was not the thought of kissing her that made him happy, because obviously kissing a woman like that would make his life rife with complications that it did not currently have.
As if an eleven-year-old boy armed with a nail was not enough of a complication for him at the moment.
What seemed to be causing the renegade happiness was the thought of the look on her face a long time ago when he had told her about swimming in the dark: a moment of unguarded wonder and yearning, before she had quickly masked whatever she was feeling.
He wanted to make her look like that again.
He supposed it was a guy thing. A challenge.
He reminded himself sternly that his big challenge right now was the person who was vandalizing people’s cars.
It was a big deal. A terrible thing for Kyle to have done. A betrayal of the teacher who had been nothing but good to him.
But Ben Anderson still whistled all the way to the school.
Beth Maple’s car was about the cutest thing he had ever seen, a perfectly refurbished 1964 Volkswagen Beetle convertible, finished in candy-apple red. The car was kind of like her—sweet and understated, with the surprise element of the candy-apple red, and the unexpected sexiness of a convertible top.
Unfortunately, the car was marred right now. On the driver’s side door someone had scratched “THE GARDEN OF WEDDING,” an unfortunate misspelling of the name of Ben’s business. Like most confirmed bachelors, he did not like weddings. He had never noticed before how close to the word wedding that weedin’ was.
He was startled and horrified that even being in the near vicinity of that word and Beth at the same time, he could picture her as a bride, gliding down an aisle in a sea of virginal white.
Was she a virgin?
He could feel his face getting red, so he frowned hard at the words scratched in the side of her car. What the hell was going on with him? His self-control was legendary, and yet here were these renegade thoughts, just exploding in his mind without warning, as though he had stepped on a land mine. First the naughty thoughts around ice cream and now this.
“There’s more,” she said.
Yeah, there was, because as hard as he was trying to crowd out the picture of her in a wedding dress from his mind, not to mention that terrible none-of-your-business question, once you had allowed your mind to go somewhere like that, it was very hard to corral the wayward thoughts.
He slid a glance at her face, her smooth forehead marred by a frown, distress in her eyes, as if this was the very worst thing that had ever happened to her.
He would guess she had lived a sheltered life.
He followed her around to the passenger side, looked where she pointed. In smaller letters, lower case, was scratched deep into that candy-apple red paint “it sucks to be you.”
Ben glanced at Beth Maple again. The teacher was looking distressed and pale, as if she was hanging on by a thread and the slightest thing would make her burst into tears.
Which was something Ben Anderson did not want to see at all. The wedding thoughts and the question were about as much stress as he wanted for one day. A woman like that, in tears, could be his undoing. It could make a man feel all big and strong and protective. He didn’t want to feel like that. He was as unsuited to the role of riding in on his charger to rescue the damsel in distress as he was to the role of standing at the top of that aisle, waiting…
And reacting to tears moved a man toward emotional involvement, and as challenging as he found the prim schoolteacher, he wanted to play with her, that delicious wonderful exhilarating man/woman game where you parted with a kiss and no hard feelings when it was all over.
He did not want to play the game that ended with white dresses, no matter how lovely that vision might be.
He slid a look at her and wondered when he had become so imaginative. Today she was wearing a white sweater and a black skirt and a lavender blouse with lace on it.
Not an outfit that should make a man think of weddings or virginity. Or of bubble baths or swimming in dark ocean waters. At all.
But that is where his unruly male mind went nonetheless.
Her hair was still wet from the class trip, and he wondered what she had worn at the pool. A one-piece, he decided. Matching shorts, that she probably hadn’t taken off. Not what she would wear for a midnight swim with him.
He had the sudden, disturbing thought that it might not be exactly ethical to play with Miss Maple. She wasn’t the kind of woman who understood the rules he played by. The thought was disturbing because he did not think thoughts like that. She was an adult. He was an adult. Couldn’t they just dance around each other a bit and see where it went?
No. It was a whisper. His conscience? Or maybe his bachelor survival instincts. Beware of women who make you think of weddings.