by Cara Colter
But there he was, sitting on his bike, glaring at them, looking pale and accusing. Ben jumped up, reached back for her and pulled her to her feet, put her behind him as if he was protecting her from the look on his nephew’s face.
“It wasn’t gross,” he said evenly, and something in the warrior cast of his face warned Kyle not to go further with his commentary, and Kyle didn’t.
Still, Beth could clearly see that Ben either regretted the kiss or regretted getting caught, and it was probably some combination of the two. Clearly, unlike Kyle’s bike ride, her flight was not going to be solo. And flying with someone who had doubts would be catastrophic. If the choice would be hers to make at all!
“There are some swans on the river down there,” Kyle said, obviously sharing his uncle’s eagerness to move away from that kiss. “I wanted you two to see them. They’re too pretty to see by yourself.”
And in that she heard wariness and longing, as if Kyle was showing them all how they felt about this relationship.
There were things too pretty about life to experience it all by yourself.
But trusting another person to share them with you was the scariest journey of all. Things could get wrecked by following a simple thing like a kiss to the mountaintop where it wanted to go.
It did feel like you could fly. But realistically, you could fall just as easily.
Kyle was only eleven and he already knew that.
Beth felt her first moment of fear since she had adopted the new her. Ben studiously ignored her as he got back on his bike and followed his nephew down the trail. She followed, even though part of her wanted to ride away from them, back home, to her nice safe place.
Funny it would be swans she thought, gazing at them moments later, the absolute beauty of jet black faces and gracefully curving white necks.
Funny they would be swans when she could feel herself beginning the transformation from ugly duckling. It was a transformation that was unsettling and uncertain.
And being unsettled and uncertain were the two things Beth Maple hated the most.
The Top-Secret Diary of Kyle O. Anderson
When I came down that bike path and saw my uncle and Miss Maple kissing, I felt sick to my stomach. I’ve seen my mom do this. Along comes the kissing part, and she’s looking for a place to put me where no one will know I’m around.
So, I waited. I thought, my uncle will give me ten bucks and tell me to go get some more ice cream, but he didn’t.
We went and looked at the swans and then we went back to Miss Maple’s house and worked on the tree house some more. They didn’t touch each other or kiss in front of me.
Miss Maple gave me the bike to take home, and my uncle and I went riding again after supper.
It’s easy to ride a bike. I asked him if it was just as easy to swim and to learn to skate and he said a man could do anything he set his mind to.
As if he thinks of me as a man.
“Is there anything you’re scared of?” I asked him.
And he didn’t say anything for a long time. And then he said, “There’s something everyone is scared of.”
But he didn’t tell me what it was, and you know what? I didn’t want to know, because I bet whatever he’s scared of is really, really bad, worse than Genghis Khan being at the gate and telling you to surrender or else.
I wish my uncle Ben wasn’t afraid of anything, because it’s been really easy, working on Miss Maple’s tree house, and eating pizza and ice cream, and going out with Mary Kay to the planetarium, to think maybe there is a place where I can feel safe and maybe I’ve found it.
Ha, ha. It’s always when you think you have something that it gets taken away. Always.
CHAPTER SEVEN
BETH Maple had kissed him. Twice. Ben was trying as valiantly as he knew how to be the perfect gentleman, a role he was admittedly not practiced at. That’s why he’d gone over there in the first place last night. To do the gentlemanly thing. To apologize.
But he had still planned to keep his distance, treat her like his nephew’s teacher. Even doing the crossword had been about teaching her the innocent fun of not being so uptight. Break a few rules, for God’s sake.
But the lines had an unpredictable way of blurring around her, and that was without her learning to be less uptight and break some rules. That was without watching her eat ice cream again, or race along a bike trail, shrieking with laughter.
Who would have guessed she would be the one instigating something more, confusing his already beleaguered male mind with kisses?
There was a chance her first kiss had been strictly a ploy to get the puzzle, and considering that would have made his world less complex, he had been strangely wounded by the thought. But kiss number two had erased any suspicion he had about ploys. She hadn’t even tried to get the crossword that he had taken from her fridge out of his front pocket when she’d kissed him under the tree by the river.
Thank goodness for that, because things were complicated enough without her getting grabby there. Not that she was the type, but twenty-four hours ago he would have laid money she wasn’t the instigating-kisses type, either.
This was the problem with kisses: in his experience kisses led to the R word, as in a Relationship. And in his experience that never went well for him. Women wanted most what he least wanted to give. Intimacy. Time. Commitment. A chunk of him.
He wanted a good time, a few laughs, nothing too demanding on his schedule, his psyche or his lifestyle. Which probably explained why a relationship for him, beginning to end, first kiss to glass smashing against the door as he said goodbye and made his final exit, was about one month. On a rare occasion, two.
He felt strangely reluctant to follow that pattern with Beth Maple. She’d only been in his life for a few weeks, but when he thought of going back to life without her, no tree house, no crossword puzzles, no bike rides by the river, he felt a strange feeling of emptiness.
“Look,” he said, taking the bull by the horns after they had wheeled the bikes back into her garage. Kyle was out of earshot, loading up the tools in Ben’s truck. They had made dismally little headway on the tree house today, which was part of why he had to take the bull by the horns. “We have to talk about this kissing thing.”
“We do?” She had that mulish look on her face, the same one she’d had as she was dangling her feet off a tree branch thirty feet in the air, the one that clearly said she wasn’t having him call the shots for her.
“It’s not that I don’t like it,” he said. He could feel his face getting hot. Hell. Was he blushing? No, too much sun and wind today.
“You don’t?” she said sweetly, determined not to help him.
“I like it,” he snapped, “but you should know I have a history with relationships that stinks. And that’s how a relationship starts. With kissing.”
“Thank you for the lecture, Mr. Anderson. Will there be a test?”
“I’m trying to reason with you!”
“You’re trying to tell me you don’t want to have a relationship with me.”
“Only because it would end badly. Based on past history.”
“Would you like to know what very important element was probably missing from your past relationships?”
Don’t encourage her, he thought. It was obvious to him she was no kind of expert on relationships. Still, he’d come to respect her mind.
“What?” he asked.
“Friendship.”
He stared at her. How could she know that? And yet if he reviewed all his many past experiences and failures, it was true.
He had never ever chosen a woman he could have been friends with.
And there was a reason for that.
He’d had his fill of hard times and heartaches. He’d known more loss by the time he was twenty-one than most people would experience in a lifetime.
He’d become determined to have fun, and he’d become just as determined that the easiest way to stop having fun was to start caring a
bout someone other than himself.
“We can be friends or we can be lovers,” he said with far more firmness than he felt. “We can’t be both.”
He could tell by the shocked look on her face she hadn’t even considered that’s where kisses led.
“Wow,” she said. “You know how to go from A to Z with no stopping in between.”
Well put. “Exactly.”
She looked at him for a long time. He had the feeling Beth Maple saw things about him that he didn’t really want people to see.
She confirmed that by saying, “You know, Ben, you strike me as somebody who needs a friend more than a lover.”
He wanted to tell her he had plenty of friends, but that wasn’t exactly true. Not girl friends. He told himself he’d gotten the answer he wanted, the answer that kept everything nice and safe, especially his lips. He told himself this would be a good place to leave it. But naturally he wasn’t smart enough to do that.
“And what do you need?” He was surprised that he asked, more surprised by how badly he wanted to hear her answer. What if she said, “I need to have a wild fling where I learn to let down my hair and live up to what my lips are telling you about me”?
He held his breath, but he got the stock Miss Maple answer.
“I need not to get involved with a family member of one of my students. On a lover level.”
She blushed when she said it. What a relief. She couldn’t even say lover let alone invite him to have a wild fling with her.
Her cheeks, staining the color of the beets his mother used to can, told him a truth about her. And about himself.
A man could never take her as a lover. She was the kind of woman who required way more than a recreational romp in the hay, whether she knew that about herself or not. She was the kind of woman who needed commitment. He’d known that from practically their first meeting when she had tossed that word around so lightly!
She was the kind of girl who would never be satisfied with the superficial, who would demand a man leave his self-centered ways behind him.
To be worthy of her. Which he was pretty darn sure he wasn’t.
Thank God.
“Well, I’m glad we got that sorted out,” he said doubtfully.
“Me, too,” she said.
“It’s not that I didn’t like kissing you.”
“I understand.”
“So, you won’t kiss me again?” What had his life become? He was begging a very pretty woman not to kiss him!
For her own good. Maybe he was becoming a better man, despite himself.
“I’ll do my best,” she said solemnly. And then, just when he thought she totally got what he was trying to tell her, she giggled, tried to hold it back and snorted in a most un-Miss Maple way.
He scowled at her.
“Rein myself in,” she promised, and then snickered again. “Wanton floozy. I didn’t mean to throw myself at you.”
“Nobody says things like that,” he said, irritated. “Wanton floozy.”
She was laughing and snorting in an effort to restrain herself. “Oh, you know us readers of romance novels.”
“You know, that’s another annoying thing about you—” besides the fact that she looked absolutely glorious when she laughed, and her nose wrinkled like that “—you have this mind like a computer, and you store away every single thing a person ever says to you for later use. Against them.”
She finally got the laughter under control, thankfully. Though now that he thought about it, he was not sure he liked that thoughtful, stripping way she was looking at him any better.
“You know what else was missing from your past relationships? Besides friendship?”
It was very obvious she planned to tell him, whether he wanted to hear it or not. Which he didn’t. At least not very much. He glared at her, folded his arms over his chest.
“Brains,” she said, softly. “No wonder you were bored.”
“I never said I was bored!” But he realized he had been. Every single time, after the initial thrill, bored beyond belief.
“Well, based on what you said about your past history, someone was bored.”
“Relationships can end for reasons other than that.” She wasn’t insinuating the other person had been bored with him, was she?
“Yes, that’s true. Maybe you’re a bad lover.”
He opened his mouth to protest, but caught the gleeful twinkle in her eye, and snapped it shut again before he gave her more cause to laugh.
He wasn’t sure he even wanted to be friends with her after all, he thought, a trifle sullenly. She saw way too much. And said too much.
But what choice did he have? He had to finish building her tree house. And Kyle was going to be in her class for another nine months or so.
Excuses. Because it really did seem like his life the way it had been before she came along was not what he wanted anymore.
He’d been lonely. He knew that now.
She had been right. He needed a friend. He needed a friend just like her. As long as they didn’t go and wreck it all by changing it to something else.
Feeling as if he had just navigated a minefield where he had managed, just barely, not to get himself blown to smithereens, he retreated to his truck and drove home. When they got in the house, Kyle announced he was going to do his homework.
Ben decided it would be counterproductive to remind Kyle he didn’t do homework. Instead he contemplated that development, and allowed himself to feel a moment’s satisfaction about how his plan was working the miracle that hers had not. But maybe it was bike riding that had worked the miracle, and that had been her idea. Turned into a project in cooperation. An outing with a family feeling to it.
Maybe that was at the heart of the miracle. That feeling of family. Ben’s wisdom in saying nay to the kisses was confirmed, though there was a sharp and undeniable tingle of regret that went with it every time he thought about it. Or her lips.
He was still contemplating that when the phone rang. Miss Maple’s personal number on his call display. He hadn’t even been away from the many and varied temptations of her for an hour! Once upon a time, he remembered he had hoped she would call him. But that was before he’d known how capable she was of shaking up his world.
Still, it was not reluctance he felt when he answered the phone, much as he knew it should be.
“I can call you now that we’re friends, right?” she asked. “It’s not against your rules, like kissing?”
He hoped she wasn’t going to mention kissing at every opportunity, because the whole idea was he didn’t want to think about it.
“Of course you can phone me at anytime,” he said foolishly. The pathetic truth was he couldn’t think of anything he’d like more than talking to her. And the phone was so safe. He didn’t even have to see her lips.
“You don’t see my calling you as being too forward? Bordering on wanton?”
“No,” he said sharply, trying to disguise how much he was liking this. “Are you amusing yourself at my expense?”
“Of course not. Actually, I called about Kyle, so this is definitely not wanton.”
“Definitely,” he agreed, disappointed that she had called about Kyle, even though he did appreciate her concern for his nephew’s well-being. Besides, what could be better? That was a nice and safe topic.
“He told me he was going to do his homework,” he whispered into the phone. It occurred to him there was no one else in the world who cared about that except her. It made him feel an unwanted nudge of tenderness for her. “Try not to make too big a fuss when he turns it in tomorrow.”
“Don’t worry, Ben, I’m not insulted that you think you have to tell me how to conduct myself in my classroom.”
“Don’t be so prickly.” So much for tenderness. Which was good, tender thoughts probably would lead directly back to lip thoughts.
“Don’t be so overbearing.”
Boy, he was glad he had decided against complicating things!
> “I’m not overbearing,” he growled.
“Just far too used to calling the shots?”
“I run my own business!”
“You can’t run your personal life like your business.”
Had he actually been slightly happy to see her number on the call display? Why? She was bossy, opinionated and prickly. Who was she to tell him how to run his personal life? As far as he could tell, she didn’t have one.
But if he said that, he was probably going to end up on her doorstep with pizza, apologizing again. And that led to lips, too. Instead he said, “Was there a reason you called?”
“I’ve been thinking about Kyle not knowing how to swim,” she said, moving on quickly from the topic of his overbearingness, which he was glad about, even though he might have liked to talk about her prickliness a little more.
“It really bothers me,” she said.
And just like that they were beyond the prickliness to that other side of her, so soft it beckoned like a big feather bed on a cold winter’s night.
“Me, too,” Ben agreed, and then found himself adding, “It’s like he hasn’t had a childhood.”
“It’s never too late.”
“It isn’t?” he said skeptically.
“My mom and dad have an indoor pool. It would be a nice private place to introduce him to the water and give him a few pointers on swimming. Don’t you think a public pool might be too humiliating?”
But his mind was stuck on the “her mom and dad” part.
He did not like meeting his female companion’s parents. Of course, he had just finished making it clear to her she was not going to be his female companion in the way he generally had female companions. So why not?
It wasn’t until the next night, after school, at her parents’ very upscale house in the hills, that he realized why not.
Beth met them outside in the curved driveway and led them around to a separate pool building behind the main house, glassed in and spectacular. He was relieved to note there were no parents in sight.
She pointed him and Kyle to a place to change, spalike and luxurious, and moments later he was in the pool, testing the depth of the water for Kyle, who looked scrawny, goose-bumped and terrified of this new experience.