by Cara Colter
And then Beth emerged from her own change room. She shuffled up to the edge of the pool, drowning in a too-large pure-white thick terry cloth robe, and then, looking everywhere but at him, she took a deep breath and dropped the covering.
He really hadn’t needed to see a woman he had sworn off kissing in a bathing suit. He really hadn’t needed to see that at all. Because Beth Maple, out of her schoolmarm duds was unbelievable. Oh, he’d seen hints of this in the way she dressed at home, casually, but nothing could have prepared him for Beth Maple in the flesh.
Literally.
He wouldn’t have ever thought she was a bikini kind of gal. In fact, for the school outing he had guessed she would wear a one-piece with matching shorts, not removed. Wrong. Though, he had just enough wits about him to see that the shimmery copper-colored hanky she was wearing looked brand-new. It had never been at a school outing! Was she tormenting him, deliberately, with his choice to just be friends?
Surely not! There was nothing conniving about Miss Maple, was there?
Ha. She knew exactly the effect all those scantily covered curves would have on his resolve. Nobody was that innocent!
Proving her own boldness was making her at least as uncomfortable as it was him and that she had no experience with the fact that the kind of swimwear she was wearing was not actually designed for swimming, Beth dove headlong into the water. And came up with one arm crossed firmly across her chest, and the other tugging away at something he couldn’t see—but could clearly imagine—below the water.
“Problems?” he purred.
Nope, those little scraps of fabric were definitely not attire designed to get wet. At least her hair made her look like a drowned rat instead of a femme fatale making a play for his soul.
“No,” she snapped, but made some tightening adjustments to the little threads holding everything together.
Now satisfied everything was going to stay on, she soon forgot to be self-conscious about her attire. After a few minutes of waiting, hopefully, for things to fall apart, he began to realize the bathing suit proved to be not nearly as revealing as her absolute joy and freedom in the water.
Her enthusiasm was contagious, and soon she had Kyle in the water and doing what she called a “motorboat,” blowing bubbles with his mouth to get him over his fear of getting his face wet.
Never once did she make it seem like a swim lesson. Kyle’s first time in the pool was all about fun. She never asked him to get out of the three foot end of the pool.
The three of them splashed and played tag. She got out a volleyball for them to throw around. An hour passed in the blink of an eye.
The whole experience made Ben want to get her alone, to swim with her in the Pacific on one of those nights when the sky and the water became one. Was that something someone wanted to do with their friend?
They had no sooner gotten out of the pool than the moment Ben dreaded, meeting her parents, arrived. Her mom provided them all with thick white robes that matched the one Beth had come out on the pool deck in. She got sodas out of the fridge as they all plopped down on the comfy furniture in the poolside lounging area.
Ben didn’t miss the way Beth’s mother’s eyes popped at her daughter’s bathing suit before Beth managed to get herself covered up.
So, Miss Maple did have a conniving side! He’d bet his business that her bathing suit was brand-new and carefully chosen to fluster. Though at the moment, trying to tug an uncooperative robe over her wet skin, Ben was pleased to see she seemed to be the flustered one.
After a few minutes her father joined them.
Ben was good at meeting people, and because of his line of work he was not intimidated by wealthy people. Despite his reluctance to meet parents, he realized he didn’t have to act like a high school kid picking up his prom date, because he and Beth were not dating.
Her parents were easy people to be with, but Ben became aware he had avoided this kind of gathering since the death of his parents. Mr. And Mrs. Maple were obviously devoted to their youngest child and each other. It soon became evident that family was everything to them, their lives were centered on their children and their grandchildren. It was the main reason they had a pool.
Family.
That thing he had turned his back on so long ago, because it filled him with such an intense sense of yearning for what he could never have back.
But with this family he let himself relax into it, found himself looking at Beth’s silver-haired, slender, elegant mother, Rene, thinking, Beth will look like this one day. And he hoped she would have the same light in her eyes—the rich contentment of a woman well loved.
But his relaxation faded a bit when he realized he would probably never see her silver-haired. And a bit more when he thought Beth would probably also want this someday. Oh, not necessarily the pool, but what it represented. Family closeness, family gatherings, family having fun together.
Beth’s dad, Franklin, thankfully, did not do the interrogation thing. Instead he shared his own memories of his military life, without probing Ben’s.
A man used to grandchildren, he included Kyle with ease in the conversation, drawing him out of himself.
“It’s good to know how to swim,” he told Kyle when Kyle confessed he was just learning. “You never know when you’re going to fall out of the fishing boat.”
“I’ve never been fishing,” Kyle said.
“Never fishing? That won’t do, will it? I’m taking my grandson with me next weekend. He’s about your age. Why don’t you come?”
“Can I, Uncle Ben?”
Ben looked away from the hope shining in his eyes, tried to control the feeling that came with Beth’s world opening up to include them.
Hope. She was steadily hammering a crack into the hard exterior of his cynicism, his protective shell. But she was drawing Kyle into her world, too. Was he going to be hurt in the long run?
Still, he could not say no to the light shining in Kyle’s eyes.
Ben had meant for the no-kissing rule to put distance between him and Beth, to erect a much-needed barrier between them, to put ice on that heated flicker of physical attraction they both felt.
Instead, as a week turned into two, he could see it was having the exact opposite effect.
Here was the thing about the no-kissing rule. It gave him room to know her. He was falling more for her, not less. He had not been aware how immersion in the throes of passion could actually thwart the process of two people getting to know each other. What he had always foolishly called intimacy was anything but. Physical intimacy, too soon, was actually a barrier to the kind of emotional and spiritual intimacy he was experiencing on a daily basis.
He could talk to her in a way he had never talked to anyone. Not about the weather or football stats or the best pizza, but about things that mattered. Education, politics, local issues. He moved beyond the superficial with her and found their conversations a deeply satisfying place to be. She didn’t always agree with him—well, hardly ever, actually—but he loved sparring with her, matching wits, debating. It felt as if she kicked his brain up into a different gear.
After a while, he noticed that in any particular moment he could read how she felt about the day or life or him in the set of her shoulders and the light in her eyes.
Ignoring the signs that something was happening to him, he got in deeper and deeper as his life seemed to revolve more and more around her. He always seemed to be at her place, working on the tree house or riding bikes after school. Twice a week they went to her parents’ to use the pool. Kyle went fishing with her dad and made a new friend in her nephew, Peter.
Even his sister noticed that something was going on in the lives of her brother and her son. On one of their regular visits, her eyes followed Kyle as he went to the hospital cafeteria to get her a soda.
“He seems so happy,” she said.
It was probably awful to think it, but his sister was a nicer person since being hospitalized. But without access to drug
s and alcohol, she seemed to be becoming a better person every day.
But as her spirit became better, her physical body weakened.
“Who is Miss Maple?” she asked him, turning her attention back to Ben suddenly.
“His teacher.”
“No, Ben, who is she to you?”
“Just a friend,” he said, defensively.
Something old and knowing and wise was in his younger sister’s face.
“I’d like to meet her.”
As if their lives weren’t tangled enough without Beth meeting his dying sister.
Ben was astonished how strongly he didn’t want Beth to meet his sister.
Because he knew as easily as he now read Beth, she also read him with a kind of uncanny accuracy. Beth would know the truth. When it came to Carly, his heart was breaking.
And Beth might try to fix it, knowing Beth.
And the truth was he was not sure he wanted her to. Because a heart shattered beyond repair might be his last remaining defense.
Who is she to you?
It had all been well and good to spend more and more time with her, to pretend that not kissing her meant it wasn’t going anywhere that he needed to worry about.
But his sister’s question bothered him deeply. Because his heart answered instantly, even though his head refused to give it words.
Who is she to you? Everything.
But there was a problem with making one person everything, with investing too much in them. He left the hospital feeling as if he’d snapped awake after allowing himself to be lulled into a dream. He felt grim and determined. Even the friendship thing wasn’t working.
They were going too deep. He was caring too much.
It was time to pull it all back, to gather his badly compromised defenses, to make decisions, rather than just floating along in the flow.
He knew what he had to do. Take back his life. Stop with all the distractions. No more swimming. Or bike riding. In fact, he would finish the tree house.
A nice way to end it. Give her that final gift and bid her adieu.
Though nothing ever quite went as he planned it with her. The kissing thing being a case in point.
Not everybody would have been as flattered as Beth Maple by a handsome man absolutely resolved not to kiss her. But the situation she was in was different than a man telling a woman he just wanted to be friends because he just wanted to be friends!
With that amazing gift of women’s intuition, Beth knew Ben didn’t want to kiss her because he had felt her sway over him. What had frightened him had empowered her. Imagine a guy like that being so terrified of a girl like her! It was probably very wicked to find his discomfort as entertaining as she did.
But as the last days of summer shortened into fall, she could see the heady truth every day, deepening around them. Ben Anderson was afraid of how he felt. He was manly enough to be terrified of all his feelings, as if somehow liking a person and coveting their lips gave them the power and made him powerless.
So, she would respect his wishes, but it was only human to torment him, wasn’t it? To make him want to kiss her so badly that he would throw his self-control to the wind.
Not that it had happened so far, but she was absolutely confident it was only a matter of time until Ben surrendered to what was sizzling in the air around them.
My goodness, Beth said to herself, astounded at her confidence, You are a prim little school-teacher. What makes you think you can bring a man like that to his knees?
More important, what are you going to do with him once you have him there?
She continued to tangle their lives together as if the only consequences would be good ones.
Her parents adored him and Kyle. Kyle was becoming like a member of her large and loving extended family. If some professional line had been blurred there, it was worth it to see Kyle becoming so sure of himself, flourishing under the attention and care of her family.
This weekend, she thought, watching Ben’s truck pull up in front of her yard, will be a turning point. Kyle was gone to spend the weekend at her nephew’s house. She and Ben were going to be alone.
She went out to greet him, but faltered when the welcoming grin that she had become so accustomed to was absent. He barely looked at her as he grabbed his tool belt from the back of his truck, strapped it around his waist.
“I’m finishing the tree house tonight.”
She froze in her tracks, hearing exactly what he was not saying. It was the thing that linked them together, the tree house was their history.
Some couples had a favorite song.
They had the tree house.
Of course most couples kissed. Of course he was as eager not to be a couple as she was to be one.
That’s what finishing the tree house was about, she realized.
Not kissing had not worked. It had not put the distance between them that he had hoped.
He was going to start cutting the ties one by one. She had been confident in her ability to hold him, but now she could see his desire not to be held was fiercely strong. He feared what she longed for.
And she felt devastated by his fear.
But she reminded herself, fiercely, that she had more power than he wanted her to have. The woman she had been a month ago would have accepted the look on his face, the formidable set of his shoulders, resigned herself to the decision he was making.
But that was not the woman she was today. She was not letting him go, not without a fight.
Too soon, with the last of the daylight leeching from the air, Ben drove home the last nail. The tree house was done.
They stood side by side at the sturdy handrail, close, but not touching. She felt loss rather than accomplishment, and she was almost certain he did, too.
“It’s too late to put in the plants that attract butterflies,” he said. “I’ll get you a list, so you can do it next spring. There’s no sense hanging the hammock, either, you’ll find it too cold to use it this year.”
You. Not we. The distinction was not lost on her.
It was true September had somehow drifted into October. There was a chill in the air.
And in his eyes.
“Wait here,” she said. “I have something.” She went into the house and found a bottle of champagne she had purchased a long time ago, for the weekend that Rock had been supposed to come. The first of many where he had been supposed to come and then never showed up. Why had she saved it? So that she could look at it and pity herself more?
She climbed back up the stairs with the bottle and two fluted glasses and a determination to enjoy every sip. It could be symbolic of letting go of the past. Looking at him, though, she realized she had already let go of the past.
That was one of the gifts Ben had given her, and even if he went now, he could not take away the woman she had become because of him.
“Are you going to break that over the bow?” he said, but there was no twinkle in his eye the way there usually was when he teased her.
“No, I’m going to get drunk and fall off the platform.”
The twinkle flashed through the deep green of his eyes, but it was reluctant. He did not want to get drawn into her world. Normally he would have had some comment, some comeback, but now he remained silent.
She uncorked the champagne with a dramatic pop, but was so aware the atmosphere was not celebratory. It felt like an ending. The end of the season. The end of something that had been growing between them.
She filled the wineglasses, passed him one. He lifted his, held it up to her, his eyes met hers.
“To all your dreams coming true, Beth.”
Not ours. Yours. He was definitely getting ready to say goodbye.
“What do you know of my dreams?” she asked him quietly, taking a sip of her champagne and looking out over her yard and her house, once the only dreams that she had dared to harbor.
He actually laughed, but it had a faintly harsh sound to it, bitter.
“Do yo
u think I could spend this much time with you and not know about your dreams? You dream of having a feeling like your mom and dad have for each other, and a life like the one they have. You dream of a family and swings in the backyard.”
“I don’t!” she said stunned.
“Yes, you do,” he said quietly.
“Maybe I did once,” she tilted her chin up proudly. “But I gave it up.”
“You thought you did. The lowlife only hurt you temporarily, which is a good thing to remember.”
“What do you know about Rock?” she whispered. Had somebody told him? One of her family members? Good grief.
“Rock,” he snorted. “The name alone should have sent you running for cover.”
“Did somebody tell you?” she demanded.
“Oh, Beth, this told me.” He swept the view of her yard, wineglass in hand. “The little house for one, a car babied more than a, well, baby. You told me all about your heartbreak just by being a buttoned-up teacher devoting her life to her students.”
“How dare you make me sound pathetic!”
“I don’t find you pathetic,” he said, quietly and firmly. “Not at all. You just want things, Beth. It’s not wrong to want them. But there’s no point hanging out with a guy who can’t give them to you.”
She was stunned by what he was seeing, because she thought that was precisely what she had given up after Rock/Ralph. But now she saw that Ben had clearly seen her truth, maybe before she had completely seen it herself.
She had convinced herself she was just playing a game with Ben, seeing if she could overcome his aversion to caring for another. She had talked herself into thinking it was all about her reclaiming her power in the face of having lost it.
But underneath all those things she had been telling herself, the dream of love had been creeping back into her life, fueled by his laughter and the green of his eyes and his fun-loving spirit and his ability to suddenly go deep in unexpected and delightful ways.
He had seen her more clearly than she saw herself. And her secret motivations were what was driving him away, what had brought that look into his eyes, why suddenly he had felt an urgent need to finish.