Miss Maple and the Playboy

by Cara Colter

  “Well. Whether you think I’m pathetic or not I am. You know what I did? I fell in love over the Internet. Conservative, cautious me, taken for a ride. How’s that for pathetic?” She could not believe she was crying, but she was and she couldn’t stop talking, either, despite the fact her confessions were making her miserable.

  Why was she telling him this now, when he had leaving written all over him? She hadn’t become one of those women who would take pity if they couldn’t have love, had she?

  “It ended up he wasn’t even a real person. He had stolen pictures from a Web site of a male model. This fraud was having relationships with dozens of women. I was contacted by an investigator in his state. Asking if I’d ever sent him money.”

  “Had you?” It was a deep growl of ferocious anger.

  “I said I hadn’t, because I felt so foolish for believing his stories. An inheritance tangled up in court. His pay cheque stalled by the bureaucracy in Abu Dhabi. He was always so sincerely embarrassed. But everyone had tried to tell me. My family. My friends. I wanted so desperately for what I was feeling to be true that I wouldn’t listen.

  “I told the investigators I hadn’t given him money because I just wanted it over. I didn’t want revenge, I didn’t want my name to appear in lists of women who had been victimized by him.”

  “You know I’m going to kill him if I ever see him, right?” Somehow his arm was around her shoulder, and she was pulled in hard against the pure strength of him. It seemed like such a safe place. She kept talking, the flood gates refusing to be closed now that everything was gushing out of them.

  “The strange thing is for the longest time after, it still felt as if he’d been real. I mourned Rock as though a real person had died.”

  “And now?”

  Now I know real. I have you to thank for that. But out loud she just said, “I can’t believe I’ve wasted one more tear on him.”

  She found her face cupped in his hand. He dragged the tear away from her cheek with the rough edge of his thumb. Somehow his thumb ended up on her lip, and he was looking deep into her eyes, and she could see his resolve to be on his way melting.

  “Come here,” he said with a sigh, and he sat down on the planking of the deck and pulled her into him and held her between the vee of his legs. Home.

  Wasn’t that really what she’d longed for? What she had hoped to find when she had bought that tiny, run-down house?

  But the house, in the end, was just sticks and stones. His arms around her felt like a shelter from the hurts of the world. She peeked up at his face. This is what she wanted to come home to.

  A real man. Like him.

  “I wish I could tell you life won’t hurt you anymore,” he said finally, quietly. “But I can’t. It will. Life stinks sometimes.”

  “That’s why you have to have places like this tree house,” she said dreamily. Places like his arms. Home.

  He said nothing.

  “Ben?”

  “Uh-huh?”

  “Will you tell me? About that hurt inside of you?”

  “Trading war stories?” he said. “No, I don’t think so.”

  “Trading trust,” she suggested. “Laying down the burden.”

  “Beth, I don’t want to lay my burdens on you.”

  “You’ve carried them long enough.”

  “Beth,” he said softly, “why is it you are determined to make me weak? When I am just as determined to be strong?”

  “I guess I don’t see a man speaking of the forces that shaped him as a weakness. A true form of courage. The ability to be vulnerable. To not be lonely anymore. Tell me.”

  He was silent; she held her breath. And then he spoke. A surrender.

  “My parents were killed in a car accident when I was seventeen. We had a family like your family, only without the financial security. I mean, I didn’t know that growing up. We always had everything. Good home, nice clothes, plenty to eat, money to play sports.

  “But when my mom and dad died, I found very quickly that there was nothing. A big mortgage on the house, no insurance, no savings.”

  “Ben, what a terrible burden to add to the grief you must have been feeling.”

  “Sometimes I think that time was so desperate I postponed grief. I had to figure out quickly how to look after things. There was no question of being able to look after my sister, too.

  “The marines took me. A good family for a guy who has just lost everything. Feelings are scorned in the rough camaraderie of men. I was given a new purpose and a new family, and I wasn’t allowed to indulge my desire to immerse myself in misery.

  “But Carly. Oh, Carly. She was so much younger than me. Fourteen is a hard age without adding the complication of a life unfairly interrupted by tragedy. My parents were gone, and I was going.

  “Sometimes I can still hear her howling like a wounded animal when I told her I had to go to the marines. She was a dreamer. Somehow she thought we were going to make it together. She was going to quit school and get a job in a fast-food place, she thought I could get a job, too. Two underage kids on minimum wage, no health care, no safety net. I knew it wasn’t going to work, but she hated me for knowing.” He shook his head, remembering.

  “She went from one foster home to the next, becoming more bitter and more hard and more incensed at the unfairness of her life by the day. She went wild, got pregnant. I don’t know if she ever told the father, or if she told him and he just didn’t care.

  “I’m the last person she ever would confide in. She never ever forgave me for leaving her.

  “The truth is I’ve never really forgiven myself. I look at her and think, Couldn’t I have done something? Couldn’t I?”

  Beth felt the helpless heave of his shoulders.

  “Aren’t you doing something now?” she asked softly.

  “It’s too late. I can’t save my sister.”

  “But you’re saving Kyle.”

  “Beth,” he said, and there was something tortured in his voice, “don’t make me into a man I’m not.”

  “I think you’re the one who wants to make yourself into a man that you’re not. I see who you really are, Ben Anderson.”

  “You do, huh?” And there was that teasing note in his voice again, as if he had decided to stay, after all.

  And something in her decided to risk it all.

  She spoke the truth that she had just admitted to herself, “And I’m falling in love with who you really are.”

  She kissed him then, up there in the tree house, with the leaves looking so magnificent in their dying throes.

  “That’s what I was afraid of,” he said against her lips.

  “You don’t have to be afraid anymore, Ben.”

  And she felt him surrender to her as he retook her lips with his own.

  CHAPTER EIGHT

  BEN Anderson had gone to Beth’s house planning to finish. Everything. It disturbed him that even setting his formidable will to that plan, things had gone seriously awry.

  Seriously.

  The thing about Beth was that she had seen that he was flawed. She had seen right through his warrior bravado to the fear underneath it.

  The fear of loss. He had a terror about caring for people. But Beth clearly saw the cause: the fear of loss.

  The thing about Beth was that she saw all that he was, good and bad, strong and weak, and loved him anyway. He saw it in her eyes. That she knew completely who he was, and even knowing that, she was willing to take a risk on him.

  The thing about Beth was she took a man worn right out on his own cynicism, a man who had been through the wars, on every level, and made him want to hope again for a better world and a better life, a life with soft places to fall.

  Somehow, even though he had gone to her house with every intention of saying farewell to her and to the part of him that hoped, he had been unable to leave her. He’d been unable to walk away from that feeling of being connected. He had been seduced by the magic of that place among the leave
s, by the look in her eyes, by the way it felt to have her leaning her back against his chest, as if she belonged there, and to him.

  She had been right, as she so often was—one of her most annoying qualities. And endearing.

  He had felt better after he had spoken of his history. Trusted her with it. He had felt not so alone in the world. Lighter.

  Ben had felt connected to another human being in a way that he had lost faith that it was possible to be connected. Destiny had laughed at his resolve to leave her, to finish it. Instead, they had stayed in that tree house all night. Watching the sky turn that purple blue before blackness, watching the stars wink on above them through the filter of leaves that were turning orange and fire red, a reminder that seasons ended.

  They had finished the wine, but instead of ending it there, he had acquiesced when she had gone and got blankets and coffee. And then more coffee, and somehow pink had been painting dawn colors in the sky, and they’d both been wrapped in the same blanket, her breath feeling like his breath, her heart beating at one with his heart.

  Finally, when he had pulled himself away, it had not been with a feeling of things ending, but of a brand-new day dawning in every possible way.

  He’d driven home, the effects of the wine long since worn off, but drunk nonetheless. On exhaustion. And the look in her eyes.

  Drunk on the possibility that he loved her, and that maybe he was strong enough and brave enough to say yes to a beginning instead of an end.

  But he of all men should have known. What had he said to her? Not very poetic, just truth, unvarnished.

  Life stinks.

  And wasn’t it always when a man forgot that, that life was more than willing to remind him?

  He had barely stripped off his clothes and climbed into bed when his phone rang. Who else would call at such a ridiculous hour of the morning? Who else would know he was not asleep? He reached for it eagerly, thinking, It is her. Thinking she had thought of one last thing to say to him before she, too, slept.

  In that moment before he picked up the phone he had an illuminating vision of what his life could be. He could fall asleep with his nose buried in the perfume of her hair, with her sweet curves pressed into his. His last words at night could be to her, and his first ones in the morning.

  She had said she was falling in love with him.

  He was falling in love with her. There it was. The admission. And for the first time in a very long time he could see something different for himself.

  Not a desire to run. But a desire to have a place to lay his head. A place to put down his armor. A place where he loved and was cherished in return.

  “Hello.” Everything in his voice greeted her, ready to tell her, ready to see where it all went.

  Only, it wasn’t her.

  “Mr. Anderson?”

  His heart plummeted. Something about the official sound of the voice, the sympathy underlying told him before he heard a single word. That he had hoped too hard for a happy ending.

  Carly.

  “You’d better come,” the nurse told him gently. “It’s a matter of hours.”

  Somehow, in a nightmare of slow motion, he managed to pull on his clothes. He ignored the impulse to call Beth, and instead phoned Peter’s house to tell them he was coming for Kyle. His early-morning phone call there had woken the whole family, and when he arrived everybody had that pinched look of distress about them.

  Kyle’s shoulders were hunched, and he looked bewildered as he followed Ben out to the truck and got in beside him.

  Ben wished he had called Beth. She would know what to do. She would, he reminded himself, also trust that he knew what to do.

  “Are you okay?” he asked Kyle.

  “No.”

  “Me, neither.”

  “I’m so scared,” Kyle said.

  “Me, too.”

  “Is this what you’re scared of?” Kyle asked him, his voice a croak of fear and misery. “You told me once everybody was scared of something. Is this what you’re scared of, Uncle Ben?”

  Ben could barely speak over the lump in his throat. “Yeah,” he finally said, “this is it.” He knew his nephew thought he meant death, but he had dealt with more death than most people, and it was not that that scared him.

  Love. It was love that scared him the most. Because love always seemed to, in the end, cut a man off at his knees, prove to him how puny his will was against the way of the world.

  And he had almost given himself over to the cruel vulnerability of loving again. Almost. Not quite.

  Had it been Beth’s voice on the phone this morning, his whole life could have been unfolding differently. But he quashed the yearning and vowed not to go there anymore.

  Ben and Kyle made their way through the too-bright lights of the hospital hallways to Carly’s room.

  It was darkened after the hall, and Ben hesitated in the doorway, one hand on Kyle’s shoulder as he let his eyes adjust to the light.

  Had it been the right thing to bring his nephew here? He wished he had asked Beth. But the privilege of sharing her wisdom, of walking through life sharing his burdens meant he had to make a decision. He had made one in the dawn hours, with her warm in his arms, but with the ringing of the phone this morning he was reneging on it.

  Was it right for him to have brought Kyle? He felt the loneliness of having to make these huge decisions alone, but he squared his shoulders, resolved. Ben had seen people die and it was a hard thing to see. But wouldn’t it have been harder for his nephew not to have had this opportunity to say goodbye?

  In the room his sister was the slightest little bump under a blanket, as if she had begun disappearing long ago. She turned her head to them, and in her face Ben saw no fear and no anguish.

  Absolute serenity.

  “Kyle,” she whispered, “come here.”

  Kyle went to her, and despite her frailty he climbed on the bed and into her arms. She rocked him and kissed the top of his head. She told him over and over she loved him. She told him she wasn’t the mother he deserved. She told him he was a good kid. She told him she was proud of him.

  The tears slithering down Kyle’s face puddled on her nightgown, soaked it. Ben tiptoed out of the room. This was the moment they needed, the moment Kyle had waited all his life for.

  After a long time Kyle came out into the hallway, wiping his face on his sleeve.

  “She wants to see you, by yourself.”

  “Are you okay?”

  His nephew gave him a look.

  “Sorry, dumb question.” He chucked him on the shoulder, changed his mind and pulled him hard into his chest and then released him reluctantly and went into the room.

  “You’ll look after him, won’t you, Ben?” Something so desperate in that, pleading.

  “I promise.”

  She studied his face, seemed satisfied. “Don’t tell him I said this, but I’m glad. I’m glad it’s over. I missed them so much, Ben.”

  “I know.”

  “Could you hold me?” she whispered.

  He slid onto her bed, and scooped her up in his arms. It was like holding a baby bird.

  “You know what I missed the most? This. Cuddling with Mom or Dad. Hearing the words I love you. You never said them, you know? You’d bring food or toys for Kyle and me, but you never said that.”

  “I’m sorry.”

  “Me, too, Ben. So much regret. I’ve put everyone I ever cared about through hell. Don’t let me go,” she said, and her hand curled into his shirt, holding him tight to her. Slowly her grip on him relaxed.

  Her eyes closed and her breathing rattled laboriously.

  He knew what he was hearing. He knew she would not wake up again. At some point Kyle came back into the room, squeezed into the bed with them, laid his head on his mother’s breast, allowed his uncle to curl his hand around his shoulder, holding them both.

  At six o’clock that night, as normal families sat down to eat their supper and talk about who was driving the kids t
o Little League, his little sister, as frail as a tiny bird that had fallen from the nest, found peace at last.

  But there was no peace for Ben. He realized, even in the end, he had not been able to give her what she needed the most. Shocked, he realized he had let his chance to say the words I love you slip away from him.

  Now he knew why he had gone to Beth’s house to finish it. Not to save himself. But to do the most loving thing of all: to save her from a man who had never been able to give anyone what they needed or wanted.

  Three simple words.

  I love you. A gift his sister had waited and waited for. And he had never given it. Not even as his chances ran out.

  Beth deserved a man who was better than that. So much better.

  CHAPTER NINE

  BETH tried not to let her shock show when she saw Ben. It was the first time she had seen him since his sister’s funeral, which had been over a month ago. She had spoken to him on the phone several times, but there was no mistaking the chill in his voice. She had failed to tempt him back into her world. She could feel the formidable force of his will set against her.

  Not her, personally, she reminded herself. His will had become a defense against all the things that had ever hurt him.

  She had gotten him here to the school on the pretext of a parent-teacher night, and she knew she had chosen her own outfit—elegant silk blouse, pencil-line black skirt, pearls at her ears and throat—in anticipation of seeing him.

  It was that same old thing. Making him try to change his mind. Before about kisses, now about something so much larger.

  Trust me. Let me in. Interestingly enough, not love me, but let me love you. The most incredible thing had happened to her over the last month, even in the face of Ben’s seeming indifference, his rejection of her. She felt better for the fact she loved him, not worse.

  Beth felt deeper and more alive and more compassionate than she had ever felt. She felt like a better teacher, a better woman, a better human being. That was what love did. Genuine love didn’t rip people apart, it built them up. That’s what she wanted to share with Ben, this incredible truth she had discovered.