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When he didn’t return, she realized with a horrible sense of resignation she was going to have to inform Kyle’s uncle she had lost his nephew.
And the truth was, Beth Maple would have been just as happy if she never had to speak to Ben Anderson again.
Or at least the part of her that hadn’t nearly swooned from the pure and powerful presence of the man would be happy.
The other part, despicably weak, yearned for just one more peek at him.
Beth thought that Ben Anderson was the type of man who should have a warning label on him. There was that word again. “Beware.” Followed by “Contents too potent to handle.”
She did not think she had ever been around a man who was so casually and extraordinarily sexy. When he had walked into her room yesterday, it was as if everything but him had faded to nothing. No wonder she had thought he was in the wrong place, hopelessly lost amongst the welcoming fall leaves that dripped from her ceiling and brushed the top of his head.
Ben Anderson was all masculine power. Every single thing about him, from the ease with which he held that amazing male body, to the cast of features made more mesmerizing by the fact his once-perfect nose had the crook of a break in it, radiated some kind of vital male energy.
He oozed strength and self-assurance, from the ripple of muscle, to the upward quirk of a sexy lip. But somehow all that self-assurance was saved from becoming arrogance by the light that danced in eyes as green as a summer swimming hole. Ben Anderson’s eyes were warm and laughter filled. Kyle’s propensity for mischief was undoubtedly genetic.
Still, something lurked behind the easy laughter of his eyes, the upward quirk of that sexy mouth. There was an untouchable place in Ben Anderson that was as remote as a mountaintop. But unfortunately, rather than making him less attractive, it intrigued, added to a kind of sizzling sensuality that tingled in the air around him.
Ben Anderson had that certain indefinable something that made women melt.
And he knew it, too, the scoundrel.
Beth, sharing her classroom with him last evening, had been totally aware she was an impossibly unworldly grade-five teacher, with nothing at all in her experience to prepare her for a man like that.
You didn’t meet a man like Ben Anderson on the university campus. No, his type went to high, lonely places and battlefields. Even if Kyle had not mentioned to Beth that his uncle had been a marine, she would have known he had something other men did not have. It was in the warrior cast in his face, and the calm readiness in the way he carried himself.
He was not the kind of man she met at the parent-teacher conference, the kind who had devoted himself to a wife and children and a dream of picket fences. She met the occasional single dad, attractive in an expensive charcoal-gray suit, but never anything even remotely comparable to Ben Anderson.
Ben’s eyes resting on her face had made her feel as if an unwanted trembling, pre-earthquake, had started deep inside of her.
She hated that feeling, of somehow not being in control of herself, which probably explained why she had been driven to explain the educational benefits of her classroom tree to him. And to quote Aristotle! Who did that to a man like him?
But Beth Maple loved being in control, and she especially loved it since her one crazy and totally uncharacteristic trip outside her comfort zone had left her humiliated and ridiculously heartbroken.
She had known better. She was the least likely person to ever make the mistake she had made. She was well educated. Cautious. Conventional. Conservative. But she had been lured into love over the Internet.
Her love, Rock Kildore, had turned out to be a complete fabrication, as if the name shouldn’t have warned her. “Rock” was really Ralph Kaminsky, a fifty-two-year-old married postal clerk from Tarpool Springs, Mississippi. What he was not was a single jet-setting computer whiz from Oakland, California, who worked largely in Abu Dhabi and who claimed to have fallen hopelessly in love with a fifth-grade teacher. Even the pictures he’d posted had been fake.
But for a whole year, Beth Maple had believed what she wanted desperately to believe, exchanging increasingly steamy love letters, falling in love with being in love, anticipating that moment each day when she would open her e-mail and find Rock waiting for her. Beth had passed many a dreamy day planning the day all his work and travel obstacles would be overcome and she would meet the love of her life.
She had been so smitten she had believed his excuses, and been irritated by the pessimism of her friends and co-workers. Her mother’s and father’s concern had grated on her, partly because it was a relationship like theirs that she yearned for: stable but still wildly romantic even after forty years!
The youngest in her family, she hated being treated like a baby, as if she couldn’t make the right decisions.
After her virtual affair had ended in catastrophe that was anything but virtual, Beth had retreated to her true nature with a vengeance. Most disturbing to her had been that underlying the sympathy of her mom and dad had been their disappointment in her. Well, she was disappointed in herself, too.
Now she had something to prove: that she was mature, rational, professional, quiet and controlled. These were the qualities that had always been hers—before she had been lured into an uncharacteristic loss of her head. They were the qualities that made her an exemplary teacher, and that she returned to with conviction.
Teaching would be enough for her. Her substantial ability to love would be devoted to her students now. Her passion would be turned on making the grade-five learning experience a delight worth remembering. And she was giving up on pleasing her parents, too, since they didn’t seem any happier when she announced her choice to be single forever than they had been about Rock.
But looking at Ben Anderson, she had felt rattled, aware that all her control was an illusion, that if a man like that ever touched his lips to hers, she would surrender control with humiliating ease, dive into something hitherto wild and unexplored in herself.
Looking at Ben Anderson, Beth had thought, No wonder I liked virtual love. The real thingmight be too hot too handle!
But even more humiliating than the fact Beth had recognized this shockingly lustful weakness in herself was the fact that she was almost positive he had recognized it in her, as well! There had been knowing in his eyes, in the little smile that tickled the firm line of his lips, in the fact his hand had touched hers just a trifle too long when he had passed her his business card with his cell-phone number on it.
Ben Anderson had obviously been the conqueror of thousands of hearts.
And all of them left broken, too, Beth was willing to bet.
Not that she had let the smallest iota of any of that creep into her voice when she had spoken to him. She hoped.
When he had handed her his business card, just in case she had needed to consult with him, she’d had the ugly feeling he expected her to find some pretext to use it.
And here she was, dialing his number, and hating it, even if this was a true emergency. And at the same time she hated it, a wicked little part of her was completely oblivious to the urgency of this situation, and wanted to hear his voice again, and compare it to her memory. No man could really sound that sexy.
Except he did.
His voice, when he answered, was deep and mesmerizing. Beth asked herself if she would think it was that sexy if she had never met him in person.
The answer was an unfortunate and emphatic yes.
There was a machine running in the background and Ben sounded faintly impatient, even when Beth said who she was and even though she could have sworn he would be pleased if she called him.
“Mr. Anderson, Kyle has gone missing.”
“I can’t hear you. Sorry.”
“Kyle’s gone,” she screamed, just as the machine behind him shut off.
The silence was deafening, and she rushed to fill it, which was what a man like that did to a woman like her, took all her calm and measured responses and turned them on their head.
She explained the frog incident. Ben listened without comment. She finished with, “And then he ran off. I checked all the usual hideouts, under the stage in the gym, the last stall in the boy’s washroom, the janitorial closet. I’m afraid he’s not here.”
“Thanks for letting me know,” Ben said. “Don’t worry.”
And then Beth was left holding a dead phone, caught between admiration for his I-can-handle-this attitude when obviously he was fairly new and naive to the trouble little boys could get themselves into, and irritation that somehow, just because he had told her not to worry, she did feel less worried.
He was that kind of man. Ridiculous to plan picket fences around him, and yet if you had your back against the wall, and the enemy rushing at you with knives in their teeth, he was the one you would want to be with you.
Beth told herself, sternly, it was absolutely idiotic to think you could know that about a man from having seen him once, and heard his supersexy voice on the phone. But she knew it all the same. If the ship was sinking, he would be the one who would find the life raft.
And the desert island.
She spent a silly moment contemplating that. Being with Ben Anderson on a desert island. It was enough to make her forget she had lost a child! It was enough to remind her her ability to imagine things had gotten her into trouble before.
An hour later, just as school was letting out and she was watching the children swirl down the hallway in an amazing rainbow of energy and color, the outside doors swung open and Ben Anderson stood there, silhouetted by light. He came through the children, the wave parting around him, looking like Gulliver in the land of little people.
There was something in his face that made Beth feel oddly relieved, even though his expression was grim and Kyle was not with him.
“Did you find him?” she asked.
The hallway was now empty. The absence of little people did not make Ben Anderson seem any smaller. In fact, she was very aware that she felt small as she stood in his shadow.
Small and exquisitely feminine despite the fact she was wearing not a spec of makeup, her hair was pulled back in a no-nonsense bun and she was dressed exactly like the fifth-grade teacher that she was.
“Not yet. I thought he might be at home, but he wasn’t.” He was very calm, and that made her feel even more as if he was a man you could lean into, be protected by.
Without warning, his finger pressed into her brow. “Hey, don’t worry, he’s okay.”
“How could you possibly know that?” she asked, aware that the certain shrill note in her voice had nothing to do with the loss of a child who had been in her charge, but everything to do with the rough texture of his hand pressed into her forehead.
“Kyle’s eleven going on 102. He’s been looking after himself in some pretty mean surroundings for a long, long time. He’s okay.”
He said that with complete confidence. He withdrew his hand from her forehead, looked at it and frowned, as though it had touched her without his permission. He jammed it in his pocket, and she felt the tiniest little thrill that the contact had apparently rattled him, as well as her.
“If he’s not at home, where did he go?” she asked him. The news was full of all the hazards that awaited eleven-year-old boys who were not careful. In the week and a half that Kyle had been in her class, he had shown no sign that he was predisposed to careful behavior.
Of course, his uncle did not look as if he had ever been careful a day in his life, and he seemed to have survived just fine.
Probably to the woe of every female within a hundred miles of him.
“That’s what I’m trying to figure out. Kyle’s not that familiar with Cranberry Corners yet. Is he hiding somewhere? How much trouble does he think he’s in?”
“It’s not just about the frog,” she told him, and repeated Kyle’s awful remark.
“The aisles will run with the fat melting from your bodies?” Ben repeated. She couldn’t tell if he was appalled or appreciative. “He said that?”
“Do you think he was threatening to burn down the school?” she whispered.
Ben actually laughed, which shouldn’t have made her feel better, but it did. “Naw. He’s a scrawny little guy. He used his brains to back down the bully, and it worked. Boy, where would he get a line like that?”
She was oddly relieved that it was not from his uncle!
“The History of Khan?” she guessed.
“Bingo!” he said, with approval for her powers of deduction.
She could not let herself preen under his approval. She couldn’t. Wanting a man like him to approve of you could be the beginning of bending over backward to see that appreciative light in his eyes.
“Now if we could use those same powers of deduction to figure out where he is.”
“You know him better than me,” she said, backing away from the approval game. Besides, she really was drawing a blank about Kyle’s whereabouts.
She saw the doubt cross his face, but he regarded her thoughtfully. “You said he still had the frog, right?”
She nodded.
“You said the other boys wanted the frog and he wouldn’t give it to them.”
Silly to be pleased that he had listened so carefully to what she had said. Troublesome how easily he could nudge down her defenses, even before they were rebuilt from the last collapse!
“So, let’s assume he cared about the frog. Maybe he wanted to return it to where he got it from.”
That made such perfect sense Beth wished she had thought of it herself.
“We went on a little field trip for science class last week. Migg’s Pond,” she said. “It’s not far from here. We walked.”
“I’m sure I can find it.”
She was sure he could, too. But she was going with him. And not to spend time with him, either. Not because just standing beside him made her feel soft, and small and delicate.
She would go because this wasn’t really about Ben nor her, nor even about a frog. It was about a child who, despite the fact he was street smart, was still a child. Somehow, someway, somebody needed to let him know that. That they would come for him when he had lost his way.
“I’ll just get my jacket,” she said. “And my boots.” The boots were hideous, proof to herself that she was indifferent to the kind of impression she was making on Ben Anderson. No woman with the least bit of interest in how he perceived her would be seen dead in a skirt and gum boots by him.
“It’s wet by the pond,” she said, pleased with how rational she was being. She even leveled her grade-five-teacher look at his feet.
And then was sorry she had because her eyes had to travel the very long length of his hard-muscled legs to find the feet at the end of them.
“I’m not worried about getting my feet wet,” he said, something flat in his voice letting her know that he had been in places and experienced things that made him scorn small discomforts.
Today Beth was wearing a plaid tartan skirt, which did not seem as pretty to her now as it had when she put it on this morning. The boots, unfashionable black rubbers with dull red toes, were kept in the coatroom for just such educational excursions. They looked hideous with her skirt, but since they were going to a swamp and she was determined to not try and impress him, she thought they were perfect for the occasion.
Still, when she saw the laughter light his eyes as she emerged from the coatroom, she wished she hadn’t been quite so intent on appearing indifferent to his opinions. She wished she would have ruined her shoes!
In an effort not to look as rattled as she felt in her gum boot fashion disaster, she said conversationally, “I like the name of your business. Garden of Weedin’. Very original.”
He glanced down at his shirt and grinned. A knowing grin, that accused her of studying his chest, which of course she had been.
“Very creative,” she said stiffly, keeping on topic with stern determination as he held the door open for her to leave the school.
“Yeah, well, I stole it.”
“What?”
“I saw it on a sign in a little town I was passing through a long time ago. It kind of stuck with me.”
“I don’t think you can steal names,” she said. “That would be like saying my mother stole the name Beth from the aunt I was named after.”
“Beth,” he said, pleased, as if she had given away a secret he longed to know.
The way he said it made a funny tingle go up and down her spine. You could imagine a man saying your name like that, like a benediction, right before he kissed you. Or right before he talked you into his bed, the promise of bliss erasing the fact there had been the lack of a single promise for tomorrow.
She shot him a wary look, but he was looking ahead, scanning the terrain where the playground of the school met an undeveloped area behind it.
“Migg’s Pond is out of bounds,” she said. “The children aren’t supposed to come back here by themselves.”
He grunted. With amusement?
