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“That’d be great, if you’re sure it’s not too much trouble,” he heard himself say.
His orders didn’t seem to have any more effect on him than they did on Buddy.
SHE WAS A FOOL. Not that this was news to Tory. What in hell was she doing inviting Ben Sanders to her office? In the first place, she didn’t belong there. The office really wasn’t hers. She’d barely moved in.
In the second, teachers shouldn’t have favorites. Especially not students who had a look of knowing about them, a maturity. Students who were so capable. So reliable.
“It’s obvious you do all your reading,” she said as she walked with him across campus. The heat was almost tangible, caressing her skin, and she reveled in its gentleness. Phyllis was having a hard time acclimatizing to Arizona’s weather. Tory loved it.
“I thought we were supposed to,” he said, shortening his stride to stay beside her. She moved over just slightly, automatically, leaving space between them.
She was still wearing Christine’s ill-fitting shoes, too busy studying every night to get into Phoenix for that shopping spree.
“You are!” She grinned, forgetting for a moment that she wasn’t a teacher walking with a student.
“But I’d guess some of my students haven’t even bought the text.”
“Then they’re idiots, wasting this opportunity.”
Tory wondered if he meant that.
“Do you like the Emerson years, Ben?” He’d certainly challenged her thinking a time or two during class with his insightful interpretations. She’d rather enjoyed debating with him. In the safety of the classroom.
“Not particularly.”
“Oh!” With heat flooding her face, Tory felt once again like the untutored young woman she was. “Well—”
“Don’t get me wrong,” he interrupted, moving far enough ahead to turn and walk backward, facing her. “It’s not that I don’t think your class is great. I do. I’m just not particularly fond of the Emerson era.” He shrugged. “Too stuffy for me.”
“So what authors are you fond of?” Passing a couple of girls from one of her other classes, she waved to them, feeling almost like one of them, accompanied as she was by the man they were all drooling over.
Except that she wasn’t drooling. Tory had given up drooling. She could relax a bit, though, as long as Ben was in front of her like that.
He shrugged again, fell back into step beside her. “Nathaniel Hawthorne. James Fenimore Cooper.”
“You go for the witches and wars, huh?” She moved sideways, leaving a little more space between them.
“What I admire most about The Last of the Mohicans is not the battles.”
“What is it?”
“Hawkeye.”
“Of course. The hero who conquers all and gets his woman.” Tory had a problem with that story. She’d wanted to believe there really were heroic men like Cooper’s Hawkeye, had held steadfast to that hope even in high school, despite the damage her stepfather had done. She’d held it until she’d met Bruce, married him and found out that no matter what their station, all men were alike.
“No. Hawkeye’s a man who has such a sense of honor and decency that he’ll risk everything he has, everything he is, to see justice done.”
Tory stopped in her tracks, her heart beating heavily in her chest. And then started walking again.
There was no point in arguing with him, in telling him that it was just such viewpoints, beliefs, that hurt people like her so badly. People who still believed that the sort of people they read about in books actually existed. There was no point in getting into it with him because she couldn’t support her argument with the facts.
“So who’s your favorite nineteenth-century American author?” he asked as they neared her office building.
“Louisa May Alcott.”
“Hmm. Kind of a minor player, isn’t she?”
“I guess,” Tory said, standing back as he opened the door for her. “But I like her, anyway.”
“Why?”
He was still holding the door, standing there looking at her, and she could feel his glance all the way to her bones.
There was something special about this man. Something compelling. And frightening.
“Because in a time when those guys—your Hawthorne and Melville and Emerson and so on—were writing about witches and wars and big issues, she wrote about ordinary everyday life. Her own life and that of her sisters. She was practical, the way women often are because they have to be. And she was able to take reality and make it palatable. Her writing engaged me as a child and, equally, as an adult.”
“I think I prefer books that transform reality,” he said, letting go of the door as she started down the hall. “Instead of stories that just present it the way it is.”
“Like any good writer, she did both. Her books were based on aspects of her own life, but they weren’t autobiographical.” Tory shook her head.
“I’ve been to the house where she grew up,” she told him. Christine had taken her there—as well as many other places important to American literature. In New England, they’d been right there for the visiting. “It was so…so touching to see things I’d read about. In Little Women, one of the heroine’s sisters draws all the time, and upstairs in Alcott’s home, in this little attic bedroom, there were these incredible pencil sketches along the wall. Louisa’s sister had done them.”
Tory had treasured that tour. And all the others. For those brief moments history and fantasy had come together.
“You really love this stuff,” Ben said, waiting while she unlocked her office door.
Standing there with him right behind her, she wondered why she wasn’t feeling the need to run. Usually she couldn’t tolerate being so close to a man.
Probably because she was still playing the part of Christine.
“Yeah,” she answered. “I really do.”
BEN WAS WITH ZACK FOSTER the following evening, driving home from Phoenix. The bed of his truck was filled with Zack’s new living-room furniture. As he drove down Main, he saw Christine Evans coming out of Weber’s department store. He watched her climb into a brand-new white Ford Mustang. The car seemed to suit her better than the clothes she wore. She never seemed comfortable in them.
But then, she didn’t seem comfortable, period.
“Someone you know?” the vet asked, responding to his interest.
“Not exactly,” Ben said, pulling his gaze away, refusing to look in his rearview mirror to see which direction Christine had taken. “She’s just my English professor.”
Zack frowned. “I don’t think I’ve ever seen her before.”
“She’s new to town.”
“She’s gorgeous,” Zack said, his voice appreciative. “Not that I’m noticing,” he added.
“How long ago did your wife leave?” Ben asked, glad to change the subject. Zack had told him, when Ben had stopped in at the vet’s to pick up more puppy food for Buddy, that he was having to refurnish his house after his divorce. That was when Ben had offered the use of his truck to pick up Zack’s new furniture.
“Six months.”
Using the rearview mirror, Ben surveyed the couch and chairs in the back of the truck. “You been sitting on the floor all this time?”
“I haven’t been home long enough to sit anywhere.”
Ben could understand that. After Mary had left, taking Alex with her, Ben hadn’t been able to sit still, either. Though they’d never been in any one apartment for long—Mary had always found some reason or other to be dissatisfied with what his income could provide—there’d still been Alex’s laughter bouncing off whatever walls were surrounding them.
“You seeing anyone?” Ben asked. He had no interest whatsoever in complicating his life again, but Zack seemed like a man who’d enjoy women. Tall, blond, athletic-looking, the guy probably had women following him in droves.
“Nope,” Zack said. “I’ve been too busy at the clinic. Cassie and I are initiating a national pet-therapy program in universities across the country, and I’ve been doing a lot of traveling, though not nearly as much as she has.”
“I don’t imagine there’re lots to choose from in a town this size, anyway,” Ben commented. The thought pleased him.
“Not many I’ve noticed.” Zack grinned. “But I’m not looking, either. Marriage isn’t all it’s cracked up to be. I’m in no hurry to put myself through it again.”
“Know what you mean.”
“You been married?” The vet glanced over at Ben.
“Yeah.”
“How long?”
“Eight years.”
“Six, here.” Zack sent him a purely male look of commiseration. “Eight years,” he repeated. “You must have married young.”
“I was eighteen. Just finishing high school. I traded my education for a couple of dead-end jobs that allowed me to support my wife.”
Zack whistled, motioning for Ben to turn. “It’s the last house on the right,” he said. And then he added, “She must’ve been some looker to get her hooks into you that deep.”
“Yeah,” Ben said. Mary had been beautiful, but it wasn’t Mary who’d hooked him.
It was Alex.
CHAPTER FOUR
ALEX SANDERS wondered how far Shelter Valley was from California. She didn’t know what streets she had to take, but she might have to walk there.
“Ahhh!” she cried out when the next blow hit her back. She bit her lip. But she didn’t cry. She was a big girl now. Daddy had said so the last time he sneaked a phone call to her at this man’s place.
One more blow and Alex huddled in the corner. Her lip was bleeding now from biting it. And her back hurt so bad she thought it might be broken.
“Never, ever lie to me again,” the man said.
“I won’t,” Alex whispered. She’d try her best not to. She just wasn’t sure how she could stop doing something she wasn’t doing. How could she promise not to lie again when she hadn’t lied in the first place?
She thought of the phone number she had hidden in the pocket of her Cabbage Patch doll. Somehow she was going to have to call Daddy. He’d know the answer. He was her real daddy and he knew everything.
This other man who hit her—Mommy kept telling her to call him Daddy.
But she wouldn’t. Not ever. No matter what he did to her.
One more blow landed on her bottom when she wasn’t looking.
And Alex started to cry.
TORY WAS IN Christine’s office after her last class on Friday, double-checking to make sure she’d done everything she’d needed to. And feeling relieved that she’d made it through her second week as a teacher. There’d been no uprisings in any of her classes.
She had a few telephone calls to return—one about an assessment committee Christine had been chosen to sit in on, a student who’d missed class, and Phyllis. She also had a roster to update.
And she had a permanent knot in her stomach.
Yet, as she looked back over the past two weeks, she had to smile. She hadn’t been half-bad. What was more, during those moments when she’d forgotten who she really was, she’d actually enjoyed herself. She’d always known she loved literature. Reading it. Studying it. Discussing it. She’d just never known how much she liked teaching, too.
“Come in,” she called when a knock sounded at the door.
Her stomach flip-flopped when Ben Sanders entered. The man was definitely something to look at. Six feet tall, with his curly dark hair and big brown eyes, he’d probably led more than one woman astray.
But not this woman.
Dropping his backpack on the floor, he sank into the chair across from her desk. Tory stiffened.
“I just stopped by to let you know I sent off the paper this morning.”
“Oh!” She smiled. “Good.” Though she tried to keep it in place, she could feel her smile fading. He could just as easily have given her the news in class that morning. Why was he here? What did he want? What did he know?
“Thanks for the suggestion.”
“There’s no guarantee anything will come of it,” she felt compelled to warn him.
“Don’t worry, Teach.” He grinned. “I gave up on guarantees a long time ago.”
“I’m impressed, you know,” she said, thinking like a teacher—and suddenly horrified when she heard how the words sounded. She wasn’t a teacher; she was Tory Evans, failure and fraud.
“Oh?” He gazed over her shoulder at the window behind her desk.
“You not only read the assignments, you think about them.”
“I’m here to learn.”
“I can’t imagine how much time you must spend on homework if you do for all your classes what you do for mine.”
Ben leaned forward, his elbows on his knees. “I have the time.” He was looking at her again, and the genuine niceness in his eyes, the ease, relaxed her a tiny bit.
“You’re not working?”
Shaking his head, he smiled, almost apologetically. “I got a loan, at least for this first semester, so I could concentrate fully on my studies.”
