Miss Maple and the Playboy

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?

“Are you one of those people who scoffs at rules?” she asked.

“No, ma’am,” he said, but his amusement seemed to be deepening.

“You are! I can tell.”

“Now, how can you tell that?” he drawled, glancing at her with a lazy, sexy look that made her tingle just the way it had when he had spoken her name.

“I’m afraid I can picture you in fifth grade. Quite easily. Out of bounds would have just made it seem irresistible to you.”

“Guilty.”

“Frog in the teacher’s drawer?” she asked.

“Only if I really liked her.”

She contemplated that, and then said, “I don’t think Kyle likes me at all.”

“I would have, if I was in grade five. Not that I would have ever let on. How uncool would that be? To like the teacher.”

How uncool would it be to feel flattered that a man would have liked you in grade five? It didn’t mean he liked you now. Only a person without an ounce of pride would even pursue such a thing.

“What makes you think you would have liked me in grade five? I’m very strict. I think some of the kids think I’m mean.”

He snorted, and she realized he was trying not to laugh.

“I am! I always start off the year at my most formidable.”

“And I bet that’s some formidable,” he said, ignoring her glare.

“Because, you can’t go back if you lose respect from the start. You can soften up later if you have to.” She sounded like she was quoting from the teacher’s manual, and Ben Anderson did not look convinced by how formidable she was capable of being!

“Well, I would have liked you because you were cute. And relatively young. And obviously you are into the Aristotle school of learning, which would mean really fun things like have everyone making a fall leaf with their name on it to hang from the roof.”

He hadn’t just used the tree to flatter her, which she had suspected at the time. He’d actually liked it. Why else would he have noticed details? She could not allow herself to feel flattered by that. Weakened.

He’d been a marine. He was probably trained to notice all the details of his environment.

They arrived at the pond. As she had tried to tell him, the whole area around it was muddy and damp.

But it wasn’t him who nearly slipped and fell, it was her. She found his hand on her elbow, steadying her.

His grip, strong, sure, had the effect, again, of making her feel tiny and feminine. A lovely tingling was starting where his fingers dug lightly into her flesh.

She stopped and removed herself from his grip, moved a careful few steps away from him and scanned the small area around the pond with her best professional fifth-grade-teacher look.

As good as her intentions had been in coming here, and even though she had placed Kyle first, she had challenged herself as much as she intended to for one day.

“He’s not here,” she said. “I should go.”

But Ben tilted his head, listening to something she couldn’t hear. “He’s here,” he whispered.

She looked around. Nothing moved. Not even the grass stirred.

“How do you know?”

With his toe, he nudged a small sneaker print in the mud that she would have completely overlooked.

“It’s fresh. Within an hour or so. So is this.” His hand grazed a broken twig on a shrub near the pathway.

She didn’t even want to know how he knew how fresh a print was, or a broken branch. She didn’t want to know about the life he had led as a warrior, trained to see things others missed. Trained to shrug off hardship, go where others feared to go. Trained to deal with what came at him with calm and control. She didn’t want to know all the multi-faceted layers that went into making such a self-assured man. Or maybe she did. Maybe she wanted to know every single thing about him that there was to know.

“Well,” she said brightly, afraid of herself, her curiosity, terrified of the pull of him, “I’m sure you can take it from here. I’ll talk to Kyle tomorrow.”

“Okay,” he said, scanning her face as if she didn’t fool him one little bit, as if he knew how uncomfortable he made her feel, how aware of her needs.

“Are you going to follow the print?” she asked when he didn’t move.

“I’d like him to come to us.”

Us? She had clearly said she was leaving.

“Are you going to call him?” she asked.

“No. I’m going to wait for him. He knows we’re here.”

“He does?”

“Yeah.”

She could go. Probably should go. But somehow she needed to put all her self-preserving caution aside, just for the time being. She needed to see this moment. Needed to be with the man who understood instinctively not to chase that frightened child, but to just wait. Or was that the pull of him, overriding her own carefully honed survival skills?

Ben took off his jacket, and put it on the soggy ground, patted it for her to sit on, just as if she had never said she was leaving, and just as if he had never said okay.

Something sighed in her, surrender, and she settled on his jacket, and he went down on his haunches beside her. Ben Anderson was so close she could smell his soap and how late-summer sunshine reacted to his skin.

“So,” he said after a bit, “why don’t you tell me something interesting about yourself?”

She slid him a look. This whole experience was suffused with an unsettling atmosphere of intimacy, and now he wanted to know something interesting about her? He had actually asked that as if he had not a doubt there was something interesting about her.

“What you consider interesting and what I consider interesting are probably two different things,” she hedged.

“Uh-huh,” he agreed. “Tell me, anyway.”

And she realized he wanted Kyle to hear them talking, to hear that it was just a normal conversation, not about him, not loaded with anger or anxiety.

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