Propositioned by the Playboy: Miss Maple and the Playboy / The Playboy Doctor's Marriage Proposal / The New Girl in Town

“I like the tree,” Ben said, thinking, Flattery will get you everywhere.

“Thank you,” she said. “We made it last year as our class project.”

It must have shown on his face that he thought that was a slightly frivolous use of school time, because she said haughtily, “We use it as a jumping-off point for all kinds of learning experiences in science, math and English. ‘What is learned with delight is never forgotten.’ Aristotle.”

After they left the school, Ben took Kyle for a burger.

“Your teacher didn’t seem that old to me,” he said. Of all the things he could have picked to talk about, why her? A woman who quoted Aristotle. With ease. Whoo boy, he should be feeling warned off, not intrigued.

Kyle didn’t even look at him, he was so engrossed in his new book. “That’s because you’re not eleven.”

Leave it. There were all kinds of ways to make conversation with an eleven-year-old. How about those Giants?

“She didn’t seem all that ugly, either.”

The burgers had arrived, and Kyle was being so careful not to get stains on his new book that he barely would touch his dinner.

“Well, you haven’t seen her face when you don’t hand in the homework assignment.”

“It would be good if you handed in the homework assignments,” Ben said, thinking Kyle was lucky to have a teacher who was so enthusiastic and who actually cared. He remembered “the plan.” “If you do it for a month without missing, I’ll get us tickets to a Giants game.”

Kyle didn’t even look up from his book.

On the way home they stopped in at the hospital to see Carly, but she was sleeping, looking worn and fragile and tiny in the hospital bed. Pretty hard to interest a kid whose mom was that sick in a Giants game, Ben thought sadly. Still, he didn’t know how to comfort his nephew, and he felt the weight of his own inadequacy when they got home and Kyle went right to his room without saying good-night and slammed his bedroom door hard. Moments later Ben heard the ominous sounds of a musical group shouting incomprehensibly.

He suddenly felt exhausted. His thoughts drifted to Miss Maple and he didn’t feel like a warrior or a hunter at all.

He felt like a man who was alone and afraid and who had caught a glimpse of something in the clearness of those eyes that had made him feel as if he could lay his weapons down and fight no more.

The Top-Secret Diary of Kyle O. Anderson

Once, when I was little, my mom told me my uncle Ben was a lady-killer. When she saw the look on my face after she said it, she laughed and said it didn’t mean he killed ladies.

It meant women loved him. Now that I live with him, I can see it’s true. Whenever we go anywhere, like the burger joint tonight, I see women look at my uncle like he is the main course and they would like to eat him up. They get this funny look in their eyes, the way a little kid looks at a puppy, as if they are already half in love, and they haven’t even talked to him.

I know where that look goes, too, because I’ve seen it on my mom’s face, and I’m old enough to know simple problem math. Love plus my mom equals disaster. It probably runs in the family.

I like diaries. I have had one for as long as I can remember after I found one my mom had been given and never used. It had a key and everything. Having a diary is like having a secret friend to tell things to when they get too big to hold inside. I stole the one I am using now because it has a key, too, and I didn’t want anyone to laugh at me when I bought it, though afterward I felt bad, and thought I could have said I was buying it for my older sister for her birthday. Which is a lie because I don’t have an older sister. I wonder which is a worse bad thing, telling a lie or stealing?

There’s lots of things people don’t know about me, like I don’t really like to do bad things, but it kind of keeps anyone from guessing that I’m so scared all the time that my stomach hurts.

My mom is going to die. She weighs about ninety pounds now, less than me, and I can see bones and blue veins sticking out on her hands. There’s a look in her eyes, like she’s saying goodbye, even though she still talks tough and as if everything’s going to be okay and she’s coming home again. Anybody, even a kid, can see that that’s not true.

Not that I feel like a kid most of the time. I feel like I’ve been looking after my mom way longer than she’s been looking after me.

Not that I did a very good job of it. Look at her now.

My mom is not like the moms in movies or storybooks. She drinks too much and likes to party, and she falls in with really creepy people. Her boyfriend right now is a loser named Larry. He doesn’t even go visit her in the hospital unless her welfare cheque has come and he needs it signed. Uncle Ben moved her to the hospital closer to us, so, gee, Larry would have to take the bus and transfer twice. At least he never hit her or me, which is different than the last one, who was a loser named Barry. That is the sad poem of my mom’s life.

Here is another secret: even though I am scared of her dying, I am scared of her living, too. I try not to let my uncle know, but I like it at his house. It’s not just that it’s nice, even though it is, it’s that everything is clean, and he always has food, even if it’s dorky stuff like bananas and apples and hardly any cookies or potato chips.

I feel safe here, like I know what’s going to happen next, and there aren’t going to be any parties in the middle of the night where people start screaming at each other and breaking bottles and pretty soon you hear the sirens coming.

It’s weird because one of the things I’m scaredest of is that my uncle won’t like me. What will happen to me if he sends me away? And even though that makes me so scared I want to throw up, I am really mean to him. My mom was always mean to him, too. Whenever he turned up, even though he always had groceries for us, she’d yell at him to get lost and it was too late and we didn’t need him, and then as soon as he left, she’d slam the door behind him and say, “Why can’t he ever say he loves me,” and cry for about a week. Which is kind of how I feel after I’m mean to him, too.

He bought all new stuff for my room at his house, and he let me have his supercool TV set and stereo. I never had new stuff before—a brand-new bed and sheets that were so new they felt scratchy the first night I slept in them. It made me want to cry that he bought them just for me, and that he left the television set in there, even though he doesn’t even have one in his own bedroom. It kind of made me hope maybe I was staying for good, but I am old enough to know that hope is the most dangerous thing. Maybe that’s why I acted mad instead, and told him how lame the cowboy were.

My uncle Ben used to be a marine. He’s big as a mountain, and he’s probably killed all kinds of people. Maybe with his bare hands. I can’t be a crybaby around him.

At my new school everything is new and shiny, and you don’t have to go through a metal detector at the front door. The library has lots of books in it, but I’m trying not to care about that too much, either, in case everything changes. You don’t want to put too much faith in a place with a corny name like Cranberry Corners. It’s not even real. Do you see any cranberries around here?

It is the same with Miss Maple, like she is too good to be true. She does really nice things for me, like the book tonight, but it makes me wish I was little and could just climb on her lap and cry and cry and cry. See? There’s that crybaby thing again.

Have you ever seen those movies where people live in a big house on a nice block, with a golden retriever and the kind of yard my uncle builds? All flowers and fountains and that kind of stuff?

Miss Maple is the mom in that movie. You can tell by looking at her, when she gets married and has kids there will be no parties where things get smashed in the night!

No sirree, she will have baked cookies and would serve them warm with milk before bed. And then a nice bath, every single night, whether you are dirty or not, and then I bet she would get right in bed with her kid and read him stories about something lame like turtles that talk.

She would have stupid rules like brushing your teeth, and saying please and thank you and not being tardy, and that’s why I act like I hate her, because she is the mom I wanted and sure didn’t get, and I feel guilty for thinking that when my own mom is going to die.

I told my uncle she was old and mean and ugly because it would have been so much easier for me if that’s what she had been. Plus him being a lady-killer and all, I didn’t want him to ever get anywhere near her. Because who knows what would happen next?

I like knowing what is going to happen next. Even though it is supergross to think of your uncle and your teacher liking each other, I had an ugly feeling that it was a possibility. I am always thinking of possibilities, trying really hard not to be surprised by life.

I guess I should never have given him the note from her, because it was worse than I imagined when they saw each other. I know that look. It usually happens just when my life is getting good, too. Just me and my mom, then that look between her and the latest loser and it’s a straight downhill slide from there. Not that my uncle or Miss Maple are losers, but I still think if it runs in the family, I’m doomed.

I can probably scare her off my uncle. Sheesh. He comes with a kid. The most rotten kid in her class. She’s no dummy. She can do math, too. But what if he decides to have her and get rid of me?

This is the kind of question that makes my stomach hurt. I will just keep her from ever wanting to get mixed up with us.

I wonder if Miss Maple will scream if I put a frog in her desk?

I saw one, a really big one, at Migg’s Pond, which is behind the school and out of bounds, except for the science-class field trip. We didn’t go on field trips in my old school.

And just thinking about that, how to capture that frog, instead of my mom lying alone in a hospital, and whether or not my uncle is going to keep me, or whether my uncle and Miss Maple are going to progress to the making-eyes-at-each-other stage, eases the ache in my stomach enough that I can go to sleep, finally.

But only if I leave the light on.

CHAPTER TWO

BETH Maple heard a slightly muffled snicker just as she was sliding open her top desk drawer looking for a prize for Mary Kay Narsunchuk, who had just won the weekly spelling bee.

During the whole spelling bee, out of the corner of her eye, Beth had seen Kyle O. Anderson looking absently out the window, seeming not to pay attention, unaware his mouth was silently forming every letter of every word she had challenged the class with, including the one that had finally stumped Mary Kay, finesse. But every time she had called on him to spell a word, Kyle had just frowned and ducked his head.

It was an improvement over last week’s spelling bee. Whenever she had called on Kyle that time, he had spelled a word, all right, but never the word he’d been given. When the word was tarry, he spelled tarantula, when she gave him forte, he spelled, or started to spell fornication. She had cut him off before he’d completed the word. Thankfully, no one in her grade-five class seemed to have any idea what that exchange had been about.

But Kyle was being suspiciously well-behaved for this spelling bee. At her most optimistic she hoped that meant his uncle had talked to him after their meeting last night about the plan, and had implemented the reward system at home.

It was probably that momentary lapse, thinking about Kyle’s uncle, that made Beth react slowly to the snicker as she was opening her desk drawer. Her brain shouting “Beware” did not get to her hand in time. Of course, her brain could just as well have been warning her off the gorgeous, full-of-himself, Ben Anderson, as the contents of her desk drawer!

A blob of green exploded from the desk, and collided with her hand, unbelievably squishy and revolting. Beth did what no grade-five teacher should ever do.

She screamed, then caught herself and stuffed her fist in her mouth. She regarded the largest frog she had ever seen, which sat not three feet in front of her on the floor, glaring at her with beady reptilian eyes.

It’s only a frog, she told herself sternly, but nevertheless she screamed again when it leaped forward. She could hear Kyle’s satisfied chortles above all the other sounds in a classroom that was quickly dissolving into pandemonium.

Twelve economy-size knights rushed to rescue their teacher, aka damsel-in-distress, though she was not naive enough to believe chivalry had trumped the pure temptation of the frog.

Casper Hearn led the charge, a big boy, throwing desks and hysterical girls out of his way as he stampeded around the room in pursuit of the frog.

But somehow, out of the melee, it was Kyle who emerged, panting, the frog clutched to his chest. Now he faced the other boys, something desperate in his pinched, pale face as they surrounded him. His freckles were standing out in relief he was so white.

“Give me the frog,” Casper ordered Kyle with distinct menace.

“I’ll warn you once to stay away from me,” Kyle said, a warning that might have been more effective if his voice wasn’t shaking and Casper didn’t outweigh him by a good thirty pounds.

Casper laughed. “Is that so? Then what?”

“Then the aisles will run with the fat melting from your bodies!” Kyle shouted, slipping the frog inside his shirt.

Casper took a startled step back from Kyle. The classroom became eerily silent. Casper stared at Kyle, shook his head and then went and sat down, followed by the other boys.

Kyle gave Beth a look she interpreted as apologetic and darted out the door, Kermit happily ensconced in his shirt.

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 thing might 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.