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

Alive. As intensely alive as she had ever been. Over something so simple as working outside, shoulder to shoulder with a man, drinking in his scent and his strength, soaking his presence through her skin as surely as the beautiful late-summer sunshine.

Before she knew it, they were at the top of the staircase.

“It’s done,” she said.

“Not really. At the moment, it’s a staircase that leads to nowhere.”

Trust a man to think that! It showed the difference between how men and women thought. He so pragmatic. She so dreamy. Amazing he had thought of the tree house in the first place!

Just to show him the staircase led to somewhere, she stepped carefully off the stair and onto a branch.

“Hey, be careful.”

She ignored his warning, dropped down and shinnied out on the branch. From her own backyard was a view she had never seen before.

“I can see all of Cranberry Corners,” she said. “This is amazing.”

And that’s what happened when you took a chance and lived on the edge. You saw things differently. Whole new worlds opened to you.

“You better come back here.”

She ignored him, pulled herself to sitting, dangled her feet off the branch, looked out the veil of leaves to her brand-new view of the world and sighed with satisfaction.

“If you fall from there, you’re going to be badly hurt,” he warned.

She looked back at him. He looked very cross. Too bad.

“In between romance novels, I try and squeeze in a little reading that has purpose. Do you know Joan of Arc’s motto?” she asked him.

“Oh, sure, I have Joan of Arc’s motto taped to my bathroom mirror. What kind of question is that? Come down from there, Beth. Now is no time to be quoting Joan of Arc.”

“‘I am not afraid,’” she said, wagging her legs happily into thin air, “‘I was born for this.’”

“Hey, in case you don’t remember, Joan’s story does not have a happily-ever-after ending.”

“Like my normal reading?” she asked sweetly.

“It’s not attractive to hold a grudge. I’m sorry I insinuated you might just read something relaxing and fun in between studying Aristotle. Get off that branch.”

She glanced at him again. He did look sincerely worried. “You’re the one who likes to live dangerously,” she reminded him.

“Yeah. Me.”

“You’ve encouraged me.”

“To my eternal regret. Beth, if you don’t come back here, I’m going to come get you. I mean it.”

“I doubt if the branch is strong enough to hold us both.”

“I doubt it, too.”

It was a terrible character defect that she liked tormenting him so much. Terrible. It was terrible to enjoy how much he seemed to care about her. Though caring and feeling responsible for someone were two entirely different things.

“Is it lunchtime yet?” Kyle called up the tree. “Hey, that looks fun, Miss Maple. Can I come up?”

“No!” she and Ben called together, and she scrambled in off the branch before Kyle followed her daredevil example. Ben leaned out and put his hands around her waist as soon as she was in reach. He swung her off the branch and set her on the top stair. But his hands stayed around her waist as if he had no intention of letting her go to her own devices.

“I’m safe now,” she told him.

But his hands did not move. They both knew that she was not safe and neither was he, and that what was building between them was as dangerous as an electrical storm and every bit as thrilling.

He let her go. “I’ll take Kyle and grab a bite to eat.”

She knew he was trying to get away from the intensity that was brewing between them.

“No need,” she said easily. “There’s lots of leftover pizza.”

And so even though surrender was not the marine way, she found Ben Anderson in her kitchen for the second time in as many days. The problem with having him in her space was that it was never going to be completely her space again. There would be shadows of him in here long after he’d gone.

And men like that went, she reminded herself. They did not stay.

And right now it didn’t seem to matter. At all. It was enough to be alive in this moment. Not to analyze what the future held. Not to live in the prison of the past. Just to enjoy this simple moment.

“Microwave or oven?” she asked of reheating the pizza.

They picked the oven, and while they waited she mixed up a pitcher of lemonade and asked Kyle about the program at the planetarium.

“Hey,” she said, catching a movement out of the corner of her eye. “Hey, put that back!”

But Ben had his prize. He held up the puzzle that she had tacked on her fridge the night before.

“Ah,” he said with deep satisfaction, and folded it carefully. He put it in his pocket.

“That belongs to me,” she said sternly.

“That’s a matter of opinion.”

“It was on my fridge! It’s out of my book.”

“My. My. My. I thought by fifth grade you’d learned how to share.”

And then she couldn’t help it. She was laughing. And he was laughing.

Kyle, giving them a disgusted look, gobbled down the leftover pizza. “Is there any dessert?” he asked.

“Kyle!” Ben said.

But she was glad to see the boy eating with such healthy appetite. Since she didn’t have dessert, she said, “Let’s not go right back to work. Let’s take the bicycles down to Friendly’s and have an ice cream.”

“How many bikes do you have?” Ben asked, looking adorably and transparently anxious to keep her away from that staircase to nowhere and her perch on the tree branch.

“About half a dozen. I pick up good bikes cheap at the police auctions. Then if there’s a kid at school who needs a bike, there’s one available.”

“You really have made those kids, school, your whole life, haven’t you?”

He said it softly. Not an indictment, but as if he saw her, too. “You have a big, big heart, Miss Maple.”

And he said that as if a big heart scared him.

“Ice cream,” she said, before he thought too hard about their differences.

Kyle made a funny sound in his throat. “I don’t want ice cream,” he said. “You guys go. Without me.”

“Without you?”

They said it together and with such astonishment that some defensiveness that had come into Kyle’s face evaporated.

“I don’t know how to ride a bike,” he said, and his voice was angry even while there was something in his face that was so fragile. “And you know what else? I don’t know how to swim, either. Or skate.

“You know what I do know how to do? I know how to stick a whole loaf of bread underneath my jacket and walk out of the supermarket without paying for it. I know they put out the new stuff at the thrift store on Tuesday. I know how to get on the bus without the driver seeing you, and how to make the world’s best hangover remedy.”

Suddenly Kyle was crying. “I’m eleven years old and I don’t know how to ride a bike.”

He said a terrible swear word before bike.

Beth stared at him in shocked silence. And then her gaze went to Ben. He looked terrified by the tears, but he quickly masked his reaction.

“Big deal,” Ben said, with the perfect touch of casualness. Somehow, he was beside his nephew, his strong arm around those thin shoulders. “Riding a bike is not rocket science. I bet I can teach you to ride a bike in ten minutes.”

Beth knew if she lived to be 103, she would never forget this moment, Ben’s strength and calm giving Kyle a chance to regain his composure.

Ben met her eyes over Kyle’s head, and she realized the whole thing was tipping over for her. The look in his eyes: formidable strength mixed with incredible tenderness shook something in her to the very core.

It wasn’t about living dangerously.

It was about falling in love. But wasn’t that the most dangerous thing of all?

“Ten minutes?” Kyle croaked.

“Give or take,” Ben said.

Of course he couldn’t teach Kyle to ride a bike in ten minutes.

“Are you in?” Ben asked her.

It wasn’t really about teaching Kyle to ride a bike. It was about so much more. Going deeper out into unknown waters. Going higher up the treacherous mountain.

It was about deciding if she was brave enough to weave her life through the threads of his.

What were her options? Her life before him seemed suddenly like a barren place, for all that she had convinced herself it was satisfying. It had been without that mysterious element that gave life zing.

“I’m in,” she said. And she meant it. She was in. Totally surrendering. She’d never been a marine, anyway. It was perfectly honorable for her to give in to whatever surprises life had in store for her, to be totally open to what happened next.

It was like riding a bike. There was no doing it halfheartedly. You had to commit. And even if you ended up with some scrapes and bruises, wasn’t it worth it? Wasn’t riding a bike, full force, flat-out, as fast as you could go, like flying? But you couldn’t get there without risk.

They selected a bike for Kyle from her garage and took it out on the pavement in front of the house. Soon they were racing along beside him, Ben on one side, she on the other, breathless, shouting instructions and encouragement. Just as in life, they had to let go for him to get it. Kyle wobbled. Kyle fell. Kyle flew. They were so engrossed in the wonder of what was unfolding that no one noticed when ten minutes became an hour.

“I think we’re ready for the inaugural ride,” Ben finally said. “Let’s go to Friendly’s for ice cream.”

“Really?” Kyle breathed.

“Really?” she asked. Friendly’s was too far for a novice rider. There would be traffic and hills. Try out those brand-new skills in the real world?

Maybe there was a parallel to how she felt about Ben. Try it out in the real world, away from the safety of her yard and her world? She remembered last time she’d been at Friendly’s with Ben, too.

He’d gotten up abruptly and left her sitting there, by herself, with a half-eaten ice cream cone!

It reminded her he was complex. That embracing a new world involved a great deal of risk and many unknown factors.

But again she looked at her choices. Go back to what her life had been a few short weeks ago? Where reading an excellent essay full of potential and promise had been the thing that excited her? Or where finishing a really tough crossword had filled her with a sense of satisfaction? Or where building a papier-mâché tree for her classroom had felt like all the fulfillment she would ever need?

Her life was never going to be the same, no matter what she did.

So she might as well do it.

“Let’s go,” she said.

They rode their three bikes down to Friendly’s Ice Cream. And then, after eating their ice cream cones, instead of riding back to her place, they took the bike trail along the river and watched Kyle’s confidence grow. He was shooting out further and further ahead of them now, shouting with exuberance when they came to hills, racing up the other side, leaving them in his dust.

“You go ahead,” Ben said to him. “You’re wearing me out. Me and Miss Maple are going to do the old people thing and lie under this tree until you get back.”

There were miles of bike trails here and they watched him go.

“Are you sure he’s ready?” she asked, watching Kyle set off.

“Yup.”

“How?”

“Look at him. Have you ever seen a kid more ready to fly?”

They sat there, under the tree, enjoying the sunshine and the silence, the lazy drift of the river. They talked of small things: the tree house, the wonder of Friendly’s ice cream, bicycles and kids.

Beth was aware of a growing comfort between them. An ease as relaxed as the drift of the river. But just like the river, how smooth it looked was deceiving. A current, unseen but strong, was what kept the water moving.

And there was an unseen current between them, too. An awareness. She was so aware of the utter maleness of Ben Anderson. She had seen the way the women in the ice cream parlor looked at him, knew the body language of the women who jogged by on the bike path.

The old Beth would have been intimidated by that. The old Beth would have thought, He’s out of my league. Or What would a guy like this ever see in me?

But the new Beth had played with him, had done crosswords and eaten pizza with her hands and held a hammer and defied him by sitting way out on the branch of a tree. She liked being with him, and she was pretty sure he liked being with her, too.

“Do you want to kiss me again?” she asked, thrilled at her boldness.

“Miss Maple, do you know what you’re playing with?”

“Oh, I think I do, Mr. Anderson. Look at me. Have you ever seen a woman more ready to fly?”

He hesitated, momentarily caught, and then he leaned toward her, and she saw his nostrils flare as he caught the scent of her. His eyes closed, and he came closer.

“Beth,” he said, and her name on his lips right before he kissed her sounded exactly as she had known it would, like a benediction.

His lips touched hers, as light as a dragonfly wing. And she touched his back, felt again that delicious sense of coming home, of knowing truth about someone that was so deep it could never be denied.

But then the lightness of the kiss intensified. He took her lips, and she felt his hunger and his urgency, the pure male desire of him.

It occurred to her maybe she didn’t know what she was playing with, at all, but the thought was only fleeting, chased away by intensity of feeling such as she had never known.

This was not a picket fence kind of kiss.

It was the kiss of a warrior. The claim. It was fierce and it was demanding, and she knew another truth.

A man like this would take all a woman had to offer. She would have to be as deep and as intense, every bit as strong as he was. With a man like this there would be few quiet moments in the safety of the valleys.

He would take you to the peaks: emotional highs that were as exhilarating as they were terrifying and dangerous.

You would go higher than you had ever been before.

And you could fall further than you had ever fallen.

Unless you could fly. And hadn’t she just asked that of him, if he had ever seen a woman more ready to fly?

Only, now that she was here, standing on the precipice of flight or falling, she was not sure she could fly at all.

Was she strong enough? Hadn’t she broken a wing?

“Gross.”

Ben pulled away from her as if he had been snapped back on a bungee cord. Neither of them had expected Kyle’s solo flight be quite so brief.

But there he was, sitting on his bike, glaring at them, looking pale and accusing. Ben jumped up, reached back for her and pulled her to her feet, put her behind him as if he was protecting her from the look on his nephew’s face.

“It wasn’t gross,” he said evenly, and something in the warrior cast of his face warned Kyle not to go further with his commentary, and Kyle didn’t.

Still, Beth could clearly see that Ben either regretted the kiss or regretted getting caught, and it was probably some combination of the two. Clearly, unlike Kyle’s bike ride, her flight was not going to be solo. And flying with someone who had doubts would be catastrophic. If the choice would be hers to make at all!

“There are some swans on the river down there,” Kyle said, obviously sharing his uncle’s eagerness to move away from that kiss. “I wanted you two to see them. They’re too pretty to see by yourself.”

And in that she heard wariness and longing, as if Kyle was showing them all how they felt about this relationship.

There were things too pretty about life to experience it all by yourself.

But trusting another person to share them with you was the scariest journey of all. Things could get wrecked by following a simple thing like a kiss to the mountaintop where it wanted to go.

It did feel like you could fly. But realistically, you could fall just as easily.

Kyle was only eleven and he already knew that.

Beth felt her first moment of fear since she had adopted the new her. Ben studiously ignored her as he got back on his bike and followed his nephew down the trail. She followed, even though part of her wanted to ride away from them, back home, to her nice safe place.

Funny it would be swans she thought, gazing at them moments later, the absolute beauty of jet black faces and gracefully curving white necks.

Funny they would be swans when she could feel herself beginning the transformation from ugly duckling. It was a transformation that was unsettling and uncertain.

And being unsettled and uncertain were the two things Beth Maple hated the most.

The Top-Secret Diary of Kyle O. Anderson

When I came down that bike path and saw my uncle and Miss Maple kissing, I felt sick to my stomach. I’ve seen my mom do this. Along comes the kissing part, and she’s looking for a place to put me where no one will know I’m around.

So, I waited. I thought, my uncle will give me ten bucks and tell me to go get some more ice cream, but he didn’t.

We went and looked at the swans and then we went back to Miss Maple’s house and worked on the tree house some more. They didn’t touch each other or kiss in front of me.

Miss Maple gave me the bike to take home, and my uncle and I went riding again after supper.

It’s easy to ride a bike. I asked him if it was just as easy to swim and to learn to skate and he said a man could do anything he set his mind to.

As if he thinks of me as a man.

“Is there anything you’re scared of?” I asked him.

And he didn’t say anything for a long time. And then he said, “There’s something everyone is scared of.”

But he didn’t tell me what it was, and you know what? I didn’t want to know, because I bet whatever he’s scared of is really, really bad, worse than Genghis Khan being at the gate and telling you to surrender or else.

I wish my uncle Ben wasn’t afraid of anything, because it’s been really easy, working on Miss Maple’s tree house, and eating pizza and ice cream, and going out with Mary Kay to the planetarium, to think maybe there is a place where I can feel safe and maybe I’ve found it.

Ha, ha. It’s always when you think you have something that it gets taken away. Always.

CHAPTER SEVEN

BETH Maple had kissed him. Twice. Ben was trying as valiantly as he knew how to be the perfect gentleman, a role he was admittedly not practiced at. That’s why he’d gone over there in the first place last night. To do the gentlemanly thing. To apologize.

But he had still planned to keep his distance, treat her like his nephew’s teacher. Even doing the crossword had been about teaching her the innocent fun of not being so uptight. Break a few rules, for God’s sake.

But the lines had an unpredictable way of blurring around her, and that was without her learning to be less uptight and break some rules. That was without watching her eat ice cream again, or race along a bike trail, shrieking with laughter.

Who would have guessed she would be the one instigating something more, confusing his already beleaguered male mind with kisses?

There was a chance her first kiss had been strictly a ploy to get the puzzle, and considering that would have made his world less complex, he had been strangely wounded by the thought. But kiss number two had erased any suspicion he had about ploys. She hadn’t even tried to get the crossword that he had taken from her fridge out of his front pocket when she’d kissed him under the tree by the river.

Thank goodness for that, because things were complicated enough without her getting grabby there. Not that she was the type, but twenty-four hours ago he would have laid money she wasn’t the instigating-kisses type, either.

This was the problem with kisses: in his experience kisses led to the R word, as in a Relationship. And in his experience that never went well for him. Women wanted most what he least wanted to give. Intimacy. Time. Commitment. A chunk of him.

He wanted a good time, a few laughs, nothing too demanding on his schedule, his psyche or his lifestyle. Which probably explained why a relationship for him, beginning to end, first kiss to glass smashing against the door as he said goodbye and made his final exit, was about one month. On a rare occasion, two.

He felt strangely reluctant to follow that pattern with Beth Maple. She’d only been in his life for a few weeks, but when he thought of going back to life without her, no tree house, no crossword puzzles, no bike rides by the river, he felt a strange feeling of emptiness.

“Look,” he said, taking the bull by the horns after they had wheeled the bikes back into her garage. Kyle was out of earshot, loading up the tools in Ben’s truck. They had made dismally little headway on the tree house today, which was part of why he had to take the bull by the horns. “We have to talk about this kissing thing.”

“We do?” She had that mulish look on her face, the same one she’d had as she was dangling her feet off a tree branch thirty feet in the air, the one that clearly said she wasn’t having him call the shots for her.

“It’s not that I don’t like it,” he said. He could feel his face getting hot. Hell. Was he blushing? No, too much sun and wind today.

“You don’t?” she said sweetly, determined not to help him.

“I like it,” he snapped, “but you should know I have a history with relationships that stinks. And that’s how a relationship starts. With kissing.”

“Thank you for the lecture, Mr. Anderson. Will there be a test?”

“I’m trying to reason with you!”

“You’re trying to tell me you don’t want to have a relationship with me.”

“Only because it would end badly. Based on past history.”

“Would you like to know what very important element was probably missing from your past relationships?”

Don’t encourage her, he thought. It was obvious to him she was no kind of expert on relationships. Still, he’d come to respect her mind.

“What?” he asked.

“Friendship.”

He stared at her. How could she know that? And yet if he reviewed all his many past experiences and failures, it was true.

He had never ever chosen a woman he could have been friends with.

And there was a reason for that.

He’d had his fill of hard times and heartaches. He’d known more loss by the time he was twenty-one than most people would experience in a lifetime.

He’d become determined to have fun, and he’d become just as determined that the easiest way to stop having fun was to start caring about someone other than himself.

“We can be friends or we can be lovers,” he said with far more firmness than he felt. “We can’t be both.”

He could tell by the shocked look on her face she hadn’t even considered that’s where kisses led.

“Wow,” she said. “You know how to go from A to Z with no stopping in between.”

Well put. “Exactly.”

She looked at him for a long time. He had the feeling Beth Maple saw things about him that he didn’t really want people to see.

She confirmed that by saying, “You know, Ben, you strike me as somebody who needs a friend more than a lover.”

He wanted to tell her he had plenty of friends, but that wasn’t exactly true. Not girl friends. He told himself he’d gotten the answer he wanted, the answer that kept everything nice and safe, especially his lips. He told himself this would be a good place to leave it. But naturally he wasn’t smart enough to do that.

“And what do you need?” He was surprised that he asked, more surprised by how badly he wanted to hear her answer. What if she said, “I need to have a wild fling where I learn to let down my hair and live up to what my lips are telling you about me”?