And she did surprise him, for showing up at all, and for showing up on her bicycle with her hair down, surprisingly long, past her shoulders, her lovely cheeks pink from exertion.
“I didn’t know teachers wore shorts,” Kyle said, spotting her first. He frowned. “That should be against the law.”
Ben agreed. Even though Beth’s shorts would be considered very conservative, ending just above her knee, her legs could cause traffic accidents! They were absolutely gorgeous.
“What’s she doing here?” Kyle asked as she came toward them.
“She’s going to have ice cream with us.”
“Oh,” Kyle said, “you invited her.” He did not sound pleased. He did not sound even a little bit pleased, but what eleven-year-old wanted to have ice cream with his teacher?
She wouldn’t let Ben order for her or pay for her, but he watched closely all the same. When she joined them at a small table outside, she had ordered some hellish looking mix of orange and black.
“Tiger,” she informed Ben. Then she went on to prove that she could more than surprise him. Who would have guessed that watching that prim little schoolmarm licking an ice cream cone could be the most excruciatingly sensual experience of a somewhat experienced guy’s life? When a blob of the quickly melting brackish material fell on her naked thigh, he thought there wasn’t enough ice cream in the world to cool down the heat inside of him.
He leaped to his feet, consulted his watch with an astounded frown. “Kyle and I have to go,” he announced. “School night. That homework thing.”
She should have looked pleased that he was being such a responsible guardian. She would have looked pleased to know he was going if she knew what he was thinking about her thighs. And ice cream. In the same sentence.
He’d annoyed her. Actually, he thought she was more than annoyed. Mad. He didn’t blame her. He’d invited her for ice cream and then ditched her. She might never know how noble his departure had been. It had been for the protection of both of them.
Kyle seemed mad at him, too. When Ben pressed him about his homework, Kyle said, as regally as a prince who did not toil with the peasants, “I don’t do homework.”
And instead of thinking of some clever consequence, to go with the plan, Ben said, “Well, fail grade five then. See if I care.”
Ben Anderson wished his life could go back to being what it had been such a short while ago. Frozen dinners. Guy nights. A home gym in the spare bedroom.
And at the same time he wished it, he missed it when she didn’t call him the next night, or the one after that, either. That either meant the plan was working, or she was giving up.
Or that his foolish mixing of her professional life with her personal one had left her nearly as confused as it had left him. He doubted he’d been forgiven for leaving her in the lurch with her tiger ice cream. Now she had probably vowed not to speak to Ben Anderson again unless Kyle turned her world upside down.
Should he phone her? And tell her he rewarded Kyle every night for feeding and caring for his frog, trying to make up for the fifth-grade-failure comment. But the reward was ice cream, and Ben didn’t think it would be a very good idea to mention ice cream around her for a while.
Besides, after that shared moment of camaraderie over Casper’s unfortunate choice of underwear, Kyle had retreated into a sullen silence.
After a week of trying out excuses in his head to phone her, and discarding each one as more lame than the last, the decision was taken out of Ben’s hands.
The school’s number came up on his cell phone’s display. He knew it could be anyone. The principal, the nurse, Kyle himself. But he also knew it was telling him something important that he hoped it was Beth.
And then was reminded to be careful what he hoped for!
He had to hold the phone away—way away—from his ear. Kyle had been right about one thing. She did have kind of a screechy voice—when she was upset, and she was very upset.
She finally paused for breath, a hiccupping sound that made him wonder if she was crying. He did not want to think of Beth Maple crying.
“Let me get this straight,” he said uneasily. “While you took the class swimming, somebody took a nail and scratched my company name in the side of your car? Are you kidding me?”
He didn’t know why he said that because it was more than obvious she wasn’t kidding. He groaned when she told him what else was scratched in there.
“It sucks to be you.” And of course, Kyle had not been swimming.
“I’ll be there as soon as I can,” he said, and hung up the phone. It occurred to him it was totally inappropriate to be whistling. Totally inappropriate to feel happy that he was going to be seeing her again so soon.
She might be able to make eating ice cream look like something out of the Kama Sutra, but he had just been screeched at! He had already deduced he was not the kind of man who could give a woman like that one thing she needed.
Except she did need to be kissed. He could tell by the way she ate ice cream! And he had it on good authority he was very good at that.
But it was not the thought of kissing her that made him happy, because obviously kissing a woman like that would make his life rife with complications that it did not currently have.
As if an eleven-year-old boy armed with a nail was not enough of a complication for him at the moment.
What seemed to be causing the renegade happiness was the thought of the look on her face a long time ago when he had told her about swimming in the dark: a moment of unguarded wonder and yearning, before she had quickly masked whatever she was feeling.
He wanted to make her look like that again.
He supposed it was a guy thing. A challenge.
He reminded himself sternly that his big challenge right now was the person who was vandalizing people’s cars.
It was a big deal. A terrible thing for Kyle to have done. A betrayal of the teacher who had been nothing but good to him.
But Ben Anderson still whistled all the way to the school.
Beth Maple’s car was about the cutest thing he had ever seen, a perfectly refurbished 1964 Volkswagen Beetle convertible, finished in candy-apple red. The car was kind of like her—sweet and understated, with the surprise element of the candy-apple red, and the unexpected sexiness of a convertible top.
Unfortunately, the car was marred right now. On the driver’s side door someone had scratched “THE GARDEN OF WEDDING,” an unfortunate misspelling of the name of Ben’s business. Like most confirmed bachelors, he did not like weddings. He had never noticed before how close to the word wedding that weedin’ was.
He was startled and horrified that even being in the near vicinity of that word and Beth at the same time, he could picture her as a bride, gliding down an aisle in a sea of virginal white.
Was she a virgin?
He could feel his face getting red, so he frowned hard at the words scratched in the side of her car. What the hell was going on with him? His self-control was legendary, and yet here were these renegade thoughts, just exploding in his mind without warning, as though he had stepped on a land mine. First the naughty thoughts around ice cream and now this.
“There’s more,” she said.
Yeah, there was, because as hard as he was trying to crowd out the picture of her in a wedding dress from his mind, not to mention that terrible none-of-your-business question, once you had allowed your mind to go somewhere like that, it was very hard to corral the wayward thoughts.
He slid a glance at her face, her smooth forehead marred by a frown,