Miss Maple and the Playboy. Cara Colter

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.