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.
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