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

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, distress in her eyes, as if this was the very worst thing that had ever happened to her.

He would guess she had lived a sheltered life.

He followed her around to the passenger side, looked where she pointed. In smaller letters, lower case, was scratched deep into that candy-apple red paint “it sucks to be you.”

As if Kyle wasn’t the prime suspect anyway, he might as well have signed his handiwork with his own name.

Ben glanced at Beth Maple again. The teacher was looking distressed and pale, as if she was hanging on by a thread and the slightest thing would make her burst into tears.

Which was something Ben Anderson did not want to see at all. The wedding thoughts and the question were about as much stress as he wanted for one day. A woman like that, in tears, could be his undoing. It could make a man feel all big and strong and protective. He didn’t want to feel like that. He was as unsuited to the role of riding in on his charger to rescue the damsel in distress as he was to the role of standing at the top of that aisle, waiting…

And reacting to tears moved a man toward emotional involvement, and as challenging as he found the prim schoolteacher, he wanted to play with her, that delicious wonderful exhilarating man/woman game where you parted with a kiss and no hard feelings when it was all over.

He did not want to play the game that ended with white dresses, no matter how lovely that vision might be.

He slid a look at her and wondered when he had become so imaginative. Today she was wearing a white sweater and a black skirt and a lavender blouse with lace on it.

Not an outfit that should make a man think of weddings or virginity. Or of bubble baths or swimming in dark ocean waters. At all.

But that is where his unruly male mind went nonetheless.

Her hair was still wet from the class trip, and he wondered what she had worn at the pool. A one-piece, he decided. Matching shorts, that she probably hadn’t taken off. Not what she would wear for a midnight swim with him.

He had the sudden, disturbing thought that it might not be exactly ethical to play with Miss Maple. She wasn’t the kind of woman who understood the rules he played by. The thought was disturbing because he did not think thoughts like that. She was an adult. He was an adult. Couldn’t they just dance around each other a bit and see where it went?

No. It was a whisper. His conscience? Or maybe his bachelor survival instincts. Beware of women who make you think of weddings.

Funny, that of all the women he had gone out with, she, the least threatening, and certainly the least sexy, would be the one who would make him feel as if he needed to be the most wary, the most on guard. Because she had a sneaky kind of sexiness that crept up on you, instead of the kind that hit you over the head.

He slid her another look. No. Not the least sexy. Not at all. No, that wasn’t quite it. She wasn’t overtly sexy. Sneaky sexy in this kind of understated virginal way that could set his blood on fire. If he let it. Which he wasn’t going to. He had set his formidable will and sense of discipline against greater obstacles than her.

He turned his focus to his nephew, a welcome diversion, even in these uncomfortable circumstances.

Kyle was also standing off to the side of the car, looking into the distance, as if all this kafuffle had nothing to do with him. He looked pale to Ben, his freckles standing out against the white of his skin. He met his uncle’s accusing gaze with nothing even resembling remorse.

But it wasn’t quite belligerence, either. Amazingly it reminded Ben of the look on young soldiers’ faces when they were scared to death to do something but did what they had to do anyway.

There was a weird kind of bravery in what Kyle had done.

Between her near tears and Kyle’s attitude, Ben’s happiness was dissipating more rapidly than a snowball in August.

“I love this car,” Beth said sadly.

And Ben could tell it was true. He could tell by the sparkle shine on the wax, and the buffed white of the convertible top. He could tell by the way her fingers trembled on the scratch marks that she had been hurt and deeply.

A man allergic to love, he should have approved of her affection for the car. Why did it seem like a waste to him? Why would a woman like that waste her love on what really was just a hunk of metal and moving parts?

Because it was safe. It was a startling and totally unwanted insight into her. He slid her a look. Ah, yes, he should have seen it before.

The kind of woman who could be least trusted with the kind of man he was. He liked things light and lively and superficial, and he could see, in this moment of vulnerability, that she had already been scarred by someone. Heartbroken. Bruised.

Along with the uncontrolled direction of his own thoughts, it was a back-off insight if he had ever had one. But instead of wanting to back off, he felt a strange desire to fix it. He felt even more like he wanted to see that look on her face again that he had seen when he had told her about swimming in the dark, a look of yearning, of wonder.

“I don’t understand,” Beth said to Kyle, struggling for composure. “Why would you do this to me? I’ve been good to you, haven’t I?”