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

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 (#ulink_d8ff2ab3-ff67-56cd-897f-1df96435dc03)

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.