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

And there was a reason for that.

He’d had his fill of hard times and heartaches. He’d known more loss by the time he was twenty-one than most people would experience in a lifetime.

He’d become determined to have fun, and he’d become just as determined that the easiest way to stop having fun was to start caring about someone other than himself.

“We can be friends or we can be lovers,” he said with far more firmness than he felt. “We can’t be both.”

He could tell by the shocked look on her face she hadn’t even considered that’s where kisses led.

“Wow,” she said. “You know how to go from A to Z with no stopping in between.”

Well put. “Exactly.”

She looked at him for a long time. He had the feeling Beth Maple saw things about him that he didn’t really want people to see.

She confirmed that by saying, “You know, Ben, you strike me as somebody who needs a friend more than a lover.”

He wanted to tell her he had plenty of friends, but that wasn’t exactly true. Not girl friends. He told himself he’d gotten the answer he wanted, the answer that kept everything nice and safe, especially his lips. He told himself this would be a good place to leave it. But naturally he wasn’t smart enough to do that.

“And what do you need?” He was surprised that he asked, more surprised by how badly he wanted to hear her answer. What if she said, “I need to have a wild fling where I learn to let down my hair and live up to what my lips are telling you about me”?

He held his breath, but he got the stock Miss Maple answer.

“I need not to get involved with a family member of one of my students. On a lover level.”

She blushed when she said it. What a relief. She couldn’t even say lover let alone invite him to have a wild fling with her.

Her cheeks, staining the color of the beets his mother used to can, told him a truth about her. And about himself.

A man could never take her as a lover. She was the kind of woman who required way more than a recreational romp in the hay, whether she knew that about herself or not. She was the kind of woman who needed commitment. He’d known that from practically their first meeting when she had tossed that word around so lightly!

She was the kind of girl who would never be satisfied with the superficial, who would demand a man leave his self-centered ways behind him.

To be worthy of her. Which he was pretty darn sure he wasn’t.

Thank God.

“Well, I’m glad we got that sorted out,” he said doubtfully.

“Me, too,” she said.

“It’s not that I didn’t like kissing you.”

“I understand.”

“So, you won’t kiss me again?” What had his life become? He was begging a very pretty woman not to kiss him!

For her own good. Maybe he was becoming a better man, despite himself.

“I’ll do my best,” she said solemnly. And then, just when he thought she totally got what he was trying to tell her, she giggled, tried to hold it back and snorted in a most un-Miss Maple way.

He scowled at her.

“Rein myself in,” she promised, and then snickered again. “Wanton floozy. I didn’t mean to throw myself at you.”

“Nobody says things like that,” he said, irritated. “Wanton floozy.”

She was laughing and snorting in an effort to restrain herself. “Oh, you know us readers of romance novels.”

“You know, that’s another annoying thing about you—” besides the fact that she looked absolutely glorious when she laughed, and her nose wrinkled like that “—you have this mind like a computer, and you store away every single thing a person ever says to you for later use. Against them.”

She finally got the laughter under control, thankfully. Though now that he thought about it, he was not sure he liked that thoughtful, stripping way she was looking at him any better.

“You know what else was missing from your past relationships? Besides friendship?”

It was very obvious she planned to tell him, whether he wanted to hear it or not. Which he didn’t. At least not very much. He glared at her, folded his arms over his chest.

“Brains,” she said, softly. “No wonder you were bored.”

“I never said I was bored!” But he realized he had been. Every single time, after the initial thrill, bored beyond belief.

“Well, based on what you said about your past history, someone was bored.”

“Relationships can end for reasons other than that.” She wasn’t insinuating the other person had been bored with him, was she?

“Yes, that’s true. Maybe you’re a bad lover.”

He opened his mouth to protest, but caught the gleeful twinkle in her eye, and snapped it shut again before he gave her more cause to laugh.

He wasn’t sure he even wanted to be friends with her after all, he thought, a trifle sullenly. She saw way too much. And said too much.

But what choice did he have? He had to finish building her tree house. And Kyle was going to be in her class for another nine months or so.

Excuses. Because it really did seem like his life the way it had been before she came along was not what he wanted anymore.

He’d been lonely. He knew that now.

She had been right. He needed a friend. He needed a friend just like her. As long as they didn’t go and wreck it all by changing it to something else.

Feeling as if he had just navigated a minefield where he had managed, just barely, not to get himself blown to smithereens, he retreated to his truck and drove home. When they got in the house, Kyle announced he was going to do his homework.

Ben decided it would be counterproductive to remind Kyle he didn’t do homework. Instead he contemplated that development, and allowed himself to feel a moment’s satisfaction about how his plan was working the miracle that hers had not. But maybe it was bike riding that had worked the miracle, and that had been her idea. Turned into a project in cooperation. An outing with a family feeling to it.

Maybe that was at the heart of the miracle. That feeling of family. Ben’s wisdom in saying nay to the kisses was confirmed, though there was a sharp and undeniable tingle of regret that went with it every time he thought about it. Or her lips.

He was still contemplating that when the phone rang. Miss Maple’s personal number on his call display. He hadn’t even been away from the many and varied temptations of her for an hour! Once upon a time, he remembered he had hoped she would call him. But that was before he’d known how capable she was of shaking up his world.

Still, it was not reluctance he felt when he answered the phone, much as he knew it should be.