Fiona Lowe – Propositioned by the Playboy: Miss Maple and the Playboy / The Playboy Doctor's Marriage Proposal / The New Girl in Town (страница 5)

I told my uncle she was old and mean and ugly because it would have been so much easier for me if that’s what she had been. Plus him being a lady-killer and all, I didn’t want him to ever get anywhere near her. Because who knows what would happen next?

I like knowing what is going to happen next. Even though it is supergross to think of your uncle and your teacher liking each other, I had an ugly feeling that it was a possibility. I am always thinking of possibilities, trying really hard not to be surprised by life.

I guess I should never have given him the note from her, because it was worse than I imagined when they saw each other. I know that look. It usually happens just when my life is getting good, too. Just me and my mom, then that look between her and the latest loser and it’s a straight downhill slide from there. Not that my uncle or Miss Maple are losers, but I still think if it runs in the family, I’m doomed.

I can probably scare her off my uncle. Sheesh. He comes with a kid. The most rotten kid in her class. She’s no dummy. She can do math, too. But what if he decides to have her and get rid of me?

This is the kind of question that makes my stomach hurt. I will just keep her from ever wanting to get mixed up with us.

I wonder if Miss Maple will scream if I put a frog in her desk?

I saw one, a really big one, at Migg’s Pond, which is behind the school and out of bounds, except for the science-class field trip. We didn’t go on field trips in my old school.

And just thinking about that, how to capture that frog, instead of my mom lying alone in a hospital, and whether or not my uncle is going to keep me, or whether my uncle and Miss Maple are going to progress to the making-eyes-at-each-other stage, eases the ache in my stomach enough that I can go to sleep, finally.

But only if I leave the light on.

CHAPTER TWO

BETH Maple heard a slightly muffled snicker just as she was sliding open her top desk drawer looking for a prize for Mary Kay Narsunchuk, who had just won the weekly spelling bee.

During the whole spelling bee, out of the corner of her eye, Beth had seen Kyle O. Anderson looking absently out the window, seeming not to pay attention, unaware his mouth was silently forming every letter of every word she had challenged the class with, including the one that had finally stumped Mary Kay, finesse. But every time she had called on him to spell a word, Kyle had just frowned and ducked his head.

It was an improvement over last week’s spelling bee. Whenever she had called on Kyle that time, he had spelled a word, all right, but never the word he’d been given. When the word was tarry, he spelled tarantula, when she gave him forte, he spelled, or started to spell fornication. She had cut him off before he’d completed the word. Thankfully, no one in her grade-five class seemed to have any idea what that exchange had been about.

But Kyle was being suspiciously well-behaved for this spelling bee. At her most optimistic she hoped that meant his uncle had talked to him after their meeting last night about the plan, and had implemented the reward system at home.

It was probably that momentary lapse, thinking about Kyle’s uncle, that made Beth react slowly to the snicker as she was opening her desk drawer. Her brain shouting “Beware” did not get to her hand in time. Of course, her brain could just as well have been warning her off the gorgeous, full-of-himself, Ben Anderson, as the contents of her desk drawer!

A blob of green exploded from the desk, and collided with her hand, unbelievably squishy and revolting. Beth did what no grade-five teacher should ever do.

She screamed, then caught herself and stuffed her fist in her mouth. She regarded the largest frog she had ever seen, which sat not three feet in front of her on the floor, glaring at her with beady reptilian eyes.

It’s only a frog, she told herself sternly, but nevertheless she screamed again when it leaped forward. She could hear Kyle’s satisfied chortles above all the other sounds in a classroom that was quickly dissolving into pandemonium.

Twelve economy-size knights rushed to rescue their teacher, aka damsel-in-distress, though she was not naive enough to believe chivalry had trumped the pure temptation of the frog.

Casper Hearn led the charge, a big boy, throwing desks and hysterical girls out of his way as he stampeded around the room in pursuit of the frog.

But somehow, out of the melee, it was Kyle who emerged, panting, the frog clutched to his chest. Now he faced the other boys, something desperate in his pinched, pale face as they surrounded him. His freckles were standing out in relief he was so white.

“Give me the frog,” Casper ordered Kyle with distinct menace.

“I’ll warn you once to stay away from me,” Kyle said, a warning that might have been more effective if his voice wasn’t shaking and Casper didn’t outweigh him by a good thirty pounds.

Casper laughed. “Is that so? Then what?”

“Then the aisles will run with the fat melting from your bodies!” Kyle shouted, slipping the frog inside his shirt.

Casper took a startled step back from Kyle. The classroom became eerily silent. Casper stared at Kyle, shook his head and then went and sat down, followed by the other boys.

Kyle gave Beth a look she interpreted as apologetic and darted out the door, Kermit happily ensconced in his shirt.

When he didn’t return, she realized with a horrible sense of resignation she was going to have to inform Kyle’s uncle she had lost his nephew.

And the truth was, Beth Maple would have been just as happy if she never had to speak to Ben Anderson again.

Or at least the part of her that hadn’t nearly swooned from the pure and powerful presence of the man would be happy.

The other part, despicably weak, yearned for just one more peek at him.

Beth thought that Ben Anderson was the type of man who should have a warning label on him. There was that word again. “Beware.” Followed by “Contents too potent to handle.”

She did not think she had ever been around a man who was so casually and extraordinarily sexy. When he had walked into her room yesterday, it was as if everything but him had faded to nothing. No wonder she had thought he was in the wrong place, hopelessly lost amongst the welcoming fall leaves that dripped from her ceiling and brushed the top of his head.

Ben Anderson was all masculine power. Every single thing about him, from the ease with which he held that amazing male body, to the cast of features made more mesmerizing by the fact his once-perfect nose had the crook of a break in it, radiated some kind of vital male energy.

He oozed strength and self-assurance, from the ripple of muscle, to the upward quirk of a sexy lip. But somehow all that self-assurance was saved from becoming arrogance by the light that danced in eyes as green as a summer swimming hole. Ben Anderson’s eyes were warm and laughter filled. Kyle’s propensity for mischief was undoubtedly genetic.

Still, something lurked behind the easy laughter of his eyes, the upward quirk of that sexy mouth. There was an untouchable place in Ben Anderson that was as remote as a mountaintop. But unfortunately, rather than making him less attractive, it intrigued, added to a kind of sizzling sensuality that tingled in the air around him.

Ben Anderson had that certain indefinable something that made women melt.

And he knew it, too, the scoundrel.

Beth, sharing her classroom with him last evening, had been totally aware she was an impossibly unworldly grade-five teacher, with nothing at all in her experience to prepare her for a man like that.

You didn’t meet a man like Ben Anderson on the university campus. No, his type went to high, lonely places and battlefields. Even if Kyle had not mentioned to Beth that his uncle had been a marine, she would have known he had something other men did not have. It was in the warrior cast in his face, and the calm readiness in the way he carried himself.

He was not the kind of man she met at the parent-teacher conference, the kind who had devoted himself to a wife and children and a dream of picket fences. She met the occasional single dad, attractive in an expensive charcoal-gray suit, but never anything even remotely comparable to Ben Anderson.

Ben’s eyes resting on her face had made her feel as if an unwanted trembling, pre-earthquake, had started deep inside of her.

She hated that feeling, of somehow not being in control of herself, which probably explained why she had been driven to explain the educational benefits of her classroom tree to him. And to quote Aristotle! Who did that to a man like him?

But Beth Maple loved being in control, and she especially loved it since her one crazy and totally uncharacteristic trip outside her comfort zone had left her humiliated and ridiculously heartbroken.

She had known better. She was the least likely person to ever make the mistake she had made. She was well educated. Cautious. Conventional. Conservative. But she had been lured into love over the Internet.

Her love, Rock Kildore, had turned out to be a complete fabrication, as if the name shouldn’t have warned her. “Rock” was really Ralph Kaminsky, a fifty-two-year-old married postal clerk from Tarpool Springs, Mississippi. What he was not was a single jet-setting computer whiz from Oakland, California, who worked largely in Abu Dhabi and who claimed to have fallen hopelessly in love with a fifth-grade teacher. Even the pictures he’d posted had been fake.