to put all her self-preserving caution aside, just for the time being. She needed to see this moment. Needed to be with the man who understood instinctively not to chase that frightened child, but to just wait. Or was that the pull of him, overriding her own carefully honed survival skills?
Ben took off his jacket, and put it on the soggy ground, patted it for her to sit on, just as if she had never said she was leaving, and just as if he had never said okay.
Something sighed in her, surrender, and she settled on his jacket, and he went down on his haunches beside her. Ben Anderson was so close she could smell his soap and how late-summer sunshine reacted to his skin.
“So,” he said after a bit, “why don’t you tell me something interesting about yourself?”
She slid him a look. This whole experience was suffused with an unsettling atmosphere of intimacy, and now he wanted to know something interesting about her? He had actually asked that as if he had not a doubt there was something interesting about her.
“What you consider interesting and what I consider interesting are probably two different things,” she hedged.
“Uh-huh,” he agreed. “Tell me, anyway.”
And she realized he wanted Kyle to hear them talking, to hear that it was just a normal conversation, not about him, not loaded with anger or anxiety.
She suddenly could not think of one interesting thing about herself. Not one. “You first,” she said primly.
“I like the ocean and warm weather,” he said, almost absently, scanning the marshy ground, the reeds, the tall grass around Migg’s Pond, not looking at her. “I like waves, and boats, swimming and surfing and deep-sea fishing. I like the moodiness of the sea, that it’s cranky some days and calm others. I was stationed in Hawaii for a while, and I still miss it.”
She tried not to gulp visibly. This was a little too close to her desert-island fantasy. She could picture him, with impossible clarity, standing at the water’s edge, half-naked, sun and salt kissing his flawless body and his beautiful golden skin, white-foamed waves caressing the hard lines of his legs.
As if that vision had not made her feel weak with some unnamed wanting, he kept talking.
“I used to swim at night sometimes, the water black, and the sky black, and no line between them. It’s like swimming in the stars.”
“It sounds cold,” she said, a pure defensive move against the picture he was painting, against the wanting unfurling within her like a limp flag in a gathering breeze.
“No,” he said. “It’s not cold at all. Even on colder days, the ocean stays about the same temperature year round. It’s not warm like a bathtub, but kind of like—” he paused, thinking “—like silk that’s been left outside in a spring breeze.”
He did not look like a man who would know silk from flannel. But of course he would. The finest lingerie was made of silk, and no doubt he had worlds of experience with that.
“Parachutes,” he said succinctly.
“Excuse me?”
“Made of silk.”
As if it was that easy to read her mind! She hoped he wasn’t going to ask her about her interesting experiences again. She had nothing at all to offer a man intimately familiar with night swimming, silk and jumping out of airplanes.
“Have you ever gone swimming in the dark, Beth?”
She hoped she was not blushing. This was totally unfair. Totally. She couldn’t even sputter out a correction, that she wanted him to call her Miss Maple. Because she didn’t. She wanted him to call her Beth, and she wanted to swim in the darkness. And run out and buy silk underwear. And maybe sign up for skydiving lessons while she was at it.
The problem with a man like him was that he could make a person with a perfectly normal, satisfying life feel a kind of restless yearning for something more.
A restless yearning that had made her throw caution to the wind once before, she reminded herself. In her virtual romance with Rock, she had dared to embrace the unknown, the concept of adventure.
It had ended badly, and it would be worse if she let this man past her defenses, defenses which had seemed substantial until an hour ago.
Ben Anderson, conqueror of thousands of hearts, she reminded herself desperately. Possibly more!
“No,” she managed to choke out. “I’ve never gone swimming in the dark.” It felt like a confession, way too personal, desert-island confidences, not swamp exchanges.
“Too bad,” he said, and looked at her, his pity real, as if it was written all over her she’d never swum in the dark.
She wondered, suddenly, horribly, if his nighttime swimming escapades had included swimming trunks.
Another thing she could add to the list of things she had never done, skinny-dipping. And would never do, either, if she had an ounce of self-respect!
Never mind that the thought of silk warm water on naked skin triggered some longing in her that was primal, dangerous and sensual.
“Though, I love to swim,” she said. “We always had a pool.”
“Ah, a pool,” he said, as if that sounded tame indeed.
“Couldn’t you have lived there?” she asked, wishing he had stayed there. “In Hawaii?”
“I guess I could have.”
“Then why didn’t you?” She didn’t mean it to come out as an accusation, but it did anyway. She felt as if her whole life could have remained so much safer and so much more predictable if he had made that choice. She certainly wouldn’t be sitting here, longing for sensuality!
Buck up, she told herself sternly, you can have a bubble bath when you get home.
“I grew up here. My sister was here,” he said, softly. “And Kyle.”
She saw a nearby patch of rushes rustle, and realized Kyle had been that close all along, listening. He had heard every word. How had she missed that he was there?
Her eyes met the boy’s. “Why, Kyle,” she said. “There you are! We came here hoping to find you.”
She hoped she had not spoken too soon, that he would not get up and bolt away, not ready to be found.
But Kyle stood up awkwardly and made his way over the slippery ground toward them. Which was a relief, not just because he was safe, and found, but because she didn’t have to try and come up with something interesting to share with his uncle about herself.
As if she had anything that could compare to swimming in the dark in Hawaii!
Ben stood up then, and if he was affected by the long wait, crouched on his haunches, it did not show. Kyle came with no hesitation. Beth could see he was relieved to have been found, relieved his uncle was not angry with him. He had heard his uncle, and somehow his uncle had said exactly the right thing, exactly what that child needed to hear.
That
