hard muscle, taut, flawless skin, a smudge of dirt across the ridged plane of his belly, sweat shining in the deep hollow of his throat, just above the deep, strong expanse of a smooth chest. His jeans, nearly white with age and washing, hung low on the jut of his hips. His stomach was so flat that the jeans were suspended from hip to hip, creating a lip-licking little gap where the waistband was not even touching his skin.
Beth watched his easy swing of the hammer, the corresponding ripple of muscle. It made her feel almost dizzy. She had known from the start Ben Anderson needed a label. Contents too potent to handle. She had never gotten a thrill like this over the Internet, that was for sure!
It was embarrassing to be this enamored with his physical being, but he was so real. No wonder she had found her Internet romance as delightful as she had. The presence of a real man was anything but; it was disturbing.
It was disturbing to feel so tense around another human being, so aware of them, and so aware of unexplored parts of yourself.
Beth felt she would have been quite content to go through life without knowing that she possessed this hunger.
Now that she did know she possessed it, how did she go back to what she had been before? What did she do about it? Surrender? Fight it?
Surely baking cookies was no kind of answer! But it bought her time. Which she should have used wisely. She could have done an Internet search for defenses against diabolically attractive men instead of spying from her kitchen window!
This was the third time Ben and Kyle had been here, twice after school, short sessions where his shirt had stayed on. Though for Beth, seeing him deal with that fragile boy with just the right mix of sternness and affection had been attractive in and of itself. She could see that her initial assessment of Ben Anderson—that he could not be domesticated—had been inaccurate. When she saw his patience with Kyle, and the way he guided the child toward making his own decisions, she knew she was looking at a man who would be a wonderful daddy someday, who was growing in confidence in this role of mentor and guardian.
Now it was Saturday and Ben had shown up this morning, way too early, announcing they would spend the whole day.
Saturday was her sleep-in day, and her grocery day, and her laundry day, and her errand day, and she had canceled everything she normally would have done without a second thought. Groceries or hanging out with Ben Anderson. Duh.
The buzzer on the oven rang, and Beth moved, reluctantly, from the window and removed the cookies, dripping with melted chocolate chips, from her oven. While she waited for them to cool, she debated, milk or lemonade? Milk would go better with the cookies, lemonade would go better with the day.
That’s what having a man like that in your yard did to you. Every decision suddenly seemed momentous. It felt as if her choice would say something about her. To him.
In the end she put milk and lemonade on the tray. To confuse him, just in case her choices were telling him anything about her.
He set down his hammer when he saw her coming, smiled that lazy, sexy smile that was setting her world on edge. Kyle, who was hard at work digging something, set down the shovel eagerly.
She had known Ben was a man with good instincts. This project was not just good for Kyle. The turn-around in his attitude seemed nothing short of spectacular. It was as if he had been uncertain he had any value in the world, and suddenly he saw what hard work—his hard work—could accomplish. He could see how the face of the world could be changed by him in small ways, like her yard. And the possibility of changing the world in big ways opened to him for the first time.
When Ben had unfolded his drawing of the yard, he had included his nephew and consulted with him, listened to him, showed respect for his opinions. And Ben had done the same for her.
The three of them were building something together, and in her most clear moments she was aware it was not just a tree house.
The plan that Ben had drawn for her tree retreat filled some part of her that she did not know had been empty. It was deceptively simple. A staircase spiraled around the tree trunk, though it actually never touched it, because Ben had been concerned about keeping the tree healthy, by not driving nails into the trunk or branches.
The staircase led to a simple railed platform that sat solidly in amongst the strongest branches, but was again supported mostly by the subtle use of posts and beams.
Ben’s concern for the health of her tree had surprised her, showed her, again, that there was something more there than rugged appeal and rippling muscle. Ben had a thoughtfulness about him, though if she were to point it out, she was certain he would laugh and deny it.
She soon found out executing such a vision was not that simple. There had been digging, digging and more digging. Then leveling and compacting. She had insisted on having a turn on the compactor, a machine that looked like a lawn mower, only it was heavier and had a mind of its own.
Ben had turned it on, and while under his watchful eye she had tried to guide it around the base of the tree where there would be a concrete pad. The compactor was like handling a jackhammer. The shaking went up her whole body. She felt like a bobble-head doll being hijacked!
“Whoa,” she called over and over, but the machine did not listen. Despite all Ben’s efforts to be kind to the tree, she banged into the trunk of it three times.
Kyle finally yelled over the noise, begging her to stop, he was laughing so hard. And then she had dared to glance away from her work. Ben was laughing, too.
And then she was laughing, which the unruly machine took advantage of by taking off across her lawn and ripping out a patch of it, until Ben grabbed it and shut it off and gently put her away from it.
“Miss Maple?”
“Yes?”
“You’re fired.”
When had she last laughed like that? Until her sides hurt? Until everything bad that had ever happened to her was washed away in the golden light of that shared moment? The laughter had made her feel new and alive, and as though life held possibilities that she had never dreamed of.
Possibilities as good as or even better than the tree sanctuary that was becoming a reality in her backyard.
The world she had allowed herself to have suddenly seemed way too rigid, the dreams she had given up on beckoned again. Everything shimmered, but was it an illusion of an oasis or was it something real?
Watching Ben work made it harder to see those distinctions, flustered her, and made her feel off balance. When a concrete truck had arrived, she had watched as Ben, so sure of himself, so in charge, so at ease, had directed that spout of creamy cement, pouring concrete footings, a pad for the staircase and a small patio.
It was his world. He was in charge. Competent. Decisive. All business and no nonsense as he showed Kyle what needed to be done. The concrete work seemed so hard, and yet there was nothing in him that shirked from it, he seemed to enjoy using his strength to create such lasting structures. That alone was deeply attractive in ways she didn’t quite understand, but it was when the concrete was beginning to set that he added the shimmer.
The stern expression of absolute concentration fell away. He set down the trowel he’d been using and showing Kyle how to use. “Come on over, Beth, let’s show them forever who did this.”
Not
