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.
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
