ran, holding the puzzle out in front of him. She chased him out of the kitchen and through the living room, around the coffee table and over the couch. The vases on the floor wobbled as he thundered by, but did not break.
She backed him into a corner up the hallway, by her open bedroom door. Decorated in many, many shades of virginal white. Unless he was going to mow her over, or move into her bedroom, which was out of the question, he was trapped. And delightfully so.
“Surrender,” she demanded, holding out her hand.
“Surrender? As in nine-letter word for give up? Not in the marine vocabulary.”
She made a snatch for it.
He held the puzzle over his head. “Come and get it,” he said, and laughed when she leaped ineffectually at him.
Her face was glowing. She looked pretty and uninhibited and ferociously determined to have her own way. After several leaps, she tried to climb up him.
With her sock feet on top of his sock feet and her full length pressed against him, she tried to leverage herself for the climb up him. With one arm around his neck, and one toe on his knee, she reached for the paper, laughing breathlessly, her nose as crinkled as a bunny’s.
She suddenly realized what she was doing. He wondered if it felt as good for her as it did for him. She went very still.
And then backed off from him so fast she nearly fell over. He resisted the impulse to steady her.
“Hmm,” he said quietly. “That made me happy. Your puzzle is safe with me, for now. Unfortunately, I have to go.” He looked at his watch. “Kyle will be home soon. I don’t want him to come into an empty house. I think there’s been a little too much of that in his life.”
“You’re a good man, Ben Anderson,” she said.
He felt the mood changing, softening, moving back to where it had been this afternoon when she had laid her hand on his arm and he had felt oddly undone by it.
So he waggled the puzzle at her, eager to keep it light. Maybe even hoping to tempt her to try and climb up him one more time to retrieve it.
“I’m not really a good man,” he said. “I have the puzzle, and I’m not afraid to use this. Don’t forget.”
“I’ll see you to the door,” she said, not lured in, and with ridiculous formality, given that she had just tried to climb him like a tree. She preceded him to it, held it open.
“Thank you for the pizza.” Again the formal note was in her voice.
“You’re welcome.”
He stood there for a minute, looking at her. Don’t do it, he told himself. She wasn’t ready to have her world rattled. She wasn’t ready for a man like him. There was no sense complicating things between them.
But, as it turned out, she made the choice, not him. Just as he turned to go out the door, he felt her hand, featherlight, on his shoulder. He turned back, and it was she who stood on her tiptoes and brushed her lips against his.
It was like tasting cool, clean water after years of drinking water gone brackish. It was innocence, in a world of cynicism. It was beauty in a world that had been ugly. It was a glimpse of a place he had never been.
So the truth was not that she was not ready for a man like him. The truth was that he was not ready for a woman like her.
Who would require so much of him. Who would require him to learn his whole world all over again. Who would require him to be so much more than he had ever been before.
“Well,” she said, stepping back from him, her eyes wide, as if she could not believe her own audacity, “I’m glad we addressed the elephant.”
But he wasn’t so sure. The elephant had been sleeping contentedly. Now that they had “addressed” it, they couldn’t go back to where they had been before. Now that they had “addressed” it, it was going to be hungry.
Now that they’d addressed it, her lips were going to be more an issue for him, not less.
The elephant was now taking up the whole room instead of just a corner in the shadows, swaying sleepily on its feet, not being too obtrusive at all.
She leaned toward him again, and he held his breath. If she kissed him again, he was not going to be responsible for what happened next. Didn’t she know the first thing about men?
But then she snatched the paper he’d forgotten all about from his hand, and laughed gleefully. Maybe she knew more about men than she had let on. She had certainly known how to collapse his defenses completely.
“Good night, Ben,” she said sweetly.
And all the way home he brooded about whether she had just kissed him to get her hands on that damned puzzle. He was still brooding about it when Kyle came through the front door.
He stopped brooding and stared at his nephew. Kyle was shining.
“Uncle Ben,” Kyle said breathlessly. “What does it mean when a girl kisses you?” And then, without waiting for an answer, “I guess she likes you a lot, huh?”
Ben contemplated that for a minute, and then said, “I guess she does.” Either that or she wants something, like her puzzle back.
SHE’D actually kissed Ben Anderson, Beth thought, as she put the leftover pizza in the fridge and the pizza box in the garbage.
Oh, no, not just kissed him, but instigated the kiss.
“What’s that about?” she asked herself. Well, he’d encouraged her. “Live dangerously,” he’d said.
Not wantonly, she chastised herself, floozy. And then she laughed at herself. Wantonly? Floozy? In this day and age a kiss like that wouldn’t be considered wanton. It wouldn’t make a woman a floozy.
She was twenty-five years old and she’d dared to brush lips with a man so attractive he made her heart stand still. She was glad she’d done it. She felt no regret at all. In fact, Beth Maple felt quite pleased with herself. There was something about being around him that made her want to be a different person.
Not reserved. Not shy. Not afraid. Not hiding from life.
She wanted to be a person who did the crossword all wrong and admitted it was so much more fun than doing it right. She uncrumpled her hard-won prize and looked at it, then moved into her kitchen and used a magnet to put it in a place of honor on her fridge.
The new Beth would break rules. The new Beth would not wait for a man to kiss her, but would kiss him if she felt like it.
She contemplated the experience of touching her lips to his and felt a quiver of pure pleasure. Imagine. She had almost gone through life without kissing a man like that! What a loss!
Ben Anderson had tasted even better than she could have hoped. It was as if the walls around her safe and structured
