“I’ll help you with the puzzle,” he decided, and took a careful seat. Did the chair groan under his weight?
He handed her the pizza since the table was not big enough to accommodate the box. He didn’t miss the fact she raised an eyebrow at him, but took the pizza, and got them plates.
“Knife and fork?” she asked him.
“Get real.” He squinted at the crossword puzzle. He should have known. It was one of the really hard ones, not like the sports one that came with the weekly TV guide in the local paper, which had supersimple clues like “Who is the most famous running back of all time?”
Out of the corner of his eye, he saw her setting a knife and fork on one of the plates.
“No utensils or I’ll take my pizza and go home. Pizza is food you eat with your hands.” Loosen up, he wanted to tell her. But then he wasn’t so sure he wanted her to loosen up, especially when she complied with his instructions and brought over two plates, no utensils. She picked up her slice gingerly and took a tiny bite, then licked a wayward speck of sauce off her index finger.
He was not so sure he should have encouraged her. Watching Miss Maple eat pizza with her hands was a vaguely erotic experience, nearly as bad as watching her eat tiger ice cream.
He reminded himself they were unchaperoned. He was not even allowed to think anything that was vaguely erotic.
So, he concentrated on the crossword book. “A six-letter word for dumb?” he asked her, but spelled in his head B-e-n.
“Stupid?”
He scorned the pencil she handed him and picked up a pen off the table. “Nitwit.”
“You can’t fill it out in pen!” She didn’t look too happy about him touching her book while he was eating, either.
“We’re living dangerously,” he reminded her. “I’ll buy you a new book if I get pizza on it.”
“I wasn’t worried about my book!” she said huffily.
“Yes, you were. What’s a seven-letter word for hot spot?”
“Volcano? I wasn’t worried about the book.”
“Yes you were. Hell,” he said, pleased.
“Hell does not have seven letters!”
“Hellish, then,” he wrote it in, pressing hard on the pen so she wouldn’t get any ideas about erasing it later. “Eight-letter word for aggravation?”
“Anderson?” she said sweetly.
How did she count letters so darn fast? “Perfect,” he said approvingly, and wrote it in. “This is too easy for us. Next time the New York Times.”
Next time. Way to go, nitwit.
But somehow the evening did become easy. As they focused on the puzzle, she lost her shyness. She even was eating the pizza with relish. Her wall of reservation came down around her as she got into the spirit of wrecking the puzzle.
“Incognito,” she crowed.
“It doesn’t fit.”
Impatiently she took the pen from him, scowled at the puzzle and then wrote, “Inkono.”
“Miss Maple, you are getting the hang of this,” he said with approval. “That makes zuntkun down.”
“Zuntkun,” she said happily, “a seven-letter word for an exotic horned animal in Africa if I’m not mistaken.”
“Done,” he declared, half an hour later looking down at the mess of scribbles and crossed-out words and wrong words with complete satisfaction. So was most of the pizza. So was his control.
This close to her, he could smell lavender and vanilla over the lingering scent of pizza. He liked the laughter in her eyes, and the crinkle on her nose. He decided to make both deepen. He ripped the puzzle out of the book.
“What are you doing?”
“It’s a little something on you. From now on I have this to show your class how their teacher spells incognito in a pinch. If you make me happy, I’ll never have to use it.”
“How would I make you happy?” she asked warily.
“Use your imagination. Any woman who can spell incognito like that, and who can invent horned beasts in Africa, has to have a pretty good imagination.”
“I have a better idea. Just give it back.”
“I’m not one of your fifth-graders. I don’t have to do things just because you say so. You come get it,” he teased, and at the look on her face he pushed back his chair.
She moved toward him. “Give it!”
“Don’t make me run,” he said. “You have highly breakable bric-a-brac.”
She lunged at him. He turned and 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.