Once in a Lifetime (17 page)

“Never?” He found this hard to believe. “You’re telling me through all your teenage years here in Lucky Harbor, no guy ever brought you up here to make out?”

She smiled. “I wasn’t as easy as I looked.”

“I found that a lot with girls back then,” he said on a disappointed sigh that made her laugh.

He loved the sound of her laugh. Her eyes lit and her face softened. Not that she wasn’t always beautiful, because she was. But when she smiled like that, she relaxed and…let him in.

He knew she wasn’t good at it. He got that he was one of the chosen few. He had to admit he liked that and found himself wanting even more.

“How did you ever find this spot?” she asked.

“Luke found it years ago, out of necessity.”

“Necessity?”

He smiled. “You were never a teenage boy.”

“That is an accurate statement.”

He laughed. “As a whole, the breed tends to need a lot of unsupervised time away from authority of any kind. It makes it easier to get in all sorts of trouble, which is incredibly attractive to the breed in general.”

She smiled. “What did you all do?”

“Probably best to ask what we
didn’t
do. For one thing, we’d steal Luke’s sister’s stash of pot. Or booze from Jack’s dad. We weren’t choosy. Whatever we could get our klepto fingers on. Then I’d tell Dee that Jack and I were going to spend the night at Luke’s, and Luke would tell his grandma he was going to Jack’s.”

“Ah,” she said. “The switch and bait.”

“Yep.”

“And then you would…” She arched a brow.

“Hike up here. We’d make a campfire—also illegal—and then get drunk or high and sleep out beneath the stars. We were complete idiots.” But those times, just the three of them against the world, were vivid in Ben’s mind. They were some of his fondest memories.

“You ever get caught?” she asked.

“Bite your tongue.” He smiled. “Nope, we never got caught.”

She shook her head, smiling a little bit, too, enjoying the story. “Hard to picture Detective Luke Hanover and Fire Marshal Jack Harper being juvenile delinquents,” she said.

“But not hard to imagine me as one?” he asked mildly.

Now she laughed outright. “Benjamin McDaniel, you were born a delinquent.”

This was true enough, and he smiled at the sight of her relaxing a little bit, enjoying herself at his expense. “Some things are in the blood, I guess,” he said.

Her smile slowly faded. “I didn’t mean—”

“I know.” He couldn’t help the genes he’d come from—he got that. And most of the time he never even thought about it, about his real parents. He’d honestly been kidding. But Aubrey shocked the hell out of him when she put her hands on his jaw and stared fiercely into his eyes. “We’re
not
our parents,” she said. “We’re self-made.”

He dropped his forehead to hers. “Is that why you’re killing yourself with that list?”

She closed her eyes and laughed softly.

“Tell me about the professor,” he said.

Sighing, she pulled back from him and stared out into the water. “I met him when I was in college in Seattle. He taught English there, my favorite subject.”

Having hated English, Ben made a face, and she laughed again. “He brought it all to life,” she said. “And it dazzled me. He dazzled me.”

Ben had a feeling he knew where this was going, and he wasn’t going to like it. “Tell me.”

“I slept with him,” Aubrey admitted out loud for the first time, glad for the dark. “It was against the rules, of course, not that I cared. All I cared about was how this smart, funny, amazing man found me attractive.”

“He looks like he has twenty years on you,” Ben said.

His voice was low and not nearly as calm as usual. He was mad at the professor on her behalf. But what had happened had been one hundred percent Aubrey’s own doing and all her fault. “Forty didn’t look so bad,” she said. “Not on Professor Bennett.” She pulled her knees up and wrapped her arms around them, suddenly a little chilled. “He gave me the attention I’d been seeking, and for one whole, glorious quarter, it was really great.”

Ben slid close and rubbed his hand up and down her arm, as if trying to warm and soothe her. “What happened?”

This was the hard part. “One day I heard a couple of the other professors talking about him, how he liked to pick a pretty blonde every semester to be his pet, in spite of the fact that he was a married man. They said someday someone was going to turn him in and he’d lose his job.” She paused, remembering the agony and humiliation. “So that’s what happened. The college got a tip that he’d been screwing a pretty blonde, and he was fired, a year before he would’ve gotten tenure.”

“Tenure doesn’t mean shit when you break the rule and fuck around with an underage minor,” Ben said harshly.

“I wasn’t underage. I was twenty.”

“And he was
forty
,” he said. “You were twenty and this guy was forty, and you think this is
your
fault? Hell, no, Aubrey, it doesn’t work like that. Jesus. You were just a kid. He took advantage of you.”

“You’re missing the point,” she said. “
I
called in the tip.”

He turned her to face him and ducked down a little to look her in the eyes. “You were a
kid
,” he repeated.

“I got him fired, Ben.”

“Good.”

She stared at him. He was sitting there, vibrating tension and being pissed off on her behalf. And then it hit her, why she felt so…moved. No one had ever been pissed off on her behalf before. “I wasn’t a kid. I was an adult,” she said. “And on top of that, I knew the consequences of sleeping with a professor.”

“Did you know he was married?”

“No,” she admitted. “Not until I heard those other professors talking about him. I reacted with temper and hurt feelings. I shouldn’t have made that call.”

“So you went to his place tonight to
apologize
?” he asked incredulously.

“Yes, actually,” she said, and then hesitated. “Until I saw him with his wife.” She shook her head. “He’s still married. Or maybe she’s a new wife. It doesn’t matter; she was wearing a big fat diamond ring. I’m not going to mess with his life for a second time just to assuage my guilty conscience.”

“How about I go mess with his life by rearranging his face?” Ben muttered.

She laughed, but Ben’s expression was carved in granite, and her smiled faded. “You aren’t serious.”

He just looked at her, eyes flat, mouth flat.

He was dead serious.

“No,” she said, shaking her head. “No. I want you to forget everything I’ve told you tonight.”

Testosterone pouring off him in waves, he looked away, out at the water, noncommittal. The queen of noncommittal herself, Aubrey cupped his face and pulled him back around. “I mean it,” she said. “Put it out of your head.”

“How do you suppose I should do that, Aubrey—put it out of my mind?”

Oh, listen to him, all alpha and furious with it. The man who’d made sure she knew that he didn’t want a committed relationship with her. She was beginning to suspect he was full of shit about that, but who was she to tell him so? Lots of people hadn’t wanted to be with her, including her own father.

But there was a lot of room between nothing and a committed relationship. “We should fill your mind with something else,” she suggested, making her voice soft and sultry.

His gaze immediately went all heavy-lidded, and his voice lowered as well, to that sexy drawl that did her in every time. “Such as?”

Her gaze dropped to his mouth. “Well, to be honest, a few things come to mind.”

“Tell me,” he said huskily.

“Hmm…I’m more into show. Maybe we should go back to my place.”

“Or…” He pulled off his jacket and spread it out behind her on the rock.

“Here?” she whispered.

“Yeah.” Laying her back, he towered over her, rocking his pelvis to hers, letting her feel how hard he was. “Here.”

Already breathless, her body betrayed her by quivering in anticipation. “Someone might come.”

“That would be you,” he said, and lowered himself down to kiss her.

A
t the next Craft Corner, Ben worked to keep his patience but he was quickly losing the battle. Within fifteen minutes, he was already having to resist the urge to bang his head against the wall. He’d made the spectacularly stupid mistake of asking the kids last week what they wanted to make, and they’d voted for a birdhouse, of all things. He’d cheated by buying the materials himself ahead of time and precutting all the plywood, effectively making “birdhouse kits.” All the kids had to do was fit the pieces together like a puzzle and then glue and paint. “Right there,” he said to Pink, pointing to a spot on her wood. “Glue right there.”

“Why?” she asked.

He had twenty-five kids today, and every single one of them had asked him at least a million questions. A billion. Surely they all had sore throats from talking so much. “To hold the roof on the birdhouse,” he said for the fifth time.

“Oh, yeah,” she said. She’d lost both of her top front teeth this past week, and she liked to press her tongue into the vacancy. She beamed at him, a toothless grin, and damn if he didn’t feel his heart squeeze. Finding himself utterly helpless in the face of her sweetness, he ruffled her hair.

Her smiled widened. “You’re awfully good with this stuff, Mr. Teacher.”

No matter how many times he reminded her his name was Ben, she still said “mister,” and now she’d taken to calling him Mr. Teacher, making him feel about a thousand years old.

“
Real
good,” Pink added, clearly impressed. She cocked her head, leveling him with those heartbreaker-in-the-making blue eyes. “Are all dads good with this stuff?” she wanted to know.

Another hard squeeze to his heart. He wasn’t sure if he’d survive her. “I don’t know.” And that was God’s truth. He really didn’t know jack about dads.

Pink nodded, accepting this with a wisdom that she shouldn’t yet have. “I wonder if our dad is,” she said softly.

“He is.” He could say that much with absolute certainty, happy to be able give her at least something to go on. And then, trying to avoid another barrage of questions, he shifted his attention to her twin. “How’s it going, Kendra?”

She shrugged, but her project was pitch-perfect.

“Hey, great job.” He crouched down to her eye level, and she smiled the spitting image of Pink’s smile—without the missing front teeth, of course. Unlike her sister, however, she didn’t say a word, which had his heart rolling over in his chest and exposing its tender underbelly. He ruffled her hair, as he had Pink’s. “Maybe you should come to my work and be my assistant,” he said.

She nodded vehemently.

“Problem is,” he said, unable to believe he was going to say this, “my assistant would have to talk.”

Pink leaned in and whispered something in her twin’s ear. Kendra listened avidly and then turned her head and said something in Pink’s ear.

Pink nodded and looked up at Ben. “She says she wants to be your assistant, but I’d have to come along so I can tell you whatever she needs to say.”

Knowing he’d been outsmarted, Ben tossed back his head and laughed. Then he met Kendra’s gaze. “Smart girl.”

Kendra gave him a thumbs-up.

That night after he dropped them off at their foster home—taking yet a third hard squeeze to his heart as they vanished inside the house—he drove straight to Seattle.

To Bob’s Auto Shop.

He walked right past a scowling Bob and Ed. If they wanted another fight, he was perfectly willing to give them one, but neither man stopped him.

He found Dan on his back beneath a Jeep and kicked the cart to get his attention.

Dan rolled himself out and stared up at Ben. “What do you want?”

“You being a dad to your daughters, for starters.”

Dan’s mouth tightened. “We going to do this again?”

“You’re a fucking idiot,” Ben said. “You know that, right? You have these two perfect little girls, and you don’t even see them. Explain that to me.”

“Already did.”

“Do it again.”

Dan flung the wrench in his hand against the wall with shocking violence.

Ben didn’t move a single inch, just arched a brow.

“Fuck,” Dan said beneath his breath. He stood up, and though he still barely came to Ben’s shoulders, he stepped toe-to-toe with him. “I come from shit.”

“So?”

“I went to prison.”

“Yeah, I looked that up,” Ben said. “You told me it was a bogus charge, but I had to check for myself. The police were feeling pressure from the DA to make an arrest, and you had a juvie record that matched, so the charges stuck. But the rumor is that you really didn’t do it.”

Dan looked away. “Rumors don’t mean dick in a court of law.”

“You have a house.”

“It’s small and needs work,” Dan said.

“It’s in a good school district,” Ben said, and at Dan’s look of surprise, he nodded. “Yeah, I checked that, too. You’ve got a decent job.”

“I work for ex-cons.”

“Who did their time and turned things around.” Ben shrugged at Dan’s stare. “I’m good at research. These guys are family men, with kids. They’re running this business clean and in the black, and they care about you.” He paused, and then dropped the ace in the hole. “And then there’s your sister.”

Dan’s eyes hardened. “Leave her out of this.”

Ben liked the protective reaction, but he wasn’t going to leave anything out. “You share your house with your twenty-five-year-old sister, who’s just graduated college—thanks to you, by the way,” Ben added. “She’s working as a second-grade teacher. You’ve got a built-in support system.”

Dan looked baffled. “Why do you even give a shit about me?”

“Oh, I
don’t
give a shit about you,” Ben said. “I give a shit about your daughters—two sweet, adorable five-year-old girls who deserve a whole hell of a lot better than being deserted in a foster home.”

Dan stared at him. “I don’t even know where to start, man. They must hate me.”

“You start by exercising your rights to visitation. You get to know them. You’ll see. Neither of them has the capacity to hate.”

Ten minutes later, Ben was heading back to Lucky Harbor. Exhausted, he strode through his place, intending to go straight to bed, but there was Jack on his couch, feet up on the coffee table next to an empty bag of chips—Ben’s—and two empty beer bottles, also Ben’s. Jack’s head was back, his mouth open. He was fast asleep. Next to him, equally sprawled out, equally dead to the world, was a snoring Kevin.

Nothing snored louder than a Great Dane.

Except maybe Jack. Ben gave his cousin’s leg a nudge. Actually, it was more of a kick.

Jack sat straight up, instantly alert. “Wha—Did I miss the alarm?”

“You’re off duty. And you don’t fight fires anymore, remember?”

“Oh, yeah.” Jack scrubbed his hands over his face. “What the hell time is it?”

“I don’t know. Why are you here? Where’s Leah?”

“Leah’s at book club night. At your girlfriend’s bookstore, as a matter of fact.”

“Aubrey’s not my girlfriend. You ate all my chips and drank my beer?”

“Yeah. You’d gone to the grocery store and I hadn’t.”

Made perfect sense. Ben had certainly done the same to Jack enough times. Living next door to each other made it especially easy.

“I saw the dollhouse in the garage,” Jack said.

Well, hell. “So?”

“So you haven’t built anything like that since Hannah.”

“Don’t read anything into it,” Ben said. He sure as hell didn’t want to. He also didn’t want to think about how he’d stalked the bluffs until he’d found the sole house with a dollhouse on the porch. Or how he’d then gone to the hardware store and spent a small fortune buying the materials for the replacement dollhouse he was making Aubrey.

Or why he was making it in the first place.

He plopped down in between Jack and Kevin. Kevin immediately crawled onto Ben’s lap for a hug. Obliging, Ben wrapped his arms around the huge dog, giving him a full-body rub that had Kevin groaning in ecstasy. Then he burped in Ben’s face.

“Your dog smells like my chips,” Ben said.

“He might’ve had a few.”

Ben leaned back and closed his eyes.

“You’re not going to talk about what you’re building in the garage?” Jack asked.

“No.”

“Okay, then I’ll talk. At first, I didn’t approve of Aubrey for you.”

At this, Ben slit open his eyes and looked at Jack. “Didn’t approve? What the hell are we, eighteenth-century virgins?”

“I didn’t approve,” Jack said again, “because I thought she wasn’t your type. You’re quiet. You’re introspective. You don’t like flash. You’ve had a lot of shit in your life, and you came out on top. You’re one of the strongest people I know, and whenever I need anything, you’re at my back, no questions asked.”

“Yeah? Maybe you could learn something from the no-questions-asked thing.”

“Don’t be an asshole,” Jack said. “Hannah was such a great match because she was like you, very much so. I always thought when the day came that you landed yourself in another relationship, you’d need that same quiet strength she possessed, just like yours. But I was wrong. Aubrey is a force. She’s not quiet. She’s not easy. But in her own way, she’s really good for you. She brings you out of your shell. She challenges you. She keeps you on your toes.”

“Thanks, Dr. Phil.”

Uninsulted, Jack smiled.

Ben didn’t. “I’m not getting involved with Aubrey.”

Now Jack laughed.

“Shut up. I’m not.”

“Okay. But you’re involved. Everyone knows it but you. Have you seen Facebook lately? Lucky Harbor’s favorite son—you—has a poll up on whether or not you should settle down with Aubrey. Odds aren’t in her favor at the moment.”

“Jesus.” Ben wasn’t amused by this. By any of it. “People need to mind their own business. Aubrey could do way better than me. And we have sex,” he said bluntly. “That’s not the same thing as being involved. Not everyone has the future on their minds, like you and Luke suddenly do.”

“I like her,” Jack said, no longer amused, either. “A lot. But I’m not saying marry her. I’m saying just relax a little bit and enjoy being back here in Lucky Harbor. Enjoy having a woman who looks at you the way she does. And you look at her, too, you know. I’ve seen you with those moon eyes.”

“Yeah?” Ben asked. “Well, shoot me next time.”

Jack ignored this. “I think it’s fair to say I know you like no one else does. This thing with Aubrey is different, and you know it.”

Ben thought of how she’d been trying to make a difference, giving the seniors a place to go, giving anyone who needed it a place to go. Hell, she was even excited about working with troubled teens. He thought about how she felt in his arms, how she made him feel in hers—like he was the best man she knew and the only one she wanted. She moved him at every turn, without even trying.

And he knew Jack was right. This thing, this…whatever it was that they were doing, it
was
different.

And different was terrifying. And he wasn’t ready to fall in love. He’d been there, done that, and it had flattened him. “I’ve told her, and now I’ll tell you,” he said. “I’m not looking for a committed relationship. I don’t have it in me right now.”

“Whatever you say, man.” Jack rose and snapped his fingers at Kevin.

Kevin squeezed his eyes tight and pretended to be asleep.

Ben found a laugh after all. “Leave him.”

“He ate chili tonight at the firehouse.”

“Take him,” Ben said.

Kevin sighed and jumped off Ben’s lap, farting as he did so.

“Thanks,” Ben said, waving the air in front of his face as he rose too.

“Yeah, should’ve warned you,” Jack said. “He’s got some serious hang time with those.” Jack gave Ben a look that said they weren’t closing the file on this subject.

Ben opened the door. “I’m okay, you know. I’m fine on my own.”

Jack met his gaze. “Yeah. But you’ve been on your own a long time. Maybe it’s time to try something new.”