Propositioned by the Playboy. Cara Colter

of sand and blood and heartbreak.

      At least over there, Ben thought, there had been guidelines and rules, a rigid set of operating standards. Becoming Kyle’s guardian was like being dropped in the middle of a foreign country with no backup, no map, and only a rudimentary command of the language.

      For instance, did he tell Kyle he was sick of the expression It sucks to be you or did he let it pass?

      While contemplating his options, Ben studied the envelope in front of him. It was addressed to Mr. Ben Anderson and in careful brackets Kyle’s Guardian just so that where was no wriggling out of it. The handwriting was tidy and uptight and told Ben quite a bit about the writer, though Kyle had been filling him in for the past ten days.

      Miss Maple, Kyle’s new teacher at his new school was old. And mean. Not to mention supremely ugly. “Mugly,” Kyle had said, which apparently meant more than ugly.

      She was also unfair, shrill-voiced and the female reincarnation of Genghis Khan.

      Kyle was a surprising expert on Genghis Khan. He’d informed Ben, in a rare chatty moment, that a quarter of the world’s population had Khan blood in them. He’d said it hopefully, but Ben doubted with Kyle’s red hair and freckles that his nephew was one of them.

      Ben flipped over the envelope, looking for clues. “What does Miss Maple want?” he asked Kyle, not opening the letter.

      “She wants to see you,” Kyle said, and then repeated, “It sucks to be you.”

      Then he marched out of his uncle’s kitchen as if the fact that his old, mean and ugly teacher wanted to see his uncle had not a single thing to do with him.

      Ben thought the responsible thing to do would be to call his nephew back and discuss the whole “it sucks” thing. But fresh to the concept of being responsible for anyone other than himself, Ben wasn’t quite sure what the right thing to do was with Kyle. His nephew had the slouch and street-hardened eyes of a seasoned con, but just below that was a fragility that made Ben debate whether the Marine Corps approach was going to be helpful or damaging.

      And God knew he didn’t want to do anymore damage. Because the hard truth was if it sucked to be someone in this world, that someone was Kyle O. Anderson.

      Ben’s parents had been killed in a car accident when he was seventeen. He’d been too old to go into the “system” and too young to look after his sister, who had been fourteen at the time. Ben went to the marines, Carly went to foster care. Ben was well aware that he had gotten the better deal.

      By the time she’d been fifteen, Carly had been a boiling cauldron of pain, sixteen she was wild, seventeen she was pregnant, not that that had cured either the pain or the wildness.

      She had dragged Kyle through broken relationships and down-and-out neighborhoods. When Ben had been overseas and helpless to do a damn thing about it, she and Kyle had gone through a homeless phase. But even after he’d come back stateside, Ben’s efforts to try and help her and his nephew had been rebuffed. Carly saw her brother’s joining up as leaving her, and she never forgave him.

      But now, only twenty-eight, Carly was dying of too much heartbreak and hard living.

      And Ben found himself faced with a tough choice. Except for Carly, his life was in as close to perfect a place as it had ever been. Ben owned his own business, the Garden of Weedin’. He’d found a niche market, building outdoor rooms in the yards of the upscale satellite communities that circled the older, grittier city of Morehaven, New York.

      A year ago he’d invested in his own house, which he’d bought brand-new in the well-to-do town of Cranberry Corners, a community that supported his business and was a thirty-minute drive and a whole world away from the mean streets of the inner city that Kyle and Carly had called home.

      Ben’s personal specialty was in “hardscaping,” which was planning and putting in the permanent structures like decks, patios, fireplaces and outdoor kitchens that made the backyards of Cranberry Corners residents superposh. It was devilishly hard work, which suited him to a T because he was high energy and liked being in good shape. The business had taken off beyond his wildest dreams.

      Ben also enjoyed a tight network of buddies, some of whom he’d gone to high school with and who enjoyed success and the single lifestyle as much as he did.

      Did he disrupt all that and take sucks-to-be-him Kyle O. Anderson, with his elephant-size chip on his shoulder, or surrender him to the same system that had wrecked Carly?

      Since Ben considered himself to be a typical male animal, self-centered, insensitive, superficial—and darned proud of it—he astonished himself by not feeling as if it was a choice at all. He felt as if sometimes a man had to do what a man had to do, and for him that meant taking his nephew.

      Not that either his nephew or his sister seemed very appreciative.

      Not that that was why he had done it.

      Ben opened the tidy envelope from Miss Maple. He read that Kyle’s behavior was disrupting her class, and that she needed to meet with him urgently.

      Ben decided if Miss Maple had a plan for dealing with Kyle’s behavior, he was all for it. Having decided against the drill-sergeant method, since it was untested on eleven-year-olds who were facing personal tragedy, Ben was at a loss about how to deal with the mouthiness, the surliness, the belligerence of his eleven-year-old nephew. There always seemed to be an undertow of hostility from Kyle.

      Unfortunately, the note said he was supposed to meet with the much maligned Miss Maple fifteen minutes ago.

      “Kyle?” he called down the hallway. There was no answer, and Ben went down the hall to Kyle’s room.

      He stood in the doorway for a moment. The room used to be Ben’s home gym, complete with a wall-mounted TV and a stereo system with surround-sound speakers. Now all his workout stuff was in the basement, though he’d left the TV and stereo for Kyle.

      Kyle was sprawled on the unmade bed. Highly visible were the cowboy sheets Ben had bought for him, along with the new twin-size bed, when he’d confirmed his nephew was coming to stay for good.

      Kyle, naturally, had glared at the sheets and proclaimed them “for babies.” Ben could see his point, as at the moment he was listening to ominous-sounding music in a foreign language and flipping the pages on a book with a title that looked like it might be Greek.

      “When did your teacher give you this note for me?”

      Kyle shrugged with colossal indifference.

      “Not today?” Ben guessed dryly.

      “Not today,” Kyle agreed.

      Ben glanced at his watch and sighed. “Let’s go see Miss Maple,” he said. “We’re late.”

      “Miss Maple hates tardiness,” Kyle said, obviously mimicking his teacher’s screechy voice. He sounded quite pleased with himself that he had managed to get Ben in trouble with the teacher before they had even met.

      Ben felt uneasily like a warrior going into the unexpected as he held open the door of Cranberry Corners Elementary School, and then followed Kyle down the highly polished floor of a long hallway. Was he going into battle, or negotiations? Strange thoughts for a man traveling down hallways lined with cheerful drawings of smiling suns and stick people walking dogs.

      He stopped, just outside the doorway of the class Kyle pointed to, and frowned at what he saw inside. A woman sat at a lonely desk at the front of the class, mellow September sunshine cascading over her slender shoulders.

      “That can’t be Miss Maple.”

      Kyle peered past him. “That’s her, all right.”

      It was because he’d been expecting something so radically different that the first sight of Miss Maple made Ben feel as if he had laid down his weapons somewhere. He felt completely disarmed by the fact that it was more than evident that not one thing Kyle had said about her was true. Or