A Maverick and a Half

by Marie Ferrarella

“Pretty much,” Anderson answered.

  Jake spared him a look that could only be interpreted as hopeful. “Like Ms. Laramie?”

  The second his son asked whether or not the woman would be attending, Anderson suddenly spotted the teacher in question approximately fifteen feet away from him, standing near the front entrance of the building—and talking to Paige.

  Paige, from what he could tell, seemed to be alone. That meant that his brother-in-law was home with Carter, their two-year-old. Anderson wanted to catch up to Paige to talk about a few things, but not if it meant having to talk to Jake’s teacher, too.

  Since he and Marina Laramie had that less than productive meeting at the school the other week, he hadn’t seen the woman or exchanged any words with her, either. But that didn’t mean she’d been completely out of his mind.

  As a matter of fact, the exact opposite seemed to be true. For some reason, Marina Laramie kept popping up in his head at completely unbidden times and Anderson didn’t even remotely like the fact that she did. It made him feel as if he had no control over his own thoughts.

  How else could he view having that woman’s face suddenly appear in his head while he was in the middle of thinking of something entirely different from an interfering, feisty redhead who thought she knew how to raise his son better than he did?

  Never mind that she probably did and that maybe she was even right in her estimation that Jake needed to get involved in something outside of himself. The bottom line was that Jake was his kid, not hers, and he would raise the boy any way that he saw fit.

  Suddenly, he felt Jake eagerly tugging on his arm. “Hey, Dad, look. There’s Ms. Laramie. Let’s go over and talk to her.”

  But as Jake began to make his way over to his teacher, Anderson caught his son’s arm, clearly surprising the boy, who looked at him quizzically.

  “Ms. Laramie is already talking to someone else,” Anderson pointed out.

  Jake took another look just to be sure he was right.

  “Yeah, but it’s Aunt Paige. Aunt Paige won’t mind,” the boy insisted, shaking his arm free.

  The next minute, Anderson saw his son striding over toward the two women. With his long, lanky legs, Jake had reached Marina and his aunt in a matter of a few quick strides. And, as he watched, just like that he saw his son transform from an abnormally quiet, serious eleven-year-old to an animated, bright, smiling boy who clearly had a lot to say.

  “Ms. Laramie,” Jake had called out before he’d even reached his teacher. When she turned in his direction, he grinned broadly and asked, “Are you going to the town meeting?”

  Marina was clearly surprised to see the boy, but she recovered with grace and offered him a warm smile by way of a greeting.

  “Yes, I am,” she told him.

  “Me, too,” Jake declared proudly. “I’m here with my dad. He thinks that it’s a good idea for me to come see how people in a small town like Rust Creek Falls get things done.”

  Marina looked past the boy’s head and saw his father coming up behind him. She inclined her head politely in a silent greeting.

  Her vibrant blue eyes met Anderson’s as she told Jake, “Your father’s right. It’s always a good idea for you to see how things work firsthand.”

  No doubt pleased at her seal of approval, Jake beamed. The next moment, he seemed to come to and realized that his aunt was standing right next to his teacher. “Hi, Aunt Paige.”

  It was obvious by Paige’s expression that she was surprised by the boy’s animated response to seeing her at what was, essentially, a school board meeting.

  “Hi yourself, Jake. So your dad dragged you to this, huh?” she asked sympathetically, reading between the lines. She shook her head.

  “He didn’t drag me,” Jake corrected politely, apparently not wanting to lose any of the points he’d just managed to score with his teacher. Turning to his father for backup, Jake asked, “Did you, Dad?”

  Anderson found himself being drawn into this unexpected interaction against his will, but he couldn’t very well not be supportive of his son. For some reason, having his teacher think well of him obviously meant a great deal to Jake.

  “No,” he told Marina, “Jake came right along without a single word of protest.”

  Which was technically true. It was only the boy’s body language that indicated he didn’t want to go to the meeting. That and his comment about not being allowed to reach the next level of the video game he’d been playing perpetually.

  “Can we sit with you, Ms. Laramie?” Jake asked without warning as he looked at the woman with hopeful, soulful eyes.

  The same eyes, Marina caught herself thinking, that his father had.

  “Jake,” Anderson admonished, surprised by his son’s extroverted behavior, “you can’t just put someone on the spot like that. I’m sure Ms. Laramie has made plans to sit with her friends.” And that, Anderson hoped, was the end of that.

  Except that it wasn’t.

  “Actually, I haven’t,” Marina contradicted, addressing her response to the boy. “Except for your aunt, of course. Otherwise, I didn’t have any plans to sit with anyone in particular.” She smiled warmly at the boy who had given her some concern. “You’re welcome to join us,” she told Jake.

  Jake looked positively overjoyed.

  Anderson couldn’t remember ever seeing his son look so enthusiastic and overjoyed before.

  And then it hit him.

  His son had a crush on his teacher. There wasn’t any other explanation for the way he was acting or why he looked as if he was on the verge of doing cartwheels. This was a completely different boy from the one he’d roused from his room earlier.

  “Dad, too?” Jake asked eagerly.

  Anderson was completely floored by his son’s inclusion. Ordinarily, eleven-year-olds, whether they were male or female, were not nearly this thoughtful when it came to their parents. Or really anyone over the age of fifteen.

  He could remember himself at that age. In comparison to Jake, he’d been a thoughtless, self-centered little know-it-all. Granted, he’d outgrown that phase a long time ago, but he’d still gone through it. Jake, however, had somehow managed to bypass all that. It made Anderson realize just what a special, decent adolescent Jake really was.

  Even so, if Marina Laramie represented Jake’s big crush, he still didn’t intend to be put on the spot because of it. He was about to politely turn down the whole invitation before it was even tendered to him, but then he saw a quirky kind of smile curve the woman’s lips and heard Marina say, “Sure, why not? Your dad’s included, too.”

  Then the petite redhead turned her very bright blue eyes on him and said, “You’re welcome to join your sister and me—and your son—at the meeting if you like, Mr. Dalton.”

  She’d very deftly—and formally—put him on the spot. If he turned her down, he’d be the villain in his son’s eyes. He’d been struggling too hard to be Jake’s white knight to risk sabotaging himself just because it would entail spending an uncomfortable hour in the woman’s company. Uncomfortable not because he had any real, concrete reason to dislike her—he’d actually begun to think of Jake being a babysitter as a good thing—but because there was something about this woman that made him feel...well, antsy was as good a word for it as any, he decided.

  She made him strangely restless, like he couldn’t find a place for himself whenever she was around.

  He knew it was an absurd reaction, but it was his reaction and as long as he was experiencing it, he wasn’t going to be able to relax, certainly not anywhere around her.

  But he supposed that not being able to relax was in reality a small price to pay in exchange for seeing his son looking so happy.

  Looking like, he realized, a typical kid his age should look.

  “Can we, Dad?” Jake asked eagerly, turnin
g his face up to his father’s.

  Anderson slipped a hand on his son’s shoulder in a gesture that spoke of familiarity and hopeful bonding. He reminded himself that this was all about Jake and nothing else, certainly not about him.

  “Sure, son,” he told Jake, “since Ms. Laramie said it was all right.”

  “I said it was all right, too,” Paige reminded him, pretending to raise her hand like a student who was trying to catch her teacher’s attention after being conspicuously ignored.

  “I know, but you don’t count,” Anderson teased. “You’re just my sister. You’re supposed to say it’s all right.”

  Paige narrowed her eyes as she gave her brother a dismissive, reproving look. “Yeah, well, maybe I haven’t read the little sister, big bullying brother handbook lately.”

  “Then maybe you should,” Anderson suggested, a hint of a teasing smile barely curving the corners of his mouth. And then he deadpanned, “You’ll have fewer slipups that way.”

  Jake looked a little confused and concerned at the exchange he was witnessing between his aunt and his father.

  Noticing his expression, Marina placed a comforting hand on his forearm. When he looked at her, his expression making it clear that he was ready to hang on her every word, Marina told him, “They’re only teasing each other. It’s what brothers and sisters do,” she added, thinking of her own younger sister.

  “Oh.” Jake looked as if he’d just been seriously enlightened. “I don’t have a brother or a sister,” he explained.

  Marina resisted the temptation to tousle his hair. He looked so terribly serious. The boy needed to lighten up just a little.

  “Maybe someday, you will,” she told him.

  He nodded solemnly. “Maybe.”

  It struck Anderson that his son sounded almost wistful as he uttered the single word.

  Chapter Five

  “C’mon, Dad, we don’t want to be late,” Jake urged, all but hopping from foot to foot as he tried to get his father to move faster.

  This was a definite change in the boy, Anderson thought. Rather than sitting passively in front of his game console for hours on end, Jake had rushed through dinner and even helped put all the dishes into the dishwasher, all in an effort to get going.

  Too bad all this enthusiasm involved something that he personally would have preferred not to have to deal with, Anderson thought.

  “It’s not like they’re going to close the doors the way they do when people are boarding an airplane,” Anderson pointed out.

  He was doing his best not to sound as reluctant as he felt. After last week’s town meeting, where he wound up spending almost two hours sitting not next to Marina—that was Jake’s place of honor—but one seat over, he’d still been close enough to be able to have the woman’s perfume fill all the exposed pores of his body. It had certainly filled his head.

  Even for days later, he could have sworn that her perfume was lingering on his clothing and on his person, constantly distracting him. It was as if he couldn’t shake the scent of her away from his consciousness. That, coupled with his mind conducting unannounced ambushes on him, suddenly conjuring up images of the woman in his head, made him feel as if he had become the victim of a stalker.

  Except that in this case, it was his own mind that was responsible for the stalking.

  He needed to get a grip, Anderson told himself sternly.

  What he didn’t need was to be thrown back in with Marina Laramie again, this time in a somewhat more intimate setting than he’d been subjected to the last time.

  But this was Back to School Night and considering that Marina was Jake’s teacher, there was just no reasonable way to avoid spending time in the woman’s company—unless he didn’t attend the event in the first place.

  “You sure you want to go back to school tonight?” Anderson asked, pausing in the kitchen despite his son’s best efforts to get him out the front door. “I mean, you were just there this afternoon. To have to come back tonight just doesn’t seem fair.”

  “I can handle it,” Jake assured him, puffing up his chest a little.

  Yeah, maybe you can handle it, but can I? Anderson couldn’t help thinking in response.

  By now, Jake was pacing around the room impatiently, moving closer and closer to the front door in an attempt to prod his father in that direction. “You look ready,” the boy told him.

  He might as well get this over with, Anderson thought.

  “I guess I am, then,” he replied. The words were no sooner out of his mouth than his son all but dashed out the front door, hurrying out to the truck. “And so are you, I see,” Anderson muttered under his breath, following his son out.

  It promised to be a long evening, Anderson thought as he got in behind the wheel of his truck.

  “What are these things like?” he asked Jake once they were finally on their way to the elementary school. “These Back to School Night things,” he elaborated in case he hadn’t made himself clear.

  “You’ve never gone to one before?” Jake asked, surprised.

  “Never had a reason to go to one before,” Anderson replied.

  “Not even your own?”

  Anderson thought for a moment, then shook his head. “I don’t think I ever went to any back then. My teachers used to send notes home, so my parents knew how I was doing without having to go trudging down to the halls of learning in order to find out. So what’s it like?” he wanted to know, getting back to his initial question.

  Having been through it a total of five times before, Jake dutifully told his father what was involved. “You talk to my teacher and she tells you how I’m doing. Then she shows you some of my work.”

  Anderson supposed he could see the merit in that—if only it didn’t have to involve Marina Laramie. “You mean like your drawings?”

  “I’m in fifth grade, Dad,” Jake reminded him, suddenly sounding very grown-up. “I don’t spend time drawing.”

  Anderson suppressed a grin. Jake sounded way older than his years when he said that. “Sorry, didn’t mean to insult you, old man.”

  Jake looked at him thoughtfully. “Maybe you’d better not say anything to Ms. Laramie, Dad. Just let her do the talking.”

  “Deal.”

  He wanted to go one better and not have to look at Ms. Laramie, either, but that was out of the question. The woman was far too easy on the eyes and he could see himself getting swept away without any effort on his part. As a matter of fact, it was going to take effort not to get swept away.

  “Hey, Dad,” Jake said suddenly, turning in his seat to get a better look at him.

  Anderson instinctively braced himself. Now what? “Yes?”

  “Do you like Ms. Laramie?”

  He’d been braced, but he hadn’t been expecting that. Jake’s question came completely out of left field and caught him utterly off guard. For a second, he made no response. Was his son somehow being intuitive? Had Jake guessed that despite his best efforts, there was some sort of a strange attraction going on between him and the teacher?

  Glancing at his son’s eager face, Anderson told himself that he was overthinking this by a mile. Jake wasn’t some brilliant, pint-size mind reader. His son was just asking a harmless question to satisfy his own budding curiosity. Maybe he even thought that if his teacher was seeing his dad, then his report card would have straight As.

  Anderson did his best to sound honest. “I haven’t given it much thought.”

  He secretly hoped he could be forgiven for taking refuge in a lie in order to avoid any immediate problems and confrontations with Jake. It was very obvious that the boy had a crush on the woman and maybe if he thought that his father liked her, too, he’d be jealous. That was a road Anderson definitely didn’t want to go down.

  “But if you did give it some t
hought,” Jake pressed, not about to let the subject drop so quickly, “what would you say?” His eyes seemed to be almost dancing as he eagerly waited for an answer.

  Anderson turned away and looked out the front windshield. His shoulders rose and fell in a vague, noncommittal response. “I guess she’s okay.”

  “‘Okay’?” Jake repeated incredulously. “She’s not ‘okay,’” he admonished. “She’s great!” His voice throbbed with gusto. “She’s terrific! She’s perfect!”

  This was where he just backed away with grace, Anderson thought.

  “If you say so.” That was supposed to be as far as he was going to go talking about Marina. But something seemed to egg him on. So he paused for a second, fighting his own internal reaction, and then he gave in and finally asked, “What makes her so great?”

  Jake had his answer all prepared and didn’t even hesitate for a moment. “Ms. Laramie looks out for everybody and makes sure that nobody makes fun of anybody else. That’s important,” Jake stressed.

  He’d said it with such intensity, Anderson had an uneasy feeling that Jake was one of those people who would have been made fun of if his teacher hadn’t put a stop to that activity.

  He supposed that put him in the woman’s debt, Anderson thought grudgingly. He felt stymied at every turn, but if this teacher really was championing his son’s cause, he knew that he owed her. And Anderson Dalton was a man who made good on his debts.

  “Then I guess she really is pretty great,” he conceded.

  He was rewarded by Jake flashing a wide, happy grin at him. Anderson thought it was priceless.

  The next moment, Jake, looking around, needlessly announced, “We’re here.”

  “I recognize the place,” Anderson told him, deadpan.

  Sitting ramrod straight, Jake scanned the area, looking somewhat concerned. “Looks like there are a lot of people here already.”

  “There are a lot of kids who go here,” Anderson pointed out, then reminded his son, “But don’t worry, they’re not all here to see Ms. Laramie.”

  Jake brightened, flashing an almost sheepish smile. “You’re right. Hey, there’s a spot there, Dad,” he said suddenly, eagerly pointing to the space. “Hurry before somebody beats you to it!”