Once in a Lifetime(58)

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 f*ck 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.”