Chapter 3

Cecelia looked grim as she drove, following Bob's older model Chevrolet. While she didn't actually know all that much about Bob Hawkins, she knew he was married. All the girls had known he was married. It had been the bane of their fantasies, back when she went to school at Harper High. His age hadn't dissuaded them from fantasizing about him, but it was a little difficult to pretend you could compete with a wife. Cee Cee had simply constructed a hazy fantasy in which the wife never seemed to be around.

A slight smile of reminiscence came to her lips as she remembered wondering what it would be like to be in his arms with his luscious, smiling lips pressed to hers. That was about as far as her really detailed fantasies had ever gone, though she was aware that some of the other girls would have gone MUCH farther if there had been an opening. But there never had been an opening, because Mr. Hawkins was very married, and he'd somehow made it clear that he was very happily married.

What she was worried about now, as she trailed him to his house, was that Mrs. Hawkins would see through her hopefully calm exterior and recognize that Cecelia Carter had the same crush on Mr. Hawkins now that she'd had back in high school.

She stopped daydreaming and noticed that they were in a very nice part of town that she had always associated with being where the rich people lived. She got more and more curious when Bob's car turned into a long tree-lined driveway that led to a large house surrounded by lovely ornate gardens. When he parked his car on the brick horseshoe drive in front of the house and got out, she put her car in park and left it running, assuming he had some errand to run that he'd remembered during the drive. He stood looking at her for a few seconds, and then came to her window. She rolled it down.

"We going to do this here in your car or something?" he asked.

"This is where you live?" Her voice rose.

"Home, hearth and gardening. That is my life outside of school," he said. "It's a long story. Don't get the idea you'll be living like this on a teacher's salary any time soon."

"Wow," said Cecilia as she got out. She noticed that his eyes fell to her bare thighs as her skirt slid up, but when he offered her his hand to help her get out of the car she thought she'd imagined it.

Her amazement — and her vocal expression of it — only increased when they went inside. A vaulted entryway, with a mirror-like terrazzo floor, presented two curving staircases on opposite sides of the room that led to and met at the second floor. To the right was a living room and to the left was a dining room with a table that could easily have seated twenty people. He led her through that room and a kitchen that would have made any professional chef's mouth water, to a library that, other than one wall that was almost entirely glass, contained wall-to-wall bookshelves packed with both hard and paperbacked volumes. The only thing that seemed out of place was a cheap presswood computer hutch that had been put in one corner of the room. Along with the computer, it was covered with piles of books and papers.

"This is where I do my homework," said Bob, putting his briefcase on the round hardwood table in the middle of the room.

"This is just gorgeous," sighed Cecelia.

"Trust me," said Bob. "This place takes every penny I make. I just couldn't bear to give it up, that's all. I have a little more than an acre of land to use to pursue my love of gardening, which is what keeps me sane."

"Your wife must spend all her time just cleaning," said Cecelia, thinking about how big the house was and how much there would be to do in routine upkeep. She couldn't imagine Mr. Hawkins having servants. Then again, she would never have been able to imagine him having a house like this either. "Unless you have a maid, of course," she added.

"No maid, and no wife," he said. His voice sounded heavy. "My wife left me about a year after we got this place."

"I'm sorry," said Cecelia, who felt instantly guilty because she WASN'T sorry at all. This information was too new to fully process, so she'd simply said what she was sure she was supposed to say in this situation.

"It was a good thing, actually," said Bob. "We only got this house because she was climbing the corporate ladder and she said we needed to present a 'suitably successful' image. She wanted to be able to have dinner parties and such that would impress her bosses and clients."

"Well she sure got that," sighed Cecelia.

"Not enough, apparently," said Bob. "She'd tried talking me out of the classroom from the moment I met her. I had a little money I inherited from an uncle and she wanted to parlay that into a fortune in the stock market, while she drove toward a vice presidency. She had visions of me doing the same thing and couldn't understand that I loved my job. She got tired of trying to talk sense into my stony brain and finally gave me an ultimatum. By then I was pretty sure it had all been a mistake from the beginning. But you can't talk sense to hormones and she was a beautiful, interesting woman." He sighed. "She got her vice presidency and suddenly this place wasn't good enough. Her new job was in Chicago anyway, and I didn't feel like moving to Chicago to continue being the man she was embarrassed to be married to."

"I'm so sorry," said Cecelia. She really was sorry this time. She thought Bob Hawkins deserved much better than a grasping cutthroat corporate and social climbing bitch.

"Like I said. She was a sweet girl before she got greedy, but she wasn't the woman I thought I'd married, so when it ended it wasn't as bad as it sometimes is. I decided to invest all my savings in this place and bought her out," said Bob. "That let me refinance, which is the only reason I can afford this place on my own at all. This is my retirement fund, so to speak. When the time comes, I'll sell it for a pretty penny and live the life of Sluggo in my golden years."

"Isn't that supposed to be the life of Riley?" she asked automatically.

"Riley lives high on the hog," said Bob, smiling. "Sluggo lives in a trailer somewhere but has enough to eat and can afford a case of beer now and then." He looked around. "Speaking of which, you want a beer or something?"

Having Mr. Hawkins, her history teacher, offer her a beer seemed so bizarre that the only framework of understanding she could fit it into was that, like the fraternity boys in college, he was trying to get her drunk. That led to conflicting reactions. On the one hand, getting drunk ... and loose ... with Mr. Hawkins didn't seem like it would be all that horrible. On the other hand, she knew it was ridiculous to believe he'd try something so juvenile. She didn't like beer all that much anyway.

"I'm not much of a beer drinker," she finally responded.

"What a shame," he said. "I get mine from a company called Pyramid. My favorite is their Apricot Ale. It's a wheat beer, but flavored with fruit. I'm not much of a beer drinker either, except for this stuff."

"Maybe later," said Cecelia. "I'm not really thirsty right now."

There were comfortable, padded chairs around the circular library table, and they sat while he got the lesson plans out so they could pick up where they'd left off. At one point they got to a note that reminded him to look up more information about the origin of cloning and genetic surgery.

"I don't have any books on that," he said. "You want to research it on the internet for me?"

Cecelia got up and went to the computer. When she was seated, he leaned over her shoulder, reaching past her to push the button that supplied electricity to all the components. Her nose twitched as she inhaled the fragrance of ... Mr. Hawkins. It was difficult to break down, but he smelled good. She felt her face flush and almost jerked when he laid his hand on her shoulder briefly.

"There you go," he said, lifting his hand. "I've got broadband, so you can get a lot done in a little time."

She spent the next two hours searching the web, printing information, and making notes in the lesson plan before he said they'd done enough for one day.

"Want to see my gardens?" he asked with a hopeful note in his voice.

"Sure," she said, more to be polite than for any real craving to see plants. The front yard had been beautiful, but she didn't think she'd ever sit and contemplate it like art.

He led her through French doors in the glass wall of the library, to a patio that curved off to the right and became the deck of a swimming pool. The blue water looked good as the warmth of the sun soaked into her body. There were flowers, bushes and trees everywhere and she followed him as he pointed out various plants and named them. She thought it was funny that certain trees had to be this or that distance away from the pool, and that some types of plants couldn't be placed at the bottom of the eight foot privacy fence that surrounded the pool, patio and garden area, because the roots would interfere with the fence posts.

"Sounds like you need a degree to know all this," she said at one point.

"Actually they do have degree programs for horticultural architecture," he said quite seriously. "If I hadn't gotten my teaching degree before I got into gardening, I would probably have ended up going that way."

"That would have been a terrible loss to the students of Harper High," she said.

"Thank you," he said, bowing. "I suspect someone will say the same thing about you some day."

They ended up by the pool and Cecelia idly kicked off one shoe. She wasn't wearing pantyhose. She drew the line at that and was willing to shave her legs regularly if that was what it took to keep them looking smooth. She bent a knee and dipped the bare foot in the water.

"How can water always feel so cool when the sun is shining on it all day?" she asked.

"You like to swim?"

"It's one of the ways I kept in shape in college," she said.

"It worked."

She glanced at him and was shocked to see frank male appraisal on his face. She felt tingles of familiar excitement ripple through her body and she looked away. The prospect of Mr. Hawkins NOT being married was finally sinking in, and she suddenly felt jittery. She wanted nothing more than to just fall in the cool water to relieve the heat that suffused her body.

"Feel free to use the pool any time," he added. He turned away. "I'm going to get me a beer," he said. He didn't offer her one this time — he just walked away.

She looked around the garden, her eyes flickering past or settling on splashes of color while she got her breathing under control and reminded herself that the thoughts she was having about the owner of this garden were completely inappropriate and needed, somehow, to be banished from her mind.

Cecelia's emotional condition would have suffered even more had she known what was going through Bob's mind as he got a chilled beer from the stainless steel refrigerator in the kitchen. As he opened it, he wandered back to the doorway to the library, looking through it and the French doors at the figure of the woman in the garden.

She'd always been cute and vivacious. Sitting in his class in her cheerleading uniform, she'd caused him emotional distress of his own. While she had been undeniably good looking, she didn't seem to have the clique mentality that a lot of her good looking friends displayed. Moreover, she was smart and witty. And he'd never seen her acting slutty. He couldn't count the number of times some girl in his class had "accidentally let something show" as she sat in front of him. He'd learned to ignore those little gifts, though he knew, even then, that his marriage was in trouble. He was aware that while candy was sweet, it was also very bad for you.

Cecelia, though, was more along the lines of fine chocolate. She was a good example of the difference between Brachs and Godiva, and while it was no problem to take a pass at Brachs, well ... Godiva took a lot more self control.

Cecelia had been what he thought of as the quintessential budding woman, who had the potential to rock the world, not to mention some man's love life. He'd tried not to have sexual thoughts about her, and the few others like her, back then. It had been impossible, of course, with his sex life at home in dismal shape. She was the flower, and his subconscious male mind was the bee.