by Mulry, Megan
Hilary introduced her to Erin, who handled human resources and payroll, and then to a rather severe-looking woman with a strong Brooklyn accent. She was a beautiful brunette, with an appealing toughness about her.
“I’m Roberta, the resident bully.”
Claire wasn’t sure how to respond.
Then Roberta laughed and gave Claire a little shove on the upper arm. “I’m the one who yells at all the deliverymen and painters and manufacturers who try to tell us they’re running late or things have slipped through the cracks. I’m the buck…everything stops here.” She used her thumb to point at her chest.
Claire smiled. She liked Roberta already.
The room still had the beautiful period details of the building intact: the tall reception floor ceilings, at least twelve feet high, the pale blue walls and bright white moldings, the hardwood floors. Into each corner, a triangular desk, made of practical, no-nonsense white Formica, had been built.
Hilary pointed to the far corner. “Seniority, I’m afraid. You get one of the desks that faces away from the window.”
“Oh, I don’t mind at all. I’m so excited.”
The other three women looked at her like she was a little bit off.
“I mean,” she hesitated, wondering if she would be overstepping some unspoken rule by confiding too much. Three faces waited for her to finish. “You might as well know. This is my first job.”
“Your first job in New York or in the design business?” Hilary asked.
“No…”
Roberta had taken a sip of coffee and nearly snorted it through her nose. She sputtered, “You mean…this is your first job, ever?”
Claire blushed. “Yes.”
“That is awesome!” Erin finally chimed in from the far corner. She had just finished with a spreadsheet and had closed out the screen, swiveling to face Claire full on. “You must be so excited.”
“I really am. Thanks.” Claire turned to the corner desk and trailed her hand along the white surface, pulled the chair out, and sat. “Wow.”
The other three laughed, and Roberta and Erin turned back to their work. Hilary brought her chair over to sit next to Claire, then spent the next hour telling her passwords, how to enter orders into the system, how to access Boppy’s schedule. She was given a corporate email address, added to email distribution lists, and shown myriad other details.
“That’s probably enough for now. I could use some help with inputting all these orders. Why don’t we start there, okay?” Hilary asked.
“Sure.”
Hilary handed her a sheaf of yellow invoices. “Just be careful, because we have some bulk fabric orders that have to be billed to separate clients. I’m right here if you have any questions.”
Claire began carefully, terrified that she was going to make an error. After an hour or so, her stomach growled, and she looked at her wristwatch to see it was almost two o’clock.
“Hilary, may I step out for lunch?”
“Of course, anytime. You don’t need to ask permission. There’s a good soup and sandwich place right around the corner on Third Avenue.”
“Thanks. Do you want anything?”
“Sure. If you don’t mind, I’d love a large latte…if it’s not too much trouble.”
“Of course not.”
Claire walked out into the sunny, brisk air and had to repress the urge to jump up and down and squeal like a little girl. Instead, she reached into her purse and got her cell phone. She clicked on the preset for Bronte’s New York cell phone number.
“Well?” Bronte answered without preamble. “Why haven’t you called me until now? I was going nuts!”
“I got the job, Bron!”
“Oh my god! I think I might cry! I am so eff-ing happy for you! Did she just put you to work that very second?”
“Pretty much. I’ll tell you everything tonight. I just ran out to grab a sandwich and then I’m going back to finish inputting some invoices.”
“Listen to you! Already invoicing clients!”
“And I get to go out to Litchfield, Connecticut, next Saturday to meet with a client. It’s just all too exciting, Bron. I can’t even begin to thank you.”
“I didn’t do anything, silly. You did. I’ll talk to you later. Huge congratulations again! Yay!”
And then Claire heard the shuffle of Bronte babbling with Wolf, the eager toddler reclaiming her attention as the phone went dead.
The next ten days flew by in a whirl of learning as much as she could without her head exploding. She’d been especially looking forward to her day-trip out to Connecticut to meet with her first real client. Unfortunately, it was hard to concentrate when every time she opened the Pinckney file, her heart began to race frantically. It was a silly coincidence, probably nothing, she kept telling herself. Probably nothing.
As she’d been working on the file, Claire had come across digital copies of some canceled checks from Alice Pinckney’s joint checking account with her husband from before they got divorced. Actually, the first time she saw the printed names at the top of the check, her heart didn’t race frantically at all. It simply stopped.
Alice Pinckney’s husband (her ex-husband! Claire’s—apparently teenaged—inner self shouted) was Benjamin Hayek. The Ben Hayek! her shrieking adolescent inner self added.
Chapter 6
After it resumed beating, Claire’s heart didn’t really recover. She stared at his name right there on her computer screen with the cursor flashing—just a name, she reminded herself—but her heart pounded like one of those Japanese war drums. The scanned check looked innocuous enough, with its grainy bits here and there and a man’s firm signature slashed across the bottom right. What were the chances? she’d argued with herself. It couldn’t possibly be the same Ben from all those years ago. And even if it was, she was meeting with Alice and she needed to stay focused on doing well at her job rather than mooning over some long-lost blip on her romantic radar. Well, she’d been a blip to him, probably.
She’d held off for a couple of days, then finally gave in to her curiosity and Googled Alice Pinckney and Benjamin Hayek. Sure enough. The New York Times wedding section showed the happy couple. Well, at least they’d appeared happy ten years ago.
Just then, Hilary walked behind Claire’s chair and caught her gawking.
“Ah, Pinckney’s ex-husband. Quite something, isn’t he?”
Claire clicked on the red dot to close out the web page and swung her chair around. “Nice enough, I suppose.”
“Are you blushing?”
“What?” Claire’s hands flew to her cheeks. “No. Of course not.” She turned her chair back around. “Just preparing for my big client meeting this Saturday.”
“Mm-hmm,” Hilary agreed skeptically. “Preparation is very important, Claire.”
By the time Saturday morning rolled around, Claire had probably overprepared, making list after list of what needed to be done to wrap up the project. She was a little worried that Alice Pinckney would hate all of her nit-picking suggestions, and she didn’t even allow herself to entertain the possibility that Ben would show up at the site visit for some unexpected reason. Claire wasn’t sure she would be able to function properly if he was there, so she had to keep reminding herself he was not going to be there and—even in the very very very unlikely event he did come—she was not a teenager on a beach in France.
Despite all that, there was something about her first real on-the-job adventure that made Claire unaccountably fearless. She woke up at 6 a.m., showered, and changed into trim blue jeans and a crisp white shirt that she starched and ironed to perfection. She wanted to feel put-together; she wanted to come off as reliable.
Just before she left, she contemplated whether to borrow Bronte’s disgustingly expensive Brunello Cucinelli shearling jacket. Claire pawed it longingly, then muttered what the hell and pulled it out of the closet, taking a moment to savor the exquisite quality and texture.
She allowed plenty of time to navigate
her way out of the city and on into the countryside, especially since she was driving into unfamiliar territory on the wrong side of the road. As she pulled into the circular driveway, she checked the time and saw she was a few minutes early, so she decided to wait in the car. Right at the top of the hour, as she looked out the steamed up windows, she saw someone jog past and gesture toward the front door.
Someone tall and wet and handsome and dark and someone definitely not Alice Pinckney.
Claire felt her insides turn to jelly.
It wasn’t Ben’s turn to deal with the site visit, but Alice had rightly assumed he didn’t have anything better to do. He was playing guitar in the Village Sunday night, but other than that, he wasn’t on call at the clinic and he didn’t have any plans. So Ben had agreed to meet with some designer from Matthews Interiors at the house out in Litchfield, while Alice went out of town on business.
He’d driven out late the night before, feeling his boredom and irritability slip away as the city receded farther and farther in his rearview mirror. The whole second-house idea had been Alice’s initially, but lately, Ben had really started to cotton to it. It felt good and right to be building something other than his retirement account. Though he couldn’t understand why Alice felt compelled to hire one of the most expensive interior designers in the world. The endless envelopes filled with fabric samples and paint chips had driven him mad. He told Alice she could do whatever she wanted. Until the divorce.
Then it turned into an investment protection situation, as far as Ben was concerned. He wasn’t going to approve a four-thousand-dollar antique French chandelier for the front hall if they were just going to sell the place as soon as it was done. For the past six months, it had been stalemate after stalemate. Pretty soon, one of them was going to torch the place just to be done with it.
He kept flipping back and forth between wanting to keep it—to put his whole heart into it, maybe even buy Alice out—or to walk away and never look back.
Saturday morning, Ben woke up at six, as he always did. He read for a few hours then decided to go for a run. He threw on shorts and a stretched-out, gray college T-shirt, tied on a pair of his favorite old sneakers, and headed into the brisk autumn morning. His muscles were stiff sometimes, but he’d never let himself get out of shape. When he was younger—like that summer in France all those years ago—he had loved the exhilaration of physical exercise. Later, living in the city and grinding through the early years of building his private practice, exercise had become a sort of antidote, a way to shut down or tune out. Lately, running in Connecticut had begun to feel like that old elation—just energizing and empowering for its own sake—not something to scrape away layers of tension and anxiety.
By the time the light rain started, it felt good to have the cooling sensation against his heated muscles. He probably should have turned back if he was going to be at home in time for the designer—whomever Boppy tried to foist upon them this time—but they all had a key to the house, so it wouldn’t be the end of the world if he was a little late. He ran up the last section of road and saw the small Zipcar in the circular driveway. The driver, a blond woman whose face was obscured by the foggy windows, seemed to be looking at her paperwork in the front seat of the car. He gave her a vague wave, then pointed a single finger to indicate he’d be at the front door in a minute.
He slowed to a quick walk and entered the mudroom through the side door. The place was in such a state. The walls were plastered, but so many paint samples had been applied in so many areas that it looked like a horrible version of the Partridge Family bus.
The kitchen was finished—finally—and Ben clicked on the electric kettle as he passed through, suspecting both of them would want a cup of something hot after the rain. He grabbed a small towel from the laundry room and began roughly drying his short hair while he walked to the front hall. Ben’s face was still half covered as he pulled open the heavy, original mahogany door.
He mumbled, “Come on in” through the white terry cloth.
“Um, hello. I was supposed to be meeting with Ms. Alice Pinckney. Do I have the right house?”
The lilting British accent with its cool reserve did something strange and slashing to Ben’s gut. His heart skidded to a halt and he remembered all the times he had dreamt of that voice. Or one so much like it. A part of him wanted to stand there with the idiotic towel covering his face forever, so he could prolong the momentary fantasy that it was Claire’s voice. That it was really Claire Heyworth standing on his rainy unfinished porch in Litchfield, Connecticut.
Instead, he stopped drying his hair and slowly lowered the towel to his neck, fisting the ends of the material into each hand, tensing his upper arms. He stared at the most beautiful face he’d never been able to forget. During the intervening years, he’d convinced himself that no one could have been that beautiful, as he’d tried to erase the memory of her and those wonderful months.
He’d never succeeded.
“Oh my,” she whispered.
Oh, Jesus. She was real. “Claire?”
She laughed and turned all professional-like. The stunning face was still there, but as a sort of pale mask of the real thing. “Oh, what a small world. So you’re the oral surgeon husband?”
Ben stood back from the door and assumed a similarly casual posture. “Come on in. It’s been a long time. Yes, I’m the dentist…ex-husband.”
Claire stumbled on the heel of one of her high boots as she crossed the front hall. She’d been unbuttoning her jacket and not paying attention to where she was going. He reached out to steady her. Craft paper covered all of the hardwood floors, one of the only original features he and Alice had agreed to preserve, but they still hadn’t been able to agree on how to refinish it. He sighed at the ongoing battle.
Claire must have thought the sigh was for her clumsiness. “Sorry. I’m not used to these heels,” she said, sounding a little defensive.
She looked perfectly gorgeous in those heels, so Ben wasn’t quite sure why she wasn’t used to them. Long (long!) strong legs in fitted blue jeans, a cropped, gray woolen jacket, and all that silky blond hair tied up in a careless bundle. She was taking off her jacket, and Ben had the absurd flash (ever hopeful?) that she was there to surprise him after all these years with a striptease.
“Excuse me?” She was handing him the jacket with one hand as she held her very practical, navy blue leather attaché case in the other. “Would you mind hanging up my jacket for me?”
“Of course.” He frowned, at himself mostly for being such a pervert, and then he took the jacket from her and was disappointed that their fingers didn’t touch when she passed it to him. It grated that she seemed to be treating him like some sort of houseboy who was there to take her parcels. He reached toward one of the hooks on the back of the kitchen door to hang it up.
“Actually, it was obscenely expensive, if you wouldn’t mind putting it on a hanger?”
“Sure. No problem. Let me put it in the laundry room to make sure it dries properly.” Ben made a mental note to look into why the precious daughter-of-the-duke was mindful of expense, no matter how obscene. She’d been too good for him then and apparently she was still too good for him now. Her white shirt looked like it had been pressed by her valet, and her hair looked like it had been tousled that morning by her lover. He scowled as he hung up the expensive shearling jacket on one of the hangers on the makeshift pole over the washing machine—the only place to hang anything on the disorganized first floor.
“Okay,” Ben said when he returned to the front hall.
“Okay!” Claire agreed. “Is there somewhere we can sit down and go over some of these decisions?”
He stared at her, maybe for a few seconds too long, but he couldn’t help it. Ben took off the stupid towel around his neck that probably made him look like a wannabe Olympian and tossed it on the floor leading back toward the laundry room. Was she really going to act like they were just random acquaintances? Maybe to her mind, that�
�s all they ever were.
He tried to slap on a professional face. “Sure. There’s a worktable in the supposed living room that the contractor uses during the week. I’m sure Boppy told you what’s been going on around here…with all the back and forth.”
He watched as Claire pulled her lips between her teeth and bit down, trying to prevent herself from saying what was on her mind—probably something pithy about foolish people and their foolish divorces.
He remembered that, the way she bit her lips to hold everything in. Damn it. She was the same woman he had tried—and failed—to seduce twenty years ago. All that repression just waiting to… To nothing, he reminded himself. She was a straight-up good girl. No repression waiting to be freed. No deep-seated desires waiting to be let loose. He exhaled slowly, trying to reconcile the reality of her ramrod posture with the panting, bent woman he’d imagined in his arms all those years ago.
She flushed.
“This way,” Ben said, and turned back across the front hall to the chaotic mess that would one day be his living room.
Claire was an utter and complete wreck. All she had to fall back on was a lifetime of what amounted to behavioral conditioning. Her mother and husband had trained her well: the more nervous she became inside, the more appropriate and rigid she appeared. Intentionally or not, the Duchess of Northrop and Marquess of Wick had raised smile-and-wave to an art form; Claire was a master.
And Ben was making her so incredibly nervous. He was so big and sweaty. And kind of breathing heavily from his run. And she couldn’t think straight to save her life. He probably thought she was this ridiculous quivering thing. Which obviously didn’t make him very sympathetic, because he seemed sort of angry. Or, if not angry, just irritated. Claire didn’t know if she had done something specific to annoy him, or if that was just his default setting. Had he always been like that? Short with people? She didn’t think so. At least, that’s not how she remembered him.