by Mulry, Megan
Not that she thought about him all that often. Well, until recently. And maybe before. To be honest, ever since Sarah had pulled up that picture on the Internet, Claire had thought about Ben with an abstract frequency. She wasn’t thinking, “Oh, I’d love to reconnect with Ben,” precisely. But more of a general “Oh, I’d love to meet the grown-up version of Ben. Someone kind and attentive. Someone who likes me for no particular reason.”
But then that just sounded pathetic, so she hived off that sort of thinking as soon as it started. It was so unrealistic.
Then, when she’d discovered he was divorced and living in New York—when he’d become real in her mind—she’d tried even harder not to think about him. Which had proved impossible. But at least she’d tried.
And obviously she’d been wise to do so, because the real-life version of the grown-up Ben was a bit of a disappointment. He was kind of mean.
What had happened to the man she’d fallen in…whatever-it-was…all those years ago? She was still reluctant to admit that she had actually fallen in love with him. How was such a thing even possible, after all? She’d only known him for several months, and they’d never even had sex. As her mother had pointed out all those years ago, one simply didn’t fall in love in a matter of months. Claire set aside the realization that her widowed mother had recently done exactly that: she’d met Jack Parnell in Paris last winter and then proceeded to marry him six months later.
But apparently her mother’s advice had been sound when Claire was a teenager.
Because this adult version of Ben was rather…grumpy, thought Claire, and he certainly wasn’t anything like the man she’d been daydreaming about over the past few months since Sarah first lit the match of her imagination. Or this past week when she’d been doing quite a lot of her own flint-striking, thank you very much.
He gestured toward one of the two metal folding chairs—dented and splotched with various paint bits—that sat next to each other at the long white plastic folding table littered with blueprints.
“So,” Claire began, opening Bronte’s briefcase. The case seemed stupid now that she was here in Ben’s house. Like Claire was pretending to be a professional. She was such a sham. She looked up. Even if he was grumpy, his arms in that sweaty, rain-damp T-shirt were particularly distracting. He was looking around the room, looking more irritated than ever. She pulled her gaze away from his biceps. “Right. So where would you like to begin?”
He smiled. And Claire’s stomach dropped straight out of her. That smile changed every single thing. The irritation. The temper. Those disappeared. The wet T-shirt… She wished it would too. Her heart started to hammer wildly, and she straightened the pile of papers she’d withdrawn from the leather case, as if straightening them would straighten her pulse. She hadn’t physically wanted someone in so many years; it was utterly bizarre. The push of adrenaline. The prickling along the nape of her neck. How foreign it felt, the most basic desire.
If that’s even what it was. Maybe she was just nervous—her first job, her first meeting with a client—that sort of thing.
LIAR!
“Right,” Claire continued. “Uh…how about we go through the final paint samples…” She opened that folder and started to go down the list, avoiding his intense stare. “Maybe that’s one area in which your ex-wife doesn’t want something else entirely.”
Ben’s smile widened. “Yes. She wanted something else entirely…” He paused and stared at Claire. It was unnerving, but she held her seat and refused to fidget. That much at least had been drummed into her by her mother with such frequency, she could sit perfectly still in the face of a firing squad if necessary. “Would you like some tea?” he asked after the long pause.
“Yes, please. That would be lovely.”
He got up and left her sitting at the plastic table. Claire tried to settle her shoulders and release the tension in her neck. Oh dear. They were alone in the house! So what? Claire reminded herself. She was an almost-forty-year-old dowd. Whatever Boppy said about sticking to thirty-eight, Claire wasn’t blind. She was middle aged. Full stop. Whereas Ben looked like he had stopped aging sometime around twenty-five. The skin around his eyes might have crinkled a bit when he gave her that killer grin, but other than that, his body…oh dear. He looked perfect. She looked down at her spreading thighs, then quickly crossed her legs and sat up straighter.
Ben returned a few minutes later wearing a dry, long-sleeved shirt and loose black exercise pants, carrying two mismatched mugs. He set one in front of Claire. “Cream and a hint of sugar, right?”
Now it wasn’t just her stomach that was free-falling. Lower, out-of-use areas of her anatomy were beginning to tense and throb. From a silly cup of tea. A cup of tea that he remembered. Exactly. Precisely.
“Yes. Just so.” Claire smiled up at him, but it was that thin meaningless smile that her mother had taught her to use at hospital ribbon cuttings. Ben’s smile vanished, and he looked stormy. His brow creased and he shook his head.
“Okay. I get it. All business. Let’s go then.”
Claire wanted it to be all business. Didn’t she? This was her first job. Ever.
But, oh, his smile was so divine. What just happened? Where did his smile go?
She was just being polite. Wasn’t that the appropriate way to be? Or was she being too stiff?
Oh, dear. Why did he have to be so mercurial? She liked the remembering-the-cup-of-tea part. She liked the way his remembering made her skin tingle.
But not too much.
Oh, feck. She didn’t know what she wanted.
“Yes, all business.” She smiled, this time with more feeling, but even she knew the feeling was probably regret for what would never be. How could she possibly launch into some playful, romantic walk down memory lane when everything inside her felt so raw and confusing?
They spent the next two hours going over the paperwork. The endless paperwork. Claire was almost maniacally particular. He tried to wave his hand over a few order forms, mumbling, “Fine, fine, whatever you decide on the baseboards in the guest bathroom is fine.”
“No, pay attention! It’s the little details that will make all the difference!” She hadn’t come all this way to have him fade out after a few hours. She wanted to show Boppy and everyone in the office that she could get results.
“What?” He was obviously ready to be finished. With the house. With the lingering attachment to his ex-wife that this renovation had become. And now he appeared to be adding her to his mental list of people who were not living up to his expectations. He almost growled. “Now, see here, Claire. I’ve had enough. I don’t know what you’re playing at but I’m the customer here. You’re here to serve me, remember?”
She flushed horribly. “I— I’m so—”
“Oh, quit it. You know what I mean. I’m paying Boppy Matthews’s stupid hourly fee to get you and your nest of vipers up here every few weeks so we can get this stupid job finished and put an end to this entire farce. If someone wanted to buy it as is, I’d sell it this instant.” He looked so angry; she wasn’t even sure he knew what he was saying. “Just put whatever baseboards in that bathroom that you would put in one of the gamekeepers’ cottages at one of your castles and let’s call it a day. Cheap and cheerful and all that. I’m done.” He stood up abruptly, nearly kicking over the metal folding chair as he did.
Claire felt as though every word was a punch. He didn’t respect her job. He didn’t respect her past. He didn’t respect anything about her. She refused to cry. It would be much easier to channel her shame—like a weak stream redirected with a few leaves and pebbles—right over to indignation. She stood up, leaving a stack of work orders for him to review, and slid her own papers neatly into the blue leather case. She smiled her thinnest, meanest smile. “Very well then. Good day.”
She walked out of the cluttered living room with as much dignity as she could muster, which was pretty much, considering. She got to the car and put the key in the ignition, starte
d it up, and felt the chill in the air.
“Damn.” She’d left Bronte’s jacket. Was it worth six weeks’ pay to never speak to him again? If she hadn’t seen the price tag, she might have left it and asked one of the other designers to retrieve it in a few weeks’ time at the next site visit…or she could send an email to Ben asking him to bring it to New York when he returned. She could send a messenger over to his apartment building and get it back that way.
She slammed her palm against the steering wheel then rubbed her hands together. That actually hurt more in real life than it looked like it would when angry people in movies did it. Claire swore again then turned the car off, got out, and walked back up the wide steps to the beautiful wraparound porch. The wood was primed and repaired and the final coat of deck gray was set to go on next week. From the outside at least, the house was beginning to look finished.
She rang the bell reluctantly.
Ben opened the large door and said nothing.
“I forgot my jacket…my sister-in-law’s jacket, actually…”
“You must have closets full of jackets, Claire. What’s one more?”
She hated how he said her name like a little stab.
You are rich, Claire.
You think you’re so great, Claire.
You are nothing to me, Claire.
Or at least that’s how it sounded to her.
“May I have the jacket, please?” Her voice was so weak, damn him. She wanted to drive away then pull off to the side of the road and bawl her eyes out. Bronte would have known exactly how to turn this whole meeting into some sort of wild weekend of rekindled romance and no-strings-attached sexual escapades.
Claire felt like she was the walking, talking embodiment of Every String Attached. And she had no idea what a sexual escapade even entailed. Sure, she’d spent the past week and a half dreaming about the idea of Ben, but she’d never approached anything even remotely resembling an actual fantasy. Perhaps a swing. Fragonard’s painting in the Wallace Collection sprang to mind.
“Say my name.” Ben was staring down at her, his voice hard.
She was shorter than he was to begin with, but Claire was still on the porch and it was a few inches lower than the front hall, where he was standing. His words knocked the wind out of her.
“What?” She could barely speak. She wanted to cry or hit him or just bury her face in his hard, warm chest. It still felt like he was taunting her or trying to punish her, and she didn’t understand why, and the tears were so close.
“Just say my name. I want to hear you say it.”
Claire took a deep, fortifying breath. One syllable for a six-thousand-dollar jacket seemed like a pretty easy trade, but she wasn’t sure she could do it. She bit her lips between her teeth in the only nervous habit her mother had never been able to fully drum out of her.
“Or just let me stare at your lips while you do that…” His voice was softer, but no less menacing. Maybe more so.
She unclenched her lips and could feel them throbbing as he stared at her mouth. Her heart lurched into a frantic gallop, a terrible mix of fear and something so hot and eager, she wasn’t able to name it.
Air. Air. Air. Claire couldn’t breathe properly. She might have to abandon the jacket. It had sounded like he wanted to look at her lips, but he looked so cross now, like he resented wanting to.
Claire’s heart pounded harder as she worked up the courage to say the single word. “Ben.”
Chapter 7
He stared at her lips as she said the one syllable, then he looked into her eyes. Her pupils dilated, nearly filling the pale, pale gray of her irises. He watched her feel it—desire—finally. Decades too late. It soothed his ego to see her response, but he couldn’t let it mean more than that. A physical charge, nothing more.
Claire’s blood was so blue, Billie Holiday could have sung songs about it. Yes, she’d always appeared a bit formal, but at least Ben hadn’t imagined everything from that summer. They had shared something real, and the look in her eyes made it impossible to deny. All those years ago, whenever he had kissed her neck or reached for her hand, she would whisper his name like that, so full of desire and almost a strange disbelief. A kind of quivering hesitance that made him feel like a god.
Now, all her quivering hesitance only served to infuriate him. As if she were intimidated by him. As if she hadn’t spent her entire life among the world’s elite.
He turned from the door without inviting her back in, got the jacket from the laundry room, and returned to the front door. She was like a statue. He suspected she hadn’t moved a particle of air around her in the few seconds while he’d been gone.
“Here.” He handed her the jacket.
She reached out to take it, and he pulled it quickly back; he didn’t even know why. Maybe to make her look at him again. He couldn’t stand the way she was ignoring him, looking anywhere but in his eyes, avoiding saying his name. Something vindictive twisted inside him. “On second thought—”
“Ben—”
“Oh. Good. You’re getting the hang of it. I’m going to call Boppy and tell her you’re just the thing.”
She looked terrified, and Ben almost felt sorry for her, but decided not to. “Just the person,” he amended, “to help me wrap up this project once and for all. Who knows? Maybe you’ll want to buy it yourself when you’re done… A little piece of America to add to your vast holdings.”
She held her arm out, perfectly steady, waiting for him to put the jacket into her hand. He would figure out a way to bait her. This silly job seemed to matter to her for some reason. Not like she needed the money; maybe she’d decided she needed a little pet project to fill her royal days. Ben gave her the jacket.
Claire slid her right arm, then her left slowly into the sleeves. She pulled her hair out from beneath the collar, closing her eyes for a few seconds as she did it, as if her unruly blond hair was just one more annoyance. Ben wanted to pull her hair so hard and furiously. He wanted to show her…something.
He raked his hand through his own short hair instead.
She spoke softly. “I don’t know if I’m the right person for this job after all.”
He stared down at her. He knew it was despicable, but he liked her down there on the porch, a few inches below him.
“No, I disagree. I think you’re the best person for the job,” he said with narrowed eyes, sizing her up. “And it’s my job, so I get to decide.”
She licked her upper lip with the tip of her tongue, as if she had to do something rather than utter the condescending words that probably sprang to mind. “Very well.” She started to turn toward the car, and if Ben hadn’t known the extent of her inbred arrogance, he might have even mistaken the softening of her shoulders for a sign of defeat.
“Claire? Not even a kiss good-bye for an old friend?” He didn’t know where all of this venom was coming from, but Ben thought he must have an entire arsenal of ill-conceived, thoughtless ideas tucked away in his brain somewhere. He wanted a taste, and he knew it was wrong and laced with spite, but he wanted it. And he hadn’t wanted anything for so long, he felt almost entitled. She was made of ice. What difference did it make to her?
She turned slowly back to face him. “You can’t be serious.”
Ah, there she was. The haughty, confident ice princess.
“Oh. But I am. Just a peck. I vaguely remember you used to like kissing.”
She blushed. She probably blushed like most people raised an eyebrow. On demand, he thought cruelly.
“And only kissing,” he added, wanting to put a stop to any pleasure she might be getting, no matter how twisted. “It didn’t mean anything to you then. Why should it mean anything now?”
She stared at him, raw, murderous rage flashing behind those ice eyes. Then she stiffened. “Why not? Show me what you got…Ben.” She said his name with cold precision.
Ben let his hand come away from the doorjamb, where he’d been effectively blocking her entrance to the house.
He reached around to her lower back, slipping his hand between the smooth cotton of her white blouse—warm from the skin beneath—and the curled shearling of the luxurious coat lining. Claire didn’t gasp or respond, but she bent in a way that felt distantly familiar.
She leaned into him, and in that slight give, she took everything from him. Just like she had all those years ago—pulling him out of himself, out of control—lost to her false innocence.
He didn’t care. He planted his lips on hers and took. She made the smallest whimpering sound, which he chose to construe as reluctant pleasure, and he began to have his way with her lips. He hadn’t been lying when he’d said how she used to love kissing. They’d done it for hours. Under the plane trees outside St.-Remy. Along the canals near Dijon. They’d kissed for days. Eons. He would have kissed her forever if she’d have let him.
Ben released her, remembering that she would never let him. Not really. She always held something in reserve.
He stepped away abruptly to give himself the physical distance from her warm, soft body, before he fell back into that desperate minefield of adolescent thinking that had done so much damage to his heart twenty years ago. He would retreat first this time. He would call the shots.
“Good-bye, Claire.” He shut the large door in her face.
He walked into the kitchen without turning back, unwilling to look at her through the glass panes on the upper half of the wide front door. Once he got into the kitchen, out of sight, he slid to the floor and leaned against the wall next to the cellar door. What the hell had come over him? He wasn’t a mean person. Even Alice had cited his damnable kindness as part of the reason she could no longer stand to be married to him. Her exact words were, “You’ve become disgustingly accommodating.”
He scrubbed his cheeks with the palms of his hands. Claire Heyworth made him want to pick a fight from the minute she looked up at him with those doe eyes. False doe eyes, he reminded himself. She had been momentarily surprised when his face appeared from beneath that towel, but she’d certainly recovered her duchess-in-training ways quickly enough. He thought for sure when he brought her a cup of tea, made just the way she’d always liked it, that she might have softened slightly.