by Mulry, Megan
He thought about the expression and realized it described exactly how he felt. He didn’t just want to cross the transom of a door; he wanted to be out of all doors. Away from walls and windows and doors. Walking in woods and across fields with no doors in sight. He was letting his mind wander along those meandering paths when a taxi slowed, and he saw Claire through the back window as she leaned forward to pay the driver. Ben crossed the few steps to the curb and pulled open the taxi door.
“Oh!” Claire exclaimed. “Thank you.” Her long legs came out of the cab first, and Ben felt his stomach drop. She had on a pair of extra-long, fitted jeans that made her legs appear endless, and when she stood up in front of him, she was nearly as tall as he was. He slammed the back door shut and the cab pulled away. The two of them stared at each other.
“Did you leave your bag in the back of the cab?” Ben asked with a hint of worry.
She spread her arms wide. “No. I just slipped my credit card into my back pocket”—she turned slightly and patted her own behind for effect—“and my key into my front pocket. I thought I’d live on the edge.”
Ben stared at this new version of Claire and tried to keep steady. Her hair was mussed and loose around her face. She was wearing stunningly high heels with those infinite blue jeans, and he caught a glimpse of something shiny and touchable under her serviceable wool jacket.
“Oh. Good. I didn’t want to have to run screaming down the street after that taxi driver.”
Claire smiled, and Ben decided the friendship plan was the stupidest idea he’d ever had. There was no way he was going to be “just friends” with this woman if he could help it. And he hoped he could help it as quickly as possible. He didn’t care if she ripped his heart out again. It would be worth it.
“I might like to see that, but you’re right, no need,” she agreed. “Shall we go in?” She tipped her chin toward the entrance of the restaurant.
Ben reached out for her hand then thought she might not take it, so he touched the turn of her elbow instead. “You look lovely, Claire.”
“Oh! Oh. Thanks. I mean…thank you.”
Ben wasn’t sure what to make of the fact that she acted surprised when he complimented her. He’d always imagined her living in a sea of admirers, both public and private. He opened the door for her to pass into the warm, bustling air of the restaurant.
“May I take your coat for you?” Ben asked, lifting his hands toward her shoulders as they stood in front of the podium, where a tall, thin woman in a long-sleeved black T-shirt lifted her eyes to them.
“Do you have a reservation?”
“Yes,” Claire answered. “I think it will be under my name. Heyworth?”
Ben took a moment to feel the warmth of her skin as he pulled the shoulders of the wool coat from her arms. His fingers touched the light silk of her sleeve, and he felt it like an electrical current up his arms. He exhaled slowly and brought the coat over to the small coat check area next to the bar. He took off his jacket and passed both of them to the attendant.
When he turned back to Claire, the hostess was holding two menus and looking at them expectantly. “This way, please.”
He watched the sway of Claire’s hips as she followed the other woman to a table at the far corner of the crowded restaurant. It was a small table for two tucked against the back wall. Claire slid into the banquette, and Ben regretted the distance between them as he pulled out the seat and sat across from her. The hostess handed each of them a menu and left.
Claire caught his eye over the top of her menu then quickly looked down. Her eyes were a gorgeous greenish-gray that turned smoky when she cast her gaze away from him.
“So, what do you like?” Claire asked without looking up from the menu.
You! Ben wanted to shout. He was turning into some sort of teenaged version of himself, overcome with hormones and a desire that felt like something slippery and out of his control. Despite all of his griping about feeling like an urban lab rat, Ben was not a fan of the alternative. Unforeseen, uncontrollable situations were his worst nightmare.
“Ben?” Claire had set her menu flat on the table and was staring straight into his eyes.
“Yes?” he answered quietly.
“Are you okay?”
He took a deep breath and decided to throw it all to the wind. He had a momentary vision of a fistful of wheat being thrown into the air and the chaff flying off in a light breeze. “I don’t think I want to be friends, Claire.”
“What?” She looked so hurt.
Oh, Jesus. Now he’d done it. “I mean, I think, god—” Ben dragged both of his hands through his short hair and let them rest at the back of his neck. “I feel like I’m a teenager and this is ridiculous and I totally understand how you want to keep it light and friendly but I think…”
Claire’s hands were clasped so tightly together that Ben reached for her without thinking, the need to soothe her anxiety overriding his own desire.
“I’m sorry,” he whispered.
“It’s okay,” she said quietly. “I guess it was too much to hope that we could just hang out. After all this time. I was pretty awful, I guess, now that I look back on it. And it was dumb of me to think you would still care for me at all—”
He held her hands in one hand then brought the other up so he could hold both of hers in his. “Claire.”
“It’s all right. Maybe we should just go. I don’t know if I have much of an appetite—”
“Claire,” he said with more authority.
“What?” She looked up, startled, then contained. He saw the wall of ice, what he now knew to be the wall of insecurity and fear that he’d mistaken for arrogance.
“I don’t want to be your friend because I want to kiss you all the time and I can’t concentrate at work because I’m thinking about you incessantly. I thought I could just have dinner and be normal, but you’re so gorgeous, and I can’t imagine how I’m going to get through two minutes, much less two hours, without reaching out to touch your hair—or your cheek—and how I want to…do things to you, with you, if you’ll let me, if you want me…at all.”
“Oh, god, Ben.” Claire was breathless, her words rolling out of her unbidden.
“It’s too much too soon, isn’t it? I’m so sorry. It’s embarrassing—”
“No, it’s just—”
“It’s all right.” He tried to act normal, matter-of-fact. “I know you just want to be friends, and it wasn’t right to push that. I’m so sorry. It was wrong. I just thought—”
“Ben.” The air seemed to stop around them. She said his name with a finality that made him stop and really see her for maybe the first time since he’d started this rambling, run-on attempt to unburden himself, to release the torrent of feelings.
“Yes,” Ben answered.
Claire took a deep breath and turned her hands so she was the one holding his. “Every time I see your last name on a file at work, I have to remind myself to breathe. Every time someone at the office makes an offhand remark about the dishy dentist, I feel like all my clothes are too tight and something has gone amiss with the radiators in the office.” She shifted in her seat as if she were experiencing the same effect right then. “Is it too ridiculous? Are we too ridiculous? I feel like a teenager too. Are we just having some silly walk down memory lane? I can’t stop thinking about you…” Her voice trailed off then she continued in a throaty whisper, “Especially about that cruel, wonderful kiss on your porch.”
Ben was rubbing his thumbs along Claire’s knuckles. He licked his lips before he could speak again. “I don’t think I ever stopped loving you, Claire.”
“What?” she gasped.
The waiter came over to take their drink order, and Ben waved him away with a harsh swipe of his hand.
“Go,” he snapped at the waiter, without looking away from Claire’s eyes. When they were alone again—or relatively alone, at least—Ben tried to stay calm, which was proving difficult with Claire looking like she was feeli
ng everything he was. “The timing’s all wrong,” he started gently.
“I know!” Claire leapt in. “It’s too fast.” She shook her head with a discouraging back-and-forth. Ben looked momentarily disappointed, until Claire continued. “But then I feel like I just know you. And it’s already been too long. Do you know what I mean?”
He paused to revel in that, but she mistook it for skeptical hesitance.
“God, Claire. The minute I saw you on my porch in Litchfield, it was like a time warp. There you were, and I was nineteen again and the years had folded into nothing—since that last night in Antibes—and then the next day when you were gone. I was so…destroyed.” He added the last word quietly and looked down at the table, as if he were trying to avoid revisiting those feelings.
Eventually, he looked up and they stared at each other for a few long minutes after that, trying to process their delayed good fortune, staring with a goofy half-smile into one another’s eyes.
Claire finally broke the silence. “Will you kiss me again like you did on Saturday?”
“I was so sorry about that—”
Claire’s eyebrows pulled together in anticipation of him saying he was sorry he had kissed her. But he certainly looked like he wanted to kiss her now, the way he stared at her lips when she talked, the way his thumbs and fingers enclosed her hands and soothed her while simultaneously ratcheting up her heartbeat. She felt saner and crazier all at once.
“I don’t know if I can eat,” Claire whispered with newfound, thrilling honesty, “if I’m thinking about you kissing me again.” Ben made her believe that maybe it wasn’t so forward or wrong or crass to simply say what she felt, what she wanted.
The waiter came back, starting to look a bit arrogant and impatient. “Are you ready to order?”
Ben turned to him slowly, and Claire saw a hint of that ragged temper that he wasn’t always able to control. It was somehow woven into his passion, and he didn’t want that passion to be interrupted. “We’d like your best bottle of champagne, whatever you have.”
Claire nearly burst out laughing at the waiter’s immediate and unabashed enthusiasm, which had been bordering on snippy impatience only moments before.
“Of course,” the waiter agreed. “Right away.”
“Hold on, sorry.” Ben stopped him before he walked away. “Ice it down for a few minutes, will you? We forgot something in the cab, and he’s just coming back around the block to return it. We’ll be back at the table in a few minutes. Okay?”
“Of course, I’ll ice it down and have it waiting for you when you return. May I suggest a few appeti—”
“No.” Ben cut him off without further ceremony. Then he stood up and pulled Claire behind him. She practically danced along, and in a few seconds they were back out on the sidewalk. Neither of them had retrieved their coats, and Claire was confused about the taxi and wondering what Ben had meant—
Ben slammed into her, cradling the back of her head a second before she would have hit her skull against the brick side of the building—and not have cared a jot. They stood huddled into each other, around the corner from the plate glass windows of the restaurant and out of sight of the other diners who’d just watched them stumble out. His other hand was at the small of her back, pulling the lower half of her body flush up against him. The tilting, whirling sensation of her head pushed back and her hips straining forward while teetering on the too-high Sarah James shoes all made her feel completely off balance.
His kiss made her feel…everything. She felt the cold air against her cheeks, the hot press of his lips against hers, the tender, inquisitive touch of his fingers as they found their way beneath her blouse and trailed across her belly just above the waist of her jeans. Claire felt an electric snap, like a transformer blowing.
She gasped his name like a starving person. She wanted to nip and bite at him. He made her feel fierce.
Ben gradually slowed the kiss and removed his hands from against her supple skin, trying to take a few breaths between lighter kisses. He began to smooth her hair where his hand had clutched the loose curls at the nape of her neck. “So lovely,” he whispered.
Claire blushed. “Thank you.”
Ben laughed loud and it rang down the street. “Come, my little polite sexpot. You’re divine.”
Claire liked the idea of being a polite sexpot. The kiss had served its purpose and the nearly intolerable tension that had been hovering between them was temporarily tamped. Slightly. Claire felt like she glided back through the restaurant, a couple of people looking up and furrowing their brows in confusion about their coming and going and coming back again so quickly. Claire laughed and sat back down in the seat along the banquette that she’d taken a few moments before. She clasped her hands in front of her. “Well, now that we have that all settled.”
Ben smiled in a way that made Claire’s stomach flip and her heart sputter and drop.
“You’d best not smile at me like that if you intend to have supper,” she said. “I’m not certain I’ll make it through a proper meal.” She looked down, blushing, and pulled the neatly folded napkin into her lap. She kept her head down, looking to make sure she had opened it and refolded it neatly across her thighs. When she looked up, Ben was staring at her and shaking his head in the tiniest way.
“How did you ever get away from me?”
“Oh.” Claire’s brow pulled together and she pressed her lips. “Must we really go through all that?”
“Yes.”
“Did your wife put up with that sort of monosyllabic nonsense?”
“She’s the one who trained me in it. So, yes.”
Claire twisted her mouth as she contemplated her reply. Luckily, the waiter arrived with the champagne just then, so she didn’t need to launch into a tedious reenactment of her mother and her betrothal and how unalterable it had seemed to her seventeen-year-old self. “Oh! Champagne!”
“Saved by the bell,” Ben added with a hint of sarcasm.
As the waiter poured the champagne, Claire opened the menu and made hard work of deciding what she was going to have. She settled on the oysters to start and the crispy pork belly for her main. When she looked up from the menu, Ben was holding his champagne flute aloft and staring at Claire.
“Oh. A toast…” Claire set down her menu and picked up her glass.
Ben tapped his glass with a barely audible clink against hers. “To right now. I want to toast to this very instant with your lips just kissed and about to take a sip. And then, to later.”
Her heart began to pound with an unfamiliar, delectable force. “Yes,” she breathed. “To right now…and later.” Her cheeks must have shone bright red, and she should have been self-conscious, but she couldn’t bring herself to care. She loved how he made her feel.
The food came, and Ben ordered a bottle of cabernet to go with it. By the time they’d finished, Claire was warm all over. The last of the wine was swirling in her glass as she twisted the stem and looked into Ben’s eyes.
“What happens now?” she asked.
“I take you home and devour you.”
Claire stopped twisting the stem of the glass and looked into Ben’s eyes; his irises had gone from pale, cool jade to hot, bright emerald during the course of the meal. “I think I’m going to like that,” Claire said.
The waiter brought the check, but it was merely a formality as Boppy had already called in the reservation and told the manager that she would be picking up the tab, regardless of the cost.
“I wouldn’t have ordered the most expensive bottle of champagne if I expected Boppy to pay for it—” Ben protested.
“You are effectively paying for the whole meal, Ben. You’re a client, remember? Boppy pays. No point in getting chivalrous now. She’s earned enough off you and your wife to warrant this.”
“Ex-wife,” Ben added.
Claire looked up and smiled. “Ex-wife. I like the sound of that.” She looked down to sign the bill, to make it official that she had in fa
ct eaten there, then closed the leather case and left it on the table. She looked up into Ben’s penetrating green eyes. “I don’t think I can eat another bite. Shall we?” she asked.
He put his napkin on the table, then stood slowly and reached out a hand to help Claire up from her side of the banquette. “I’m starving,” Ben whispered hotly into the curve of Claire’s ear.
She stumbled, and Ben took the opportunity to wrap one strong arm around her waist.
“You okay?” he asked.
“Never better.” Claire slid her arm behind Ben’s back and pulled herself closer in to his hold. “Better and better,” she whispered.
They stopped at the coat check to retrieve their jackets and decided to walk the shorter distance to Claire’s apartment. The two of them swung their arms in long, wide strokes for a few blocks, then tucked close into each other when the cooler wind whipped down Fifth Avenue.
Chapter 13
“So…this is it.” Claire gestured around to indicate the small, tidy one bedroom apartment, but when she put the single key on the kitchen counter and her gaze returned to Ben, she saw the way his eyes had darkened and his lips had quirked into the sexiest thing she had ever seen. “I mean…this is the apartment…”
Ben took off his jacket and hung it on the back of the kitchen stool to his right.
Claire walked slowly backward, taking off her jacket as she did. “I mean…” She smiled, loving the predatory way Ben was following her, step by delicious step. “I mean…”
He pulled the coat out of her hand and tossed it on top of his.
“Yes?” he asked, still pursuing her slowly. She looked quickly over her shoulder to make sure she didn’t trip over the coffee table, then paused.
“I mean…I guess I mean…this is it…” Claire changed direction and dove at Ben. The silky shirt, the high heels, the tight jeans—Claire realized with a rush of pleasure that all of that was for Ben and for herself. The smooth fabric of her shirt made her feel like she was skating across his hard, hot chest and stomach. The heels gave her just the right amount of added height to look him in the eye and kiss him outside the restaurant. The jeans…were suddenly quite annoying. Claire groaned through the kiss, or kisses. Then she felt something rumble through him and wasn’t sure if it was pleasure or frustration.