by Mulry, Megan
“What is it, darling?” she asked.
He reached up and moved a strand of her golden hair, so he could see her eyes clearly. He brought the hair to his nose and inhaled. His eyes closed. “God, when you were standing in my doorway in Connecticut, I almost slammed the door in your face—”
“You did slam the door in my face!” Claire laughed and kept kissing him wherever she could find skin: his neck, below his ear, along his jaw.
“I meant when you first walked up. I thought I was having some sort of hallucination. I just couldn’t believe it was really you.”
“Kiss me, Ben. Please.” Claire had never thought to ask Freddy to kiss her—and had certainly never begged—because a kiss from Freddy was a quite perfunctory business. Whereas Ben’s kisses were so…thorough. She would beg shamelessly for kisses from Ben.
The problem with his thoroughness was that when he stopped to make those tender little comments, Claire was left feeling half-done. She couldn’t concentrate on anything he was saying, because her eyes were focused on his mouth: the glistening lower lip, the way his tongue touched the edge when he spoke, the way his teeth flashed in promise. All she could do was wonder how long before his lips were going to be back on her body.
“Are you hearing anything I’m saying?” he asked abruptly, with more force.
“Not a single word,” Claire said on a sigh. “But I love watching your lips move when you talk, so it’s not a total loss.” She smiled shyly. “You’re turning me into something wanton.”
“God, Claire.” His voice was rough and strained. He trailed the pad of his thumb over Claire’s lower lip, and she let her tongue taste the salty hint of him. Her eyes closed in the pleasure of it: his smell, and the texture of that bit of skin, and all of him, in her arms, so close, so available. Finally.
“I don’t think I ever stopped wanting you either,” Claire said quietly into his neck, not opening her eyes as she let her hands rake through the short dark hair that just skimmed Ben’s collar. It was easier to be totally honest if she didn’t have to look right into those green, demanding eyes. “Maybe that’s why my marriage was doomed.”
“Oh dear.” Ben stood up straighter and set Claire back a few inches. “Let’s not spoil everything with talk of doomed marriages. I’m not sure I can take it.” Ben tried to laugh it off.
Claire opened her eyes. Her blood had cooled considerably. “Did you just tell me to stop talking about what I was talking about?”
“What?” Ben was trying to pull her close again, beginning to dip into the crook of her neck to whisper more of that unintelligible nonsense about how lovely and gorgeous she was. Claire tried to push him away.
“Did you just tell me not to talk about my doomed marriage?”
“Jesus, Claire. What the hell?” Ben released her and put his hands out in a show of innocence. “My marriage was doomed too. We can talk about whatever you want. But—” She narrowed her eyes skeptically and he lowered his voice. “The truth is, I want to get you into bed. So. Much. I want to feel your supple body all around mine and to touch you everywhere you will let me. I’ve dreamt of you for so many years. Years, Claire. Why in the hell would I want to talk about either of our doomed marriages?”
Claire stared at him. “I… My husband…I just meant that I never…” Claire felt the press of tears and the extent of her foolishness. She collapsed onto the sofa in a heap. “I’m just a mess, Ben. I want all that too.” She threw one hand up to encompass his whole existence in a quick flick of her wrist. “Well, who wouldn’t? Just look at you.” The tears got the best of her and started to fall. “I’m just a rickety old thing.”
Ben smiled slowly and knelt down on the floor. “Me too. Ow,” he said with dramatic exaggeration, “my arthritis!”
Claire smiled and wiped at her tears. “Seriously, though, don’t you feel old sometimes? Too old to be necking on a couch.”
“Of course I do,” he said. Then, eagerly, “So are we going to neck?”
Claire laughed and wiped away more tears.
“Look, Claire, sweetheart, I’m forty. My nieces think I’m ancient, a relic.” He reached out to touch her cheek where a stray tear sparkled in the gentle light of the table lamp. “May I?” he asked, before actually touching her.
Claire nodded.
Ben wiped away the tear and then stroked the edge of her cheekbone and traced her jaw and her chin. He didn’t look her in the eye. “I’m terrified, Claire. You broke my heart when you left like you did all those years ago. Just poof and you were gone—”
Claire swallowed and felt an entirely new and unanticipated wave of tears coming on. “Oh, Ben—”
“I’m not saying it to get you to forgive me for being an ass just now about the not-wanting-to-talk-about-the-doomed-marriages shutting-you-up comment.” He took a deep breath and continued. “You can talk about whatever you want. We can talk about anything. I really believe that.” He kept touching her in that gentling way, memorizing her, or reacquainting himself with the details, more like. “I just meant, I want to touch you, to really feel you, because I have wanted—I mean really craved—you…us, for so long.” He inhaled and leaned closer into her, spreading her legs apart so he could kneel in front of her and brush his lips across hers. “Why would I ever postpone what I’ve been wanting for so long?” His stray touches were beginning to have more purpose. He was tracing the turn of her breasts through the silky fabric. “This shirt is diabolical, by the way. All night I kept getting shadowy glimpses and then, nothing.” He cupped her breast fully and squeezed, and Claire gasped at the pleasure that crashed over her. “Come to bed with me, Claire. Please. Now.” His breath was hot and demanding between kisses.
She reached her hands around his neck and her legs around his waist. “Yes, Ben.”
“Now let me see if I can lever myself up and sweep you into my arms in some stunningly romantic gesture.”
Claire laughed and buried her face into the warm, promising scent of his neck. She held on tightly with her arms and legs, and he stood up easily, cupping her bottom and walking toward the small bedroom adjacent to the living room.
“Nice bed,” Ben said, gesturing toward Bronte’s mammoth mattress covered in beautiful French sheets and enough pillows and bolsters to build a small fort.
“It’s my sister-in-law’s,” Claire said. “I think she’s a bit of a sex fiend.”
“Good. I like her already.” Ben leaned down slowly, placed Claire onto the center of the puffy down comforter, and started tossing aside some of the smaller pillows. Then he looked up at the wrought iron headboard and narrowed his eyes. “Lots of possibilities…”
“Ben!” Claire blushed, caught in some sort of limbo between the sexpot she’d been earlier when he kissed her outside the restaurant and the unbidden memory of the cold, sexless woman Freddy had repeatedly told her she was.
“What just happened? Why did you zone out?”
“I was thinking of some of the mean things my husband used to say to me…about how I was a bit of a cold fish.”
Apparently Ben thought that was hilarious. He laughed as he kept up his busy clearing of the extra pillows. Then, he was like a mischievous boy, rummaging around her body. He pushed up her silky shirt and kissed her navel.
“Oh!” she gasped, writhing beneath the intense sensation.
“Cold fish my ass.” He growled the words into another kiss, lower on her stomach.
He began to work on the button of her jeans, and Claire didn’t know what to do. She’d only been with one man her entire life, and he certainly never came after her like this. Ben seemed so adamant. He yanked her jeans partway down her thighs and stared at the silky underwear, his face only a few inches from the tiny triangle of fabric. Claire had a hand across her face, too embarrassed to look at him looking at her there.
And then he kissed her there, a hot wet possessive kiss right through the thin underwear, and Claire gasped and cried out.
“Ben!”
 
; He kissed her again and inhaled her scent. “Jesus, Claire. You’re unbelievable. Your skin is like…perfection.” He rubbed his rough cheek against the smooth tenderness of her thigh and hummed his pleasure. “Just perfect.”
“Ben,” she whispered. It seemed to be the only thing she was capable of. She didn’t know what to make of any of it. Freddy had never put his face between her legs. Never.
Ben kept tugging down her jeans until he came to her high-heeled shoes. He stood at the end of the bed, contemplating his options. “I do love the shoes, but the jeans have to come off.”
“I’m so embarrassed,” Clare said over a laugh. “I don’t feel at all sexy.”
He took each shoe off slowly. “As you would say, that’s daft.” He trailed his thumbnail up the arch of one foot and then the other. Claire’s back arched in response.
“Oh!” she gasped again. “Okay then…” She rubbed her thighs together in anticipatory glee after he tugged her jeans the rest of the way off. He pulled his sweater and shirt off in one swift motion, and Claire must have whimpered.
“What is it?” he asked, looking genuinely concerned.
Claire pulled one of the pillows from those that remained behind her on the bed and put it halfway in front of her face. “You’re just…quite nice.”
Ben’s smile was the epitome of pure male stroked ego. “Really?” he asked with false innocence, as he kicked off his shoes and slowly unbuttoned his jeans with one hand, rubbing the other lazily along his hard stomach.
Claire squealed into the pillow like a teenaged girl at her first rock concert. His torso was dark and firm, dusted with a fine spray of black hair that led down to where he was undoing his pants with maddening patience. His chest was almost exactly as she remembered it. She had seen it in her mind’s eye all these years, just as it had been on those rocky beaches on the Côte d’Azur. Dark and foreign and strong. She’d been mad for his broad chest and ridged stomach. She’d loved leaning her back into him when they’d watch the sunset and she’d nestle into the security of his embrace. He’d always held her with such conviction.
“I’ve missed you,” she whispered more seriously.
He finished taking off his pants and stalked up the length of her body. For some reason, he’d left on his boxer briefs, like he’d done when they were still teenagers, that adolescent concession to safe sex. Thinking back on it now, Claire realized they’d been so chaste. All that kissing and panting and rubbing, but they’d never been fully naked with each other. Her heart started pounding madly at the realization she was finally going to fulfill a dream she’d thought lost forever.
He pulled the pillow from her grasp. “I want to see all of you, Claire.”
“Likewise…” Claire reached around and let her hands tentatively hold the firm turn of his ass through the thin fabric. She stroked and reached and watched his eyes cloud and focus as she touched him. “I love your body…it’s just so…” She grabbed his hip where the muscles curved like a classical Greek statue across the bones. “Ideal.”
“You’re going to inflate my ego if you keep talking like that.” He was working his hands under her blouse. “Are you ready for me to take this off?”
Claire looked up at the warm light from the small French chandelier that hung over the bed. “Do you want the light on?”
Ben laughed so hard and so abruptly that Claire was momentarily frightened. “What do you think?” he asked, incredulous.
Shaking her head to let him know she really didn’t know what he thought, he stopped laughing as quickly as he’d started.
“Oh, Claire,” he said softly. “Did that bastard make you feel like you weren’t the most beautiful woman in the world? Because I want every light in New York City shining on this body of yours so I can see your eyes and your lips and your reddening skin and the slick response here—” He’d reached his fingers between her thighs and behind the satin of her underwear. “God, Claire…why wouldn’t I want to see you like this?”
Her breasts were straining against the inside of her bra and her hips were rocking of their own volition into the touch of his fingers. Claire turned her face away, afraid of how much she wanted this, wanted him. The wanting was dangerous. Very, very dangerous.
“Look at me, Claire.” His voice was stern, just like it had been last Saturday when he’d been mean to her, taunting her with that vicious kiss and then dismissing her. When, she now realized, he’d been covering for wanting her. Or maybe not covering at all.
Gathering her courage, and her desire, she reckoned, Claire turned her head back to look him in the eye. That binding look wove them together as much as any copulation or marital rite ever would. He held her with his eyes—daring her to stay with him in those demanding green depths—as one hand began to feel the smooth, slippery evidence of how turned on she was, and the other pushed up her blouse to reveal her bare stomach and bra.
“I don’t ever want you to turn away from me.” Ben’s voice was rough as his fingers were dipping into her. She stared into his eyes and felt her fears, her cold terrors, slipping away. She could really have this. He wanted her in a way she’d never thought possible. She smiled at the realization.
He smiled back, the slow, coaxing rhythm between her legs never ceasing. “What made you smile?”
Claire arched into his hand and sighed her pleasure. “You, Ben. You make me smile. You make me feel…warm and…” She squirmed toward him, putting her hand over his other hand where it rested over her breast.
“And what?” He leaned down and kissed her navel.
“And it makes me happy to think maybe you want me as much as I want you.”
His hands froze, and she thought she’d said too much or something wrong, and then he took her mouth with his and turned his fingers inside her in a way that shot bolts of pleasure throughout her body, to the tips of her fingers and toes, up her spine and then tingling across her scalp. She ached for him to be inside her.
Ben pulled away suddenly and stared down at Claire. He was all mussed hair and swollen wet lips; he groaned. “Damn it. I didn’t bring any protection.”
Claire reached up and trailed her fingertips along his chest, and his eyes slid shut at the simple connection. “I feel like I could just touch you this way for days,” she whispered.
He smiled and then slowly opened his eyes, which had taken on a predatory gleam. He took his hand from between her legs and brought it to his lips. “I want to taste you and touch you everywhere, Claire.”
His lips, her scent, his fingers, her eyes on his tongue. Claire’s mind short-circuited. She had never seen Ben like this, so completely given over to erotic pleasure. Then she whispered, “You’re naughty.”
Ben laughed, deep at the back of his throat, and then touched his wet fingertips to her lips. “So are you. You just don’t know it yet.”
She moaned at the feeling of his fingers—and the taste of him and her mingled together—on her tongue. He leaned down and pushed his hard length against her belly. “Is there a drugstore around here where I can go get some condoms?”
“Actually…”
“What?” He stopped moving, thinking she was going to change her mind about everything. They were both still so skittish.
“There are a whole bunch in the bathroom—”
Ben was up and across the room before Claire finished the sentence. She heard him pull open the cabinet and mumble something victorious. She took off her blouse and tossed it across the room, so she’d be lying on the bed in her bra and underwear when he came back. Then she felt embarrassed all of a sudden, like she was laid out in some tawdry pose. She sat up quickly to retrieve her shirt, or put on a nightgown, or get under the sheets, or something. With her back turned, she had one knee on the bed and one foot on the floor when Ben came out of the bathroom.
“Where do you think you’re going, sexy?”
She closed her eyes then gathered her courage and looked over her shoulder. “Nowhere,” she smiled hesitantly, pulling
her foot off the floor so she was kneeling back on her heels near the edge of the bed. “I’m sort of out of the habit.”
“Really? Good!” He’d walked around the end of the bed and was standing in front of her. He was right at eye level, as it were.
Her mouth dried, and she licked her lips nervously. She couldn’t look away from the straining fabric of his briefs.
“Up here,” he joked. “My eyes are up here.”
Her eyes flew up to his. “Oh. Sorry.”
“I’m joking, Claire.” He touched the edge of her cheek. “I love when you look at me like that. Hungry.”
She blushed furiously and stared down at the floor. “You’re so…graphic.”
“Graphic?” He laughed as he opened the box of condoms. “If you think the word hungry is graphic, you are in for some downright filth.”
She smiled and reached up to touch his stomach.
He smiled back. “By the way, what’s up with the gazillion condoms? Were you expecting someone?”
Claire fell back on the bed and tucked her face into the pillow.
“Not that I’m complaining, mind you! I like it.”
She looked up and smiled at him. “They’re probably expired. My sister-in-law moved to London a few years ago and doesn’t come back all that often. They were in the cabinet when I got here.”
“Nice welcome wagon,” Ben said. He set the box onto the bedside table and tapped the foil packet against his palm while contemplating something. Then he stopped and looked down the length of Claire’s body and back to her eyes with that dark mischief. “Take the rest off.”
He had this way of switching gears that made Claire pleased and almost terrified—in a good way—all at once. “Oh. Oh, okay.” She began to shimmy out of her underwear.