In Love Again (7 page)

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.

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.