In Love Again (16 page)

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.

“Slower,” he said, clipped and stern.

The way he was able to use his voice to finesse her reaction was beginning to muddle her brain. Then she realized it was quite the opposite of muddled: everything felt gloriously clear, sparkling almost. When he spoke in that dictatorial way, she felt it between her legs, like a switch had been flipped. She slowed way down, sliding the slippery underwear to her ankles and then fidgeting with her feet until she had it dangling from one toe. “Like that?” she teased in a provocative voice she had not even known she was capable of.

He cleared his throat. “Yeah. Like that.”

Claire let the underwear drop to the floor and watched Ben’s eyes travel up her legs, pausing at her throbbing center, then continuing languidly up to her breasts. “Now the bra,” he ordered.

“Oh, okay.” Claire smiled, feeling like she was getting the hang of it, getting the hang of him, and how deliciously satisfying it felt—for both of them—to have him fully focused on her like this. She had to arch her back to reach her hands behind to the clasp of her bra, and she watched Ben’s face twitch at the movement.

“Do you like that?” She arched her back more and then let the bra unsnap. She didn’t remove it, but the loosened cups barely covered her breasts. She lowered herself back onto the bed, slowly moving the shoulder straps to rest near her elbows, dipping her chin and feeling like a burlesque dancer. She thought she’d be embarrassed when she was totally revealed to him—her breasts weren’t as firm as they’d once been, her stomach not nearly as supple—but the way he looked at her made her bold. He made her feel beautiful, not just because he said it, but because he looked at her in that ravenous way of his. She started to reach for her breast, thinking she might tease him—

“Stop it!” Ben snapped.

Claire looked at him and her breathing caught. He was so demanding, so narrowly focused. Almost brutal.

“Ben…” she said, her voice low and wanting. “Please touch me.” She took the bra the rest of the way off and let it fall to the floor next to the bed. She never stopped looking at him. His eyes were stormy, bordering on angry. His cock was straining behind the fabric of his underwear. “What are you waiting for?”

His breath came out like a hiss. “Claire.” He shook his head once. “I have been waiting for this, for you, for so damn long. I think I’m having trouble processing that this is real…that you are real…and that you want me…”