Read Online In Love Again by Megan Mulry - Free Book Online

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