Free In Love Again by Megan Mulry Page B

He would retreat first this time. He would call the shots.
    “Good-bye, Claire.” He shut the large door in her face.
    He walked into the kitchen without turning back, unwilling to look at her through the glass panes on the upper half of the wide front door. Once he got into the kitchen, out of sight, he slid to the floor and leaned against the wall next to the cellar door. What the hell had come over him? He wasn’t a mean person. Even Alice had cited his damnable kindness as part of the reason she could no longer stand to be married to him. Her exact words were, “You’ve become disgustingly accommodating.”
    He scrubbed his cheeks with the palms of his hands. Claire Heyworth made him want to pick a fight from the minute she looked up at him with those doe eyes. False doe eyes , he reminded himself. She had been momentarily surprised when his face appeared from beneath that towel, but she’d certainly recovered her duchess-in-training ways quickly enough. He thought for sure when he brought her a cup of tea, made just the way she’d always liked it, that she might have softened slightly.
    “Ha,” he said aloud to the empty room. She appeared as if the last thing in the world she wanted was to be reminded of their former intimacy, what she probably thought of—regretfully—as their brief meaningless dalliance, that summer two decades ago.
    Why did it feel so fresh to him? The smell of the lavender in the hilltop towns in the Vaucluse, the dry air and the saw of the cicadas mixed with the sound of her laughter. How he’d lived to make her laugh. She’d been so reluctant to laugh that every time he’d succeeded, it was a sweet victory. How she would cover her mouth in modesty, and the first time he pulled her hand away so he could see the joy spread across her face.
    “Fuck.” It was as clear now in a rainy kitchen in northwestern Connecticut as it was under the French sun twenty years ago. It didn’t help that he could still taste her on his lips. That sweet light scent of lemon and fresh air and…
    “Fuck.”
    Ben stood up and decided to exhaust his body in an attempt to shut off his maudlin, pathetic mind. The stone wall at the far end of the backyard had been crumbling for the past hundred years. He decided that this particular cold, wet afternoon was the perfect time to remedy a century of slow decay.
    Three hours later, his hands were scraped, his back was throbbing, his shoulders were numb, and he’d rebuilt about one linear foot of the wall. He walked down the sloping yard toward the back door, then stopped to turn and look at his accomplishment. It was pretty damned satisfying, that pathetic little architecture of rocks. Mostly because he had managed not to think of Claire Heyworth for three consecutive hours. Scotch would take care of erasing her from the remaining waking hours of the night.
     

     
    Ben woke up Sunday morning with a headache and an urge to punch himself. What in the hell had he been thinking to treat Claire so abominably? He felt like a third grade boy who kicked the pretty girl right in the shin to let her know he liked her. He tried to envision some happy outcome, some scenario that would let him be friends with her or at least be able to be in the same room with her without wanting to whip her to the floor and crush her against him, beneath him.
    The vision felt so real, and then he realized he had been dreaming of her moments before. The images flashed in his mind, the naked body he’d never seen all the way naked, but had imagined easily enough after all the hours of the two of them spread on beaches with her lithe, seventeen-year-old body stretched out next to him in nothing but a turquoise string bikini.
    He closed his eyes and reached for his hard cock. He could picture her smiling at him, back when they were both young and free—or when he’d thought she was free. The wind along the Riviera whipping her hair around her face and the golden strands catching in her lips