Clair took her own silent advice again.
Then she drove the rest of the way to the building.
Apparently Ben Walker wasn’t watching for her because the big mahogany door remained closed as she parked, turned off the engine and got out of the car with her suitcase.
When she reached the front door she automatically put her hand on the knob to open it before it occurred to her that the place didn’t belong to her—or to her father—any longer and that she couldn’t just go in.
So she pulled her hand away and rang the bell instead, feeling a whole new layer of awkwardness.
But when the door opened it wasn’t Ben Walker on the other side of it. It was Cassie Walker.
“Hey there, stranger!” Clair’s old friend greeted her with a smile and a big hug. “I was hoping you’d get here before I left, and you just barely made it.”
“Cassie!” Clair responded with a full measure of relief echoing in her voice. She hadn’t expected her friend to be there but the fact that Cassie was helped immensely.
“Come in, come in,” Cassie encouraged. But despite the invitation, she didn’t make way for Clair because, as if the change in Clair had just registered, she said, “You cut your hair.”
“I did,” Clair confirmed, self-consciously fingering the short curls at her nape.
“It’s so cute. I love it on you. Even though I’m still mad at you.”
“You’re mad at me?”
“For the reunion. I can’t believe you left that night without telling me you were going and then didn’t even call before going back to Denver the next day. I don’t care if you were in a hurry to escape before you had to see Rob again.”
A second wave of relief washed through Clair. She’d called her friend a few days after the reunion, worrying that Cassie’s twin might have told her that he’d spent the night with Clair. But when it had become clear that Ben hadn’t said anything about it, Clair had given her friend the likeliest excuse—not wanting to see Rob again—to explain her hasty departure both from the reunion and from Northbridge the following morning. But for just a moment, Clair thought maybe Ben had told Cassie belatedly and her friend was genuinely angry. It was good that that didn’t seem to be the truth.
“Maybe we’ll have time to visit and catch up while I’m here now,” Clair said to appease her friend.
“I’m counting on it,” Cassie said. Then she obviously recalled that they were still standing in the doorway and said, “Oh, look at me—I told you to come in and then went right on blocking the door.” But this time she stepped out of the way.
Clair took her suitcase with her into the foyer and while Cassie closed the door behind her, Clair glanced around.
From what she could see, Ben Walker had left the lower level of the house just as her father had—just as it had been when the building had served as a private home. The large foyer had a hardwood floor and paneled walls with archways cut out of them to connect a living room to the right and a recreation room that housed a reproduction of an antique pool table to the left.
There was also a broad staircase directly across from the door, with hallways leading to the rear of the house on both sides of it. The space above the foyer was open to the second level where the staircase branched off in both directions to rise to the third floor.
Cassie aimed her chin up the stairs then and shouted, “Ben! Are you coming down? Clair’s here.”
He must have already been on his way before that because no sooner were the words out than his voice came in answer from the left branch of the staircase.
“On my way,” he said as work-booted feet and long, jean-clad legs with impressively muscular thighs came into view, followed by a leather tool belt slung low on a pair of narrow hips, a V-shaped torso with muscular chest, mile-wide shoulders and bulging biceps that were all barely contained in a plain white T-shirt.
“It was you who said you heard a car on the drive and then what do you do but disappear,” Cassie said to him as he reached the second-floor landing.
But not even that brought his gaze to them. Instead, stalled on the upper landing, he was so intent on replacing tools in the loops of his tool belt it was as if Cassie and Clair were only incidental.
“I wanted to close that paint can before I forgot,” he muttered.
Both Cassie and Clair stood there watching him, and as she did it struck Clair that he was even better-looking than she remembered—something she hadn’t thought was possible.
And it wasn’t only the bounty of his body that was remarkable. His dark, sable-brown hair was short all over and in a sexy disarray that made it impossible to tell if it was by design or nature. His features were the kind that a camera would love—stark and chiseled, with a square brow, a sharp jaw that cradled a chin with the slightest cleft in the center and a nose that was thin and perfectly aquiline.
His skin was smooth and sun-bronzed, his lean cheeks were shadowed with a day’s growth of beard that made him look appealingly scruffy, and when he finally finished hooking his tools through their allotted loops and cast his attention in the direction of the foyer, the blue-green of his eyes was so intense Clair thought she could feel his gaze settling on her.
But not so much as the hint of emotion was evident in his deep voice when he said, “Hello, Clair.”
Then he finally came the rest of the way down the steps on legs that bowed a little and carried him on a slow swagger that had just a hint of insolence to it.
And all of a sudden Clair found her throat so dry she had trouble saying, “Hi.”
His eyes remained on her but he didn’t say anything else, and Clair wasn’t sure if she was imagining it or if there was a sort of challenge in his expression. In his whole stance.
But if there was she didn’t know what he was challenging her to or how to meet it, and she was grateful when Cassie filled the gap.
“Have you eaten? Are you hungry? Thirsty? We had Chinese food and there are leftovers. And I made a pitcher of lemonade a little while ago.”
“Just the lemonade sounds good,” Clair managed.
Cassie checked her wristwatch. “I only have a few minutes before I need to leave for a committee meeting. I’m helping Ben with things around here because he’s down to the wire, but I also have stuff going on for fall semester at the college—although admittedly as a student advisor I won’t be swamped there until the kids show up so I’ll be in and out with you guys the whole time you’re here. Anyway, how about if I pour while Ben takes your suitcase out to the cottage?”
The only part of what Cassie said that registered with Clair was the part about Cassie only staying a few more minutes. And that fact made her suffer a fresh bout of panic. But she didn’t let it show. Instead she said a weak, “Okay.”
Cassie linked her arm through Clair’s then and headed for the kitchen, chattering about Northbridge going international with the opening of Ling’s Chinese Palace restaurant.
It wasn’t like Cassie to be so frenzied, and Clair wondered if her friend was responding to the tension in the air. But she was too on-edge herself to do more than let Cassie carry her along.
And all the while she was watching Ben as he walked ahead of them with her suitcase, knowing she shouldn’t be looking at his great rear end, and that she certainly shouldn’t be trying futilely to remember what it had looked like naked.
But it was only when they reached the large kitchen at the back of the house and Ben went out the sliding door that she managed to stop thinking about his derriere and focus on something else. On the kitchen itself.
The kitchen was as it had always been—a big,