The pulse in her belly beat harder, sliding heat through her veins and winding around her lower body. Sebastian’s hands stroked her hips, his fingers digging in as he urged her even closer, close enough that the bulge in his trousers nudged against her belly.
Rather than alarm her, the sensation flared a new spiral of heat. He wound the thick mass of her hair around his hand, tugging her head back for ease in deepening his potent kiss. His tongue slid into her mouth as his hand grasped her wrist and guided her to touch the hardening evidence of his arousal.
She hesitated, uncertainty warring with desire, before she allowed her fingers to curve around him. A hiss of pleasure escaped him, hot against her lips, and the sound emboldened her to tighten her hold. Even through the material of his trousers, he throbbed heavy and hard against her palm. A blaze of white-hot lust coursed across her skin. She moaned into his mouth, closing her teeth on his lower lip, swimming in the increasing urgency to see him stripped naked.
Tension rippled through his lean frame as he lifted his mouth from hers. His eyes blazed. He yanked at the ties of her dressing gown, the knots surrendering easily to his adept fingers, and pushed it away from her shoulders. A part of Clara’s mind remained aware that he was using only his left hand, his right immobile at his side, but so deft were his movements that his infirmity seemed negligible.
Although her shift concealed her from chest to calves, Clara had never stood before a man wearing so little. Sebastian’s gaze moved lower, to where the fabric outlined the taut points of her breasts. Her breath hitched as she moved to cross her arms, but he was swifter and caught her wrist in his hand to prevent the concealment.
“Oh, no,” he murmured. “This time, I will see everything.”
Everything?
A shudder shook Clara to her core. Sebastian began to retreat, still grasping her wrist, compelling her to match his footsteps as he guided them both to the bed. He fell backward, bringing her down on top of his long body and locking his mouth to hers once again.
Clara’s blood quaked as her breasts rubbed against his chest. Her hair fell in thick veils on either side of his face, enclosing them both in shadows dappled with shards of light. When she lifted her mouth from his to draw in air, she placed her trembling hands on his cheeks and stared down at him.
His dark eyes flared with heat—no self-restraint this time, only the hot, heady burn of desire. For her.
He captured her hand again and guided her palm over his chest, down his muscled torso to the thickness straining between them. Again she spread her fingers over his hardness, a fever filling her throat as he swelled against her hand.
“Take them off,” he murmured, moving her fingers to the buttons.
Clara’s breath hissed out in a rush. She sidled downward, her hair trailing like a paintbrush over his bare chest before she straightened, her bottom pressed to his thighs and her hands placed flat on his hips.
He was watching her. She felt his gaze like a hot kiss as he cast it across her crimson skin and the curves of her body beneath her shift. The faint thought surfaced that he was giving her a measure of control, as if to atone for the helpless subservience that had pervaded her life.
Until now. Until she’d purposefully asked Sebastian to marry her.
With a tremulous gathering of courage, she released the fastenings of his trousers, her urgency and trepidation stretching, then snapping like an electric wire. She let the trousers drop to the floor, a strange mixture of shock, curiosity, and pure want filling her like a cloud.
Sparks flew through her body when he nodded at her questioning glance, and she curled her hand around his smooth, taut shaft. They both watched her fingers, slender and white against his flesh, as she moved them in a hesitant rhythm that soon had Sebastian pushing his hips upward.
He made a muffled noise, half-groan and half-laugh, and flung his arm across his eyes. “Wait.”
Clara stopped, enthralled by the push-and-pull cadence of her stroking and his thrusts. “Are you all right?”
He gave another hoarse laugh and reached to ease her fingers from him. “More than all right. Come back here.”
She stretched the length of her body beside his, pressing her thighs together to quell the ceaseless throbbing that had begun the moment she unfastened the first button of his shirt.
Then he gathered the folds of her shift in his hand, his eyes never leaving hers as he pulled the cotton over her calves, her thighs, her hips…higher…higher…
Cool air brushed against her skin, knotting a tangle of trepidation in her belly. She’d never been so exposed, her slender limbs and hips bared to the dancing firelight and the heat of Sebastian’s perusal. He put his hand on her thigh, the intimate contact wringing a gasp of stunned pleasure from her as his fingers brushed the dark curls between her thighs then circled the shallow indentation of her navel.
Then he stopped suddenly, a ripple of tension coursing through his body, and Clara knew without needing to ask what had happened. She surfaced from the haze of passion and reached for his right hand, rubbing and kneading the stiff muscles until his fingers became pliable under her touch.
Holding his gaze, she placed his hand back on her body in a silent urge for him to continue his sensual ministrations. He did, his shoulders relaxing as he stroked his hand back down to the apex of her thighs.
God in heaven, she had never known the touch of a man could wind such a tight spooling of bliss. Her body strained as heat consumed her, beading perspiration on her brow and in the valley between her breasts. She wanted to arch against Sebastian, rub their naked bodies together with heedless abandon, beg him to touch her in shockingly intimate places. She wanted him to fill her and soothe the aching emptiness.
He murmured a request, lost in the sound of her heartbeat pulsing inside her head, but she knew what he asked and lifted her arms so he could slide the shift up over her head. He tossed the garment aside and levered his weight onto one elbow, a hard breath expelling from his lungs as he gave her body a slow and thorough appraisal.
Clara crushed the bedcovers in her fists, fighting the urge to cover herself—an urge that dissolved like salt in hot water when hunger fired in Sebastian’s eyes.
Then, in a movement taut with masculine grace, he rolled to straddle her, his knees hugging her hips, his lean, muscular body rippling with carnal tension above her.
Clara gasped, succumbing to her body’s urge to squirm beneath him, swimming in arousal at the sensation of his shaft throbbing hard and ready against her belly. She cried out when his long-fingered hand cupped her breast. Pleasure spiraled into her core as he caressed her tight nipples, rubbed his fingers into the warm crevice beneath her breasts.
He shifted on top of her, uncoiling the length of his body as his knee eased between her thighs. Placing his hands on either side of her head, he levered his weight onto his forearms and pressed his mouth to her right ear.
“Open for me,” he whispered, his breath a hot shiver against her neck.
Clara’s throat quivered with a swallow as she curved her hands against his hips and parted her thighs to allow him to ease into place. His hard, slick length breached her body, eliciting a sharp intake of breath from them both. Sebastian paused, sweat beading his chest, the cords of his neck taut with restraint.
Clara couldn’t speak past the burn cascading through her. She coiled her legs around his in invitation and gripped his hips, knowing that only he could ease the urgent ache expanding outward like surging waves. Then with a muffled groan, he pushed forward, filling her, stretching her in one smooth motion.
“Oh!” Clara gasped, her eyes seeking his, stunned to the depths of her being by the desire crackling from him and into her, the promise of untold pleasures evoked by the thrust of his hips, the pressure collecting in her loins.
He lowered himself onto her, sealing their damp bodies together as he buried his face in her neck and thrust harder. Drowning in sensations and heat, Clara instinctively arched her body to meet his, her broken cries flowing through the crackling air. She clenched her fingers into the smooth muscles of his back, reveling in the flex and pull of his body as he urged them both toward an explosion of pleasure that Clara knew would be her undoing.
When it happened, a cry tore from her throat as a tide of bliss overwhelmed her, as her world distilled to nothing but the rocking of their bodies together, the grip of his hands and delicious, increasing press of his shaft inside her. His own groan was muffled against her neck at the moment of his hot release, his hands digging into her thighs to spread her more fully for his final thrust.
His weight collapsed on top of her, his chest hairs abrading the tender skin of her breasts as their bodies heaved together. When Sebastian eased aside, an odd sense of bereftness fluttered in Clara until he curved an arm around her and pulled her against him again. Their breathing quieted. The logs cracked and sparked.
Clara closed her eyes, as if by doing so, she could banish the wealth of emotions rising in her chest, the certain and painful realization that no matter her efforts, Sebastian was winding into her like a plume of brilliant, shattering fire.
Her body fit against his, her curves yielding to the hard planes of his muscles, her leg sliding between his. He brushed his lips across her forehead. Clara’s throat closed.
The cold isolation in which she had lived for so long seemed to be melting. And in its place flourished the warm knowledge that she need never be alone again, that she could live the rest of her days with the reassurance of having Sebastian by her side.
Yet she did not want to imagine the cost of such a haven. If she allowed herself to acknowledge all the emotions beating at her heart, like birds struggling to escape a cage, she could lose sight of the reason she had married him in the first place.
What if loving Sebastian weakened her resolve to reclaim Andrew? What if she lost the sharp edge of her determination, the anger and desperation that had fueled her for the past year?
Lock your heart,
she reminded herself. But even now she knew it was a futile command.
She couldn’t lock her heart against Sebastian, for he alone held the key.
T
he low crash of chords reverberated in Sebastian’s head, woven into a long, spiraling braid of blue and brown. In the early morning hours of his wedding night, he’d left Clara sleeping and come downstairs to sit at his piano. He let the fingers of his left hand extract the notes of Mozart’s Concerto in G Major. The harmonies faded into the still night air. He played them again and added two octaves, struck by the sudden sense that the notes formed a counterpoint.
He’d always loved the melodic interactions of counterpoint. He loved the multicolored texture and structure of it, the challenge it presented to a composer.
He played the lines again, then improvised and added a new line that had a life and purpose all its own yet fit snugly against the other. Counterpoint. A melodic relationship between two independent lines. Two lines played together creating a harmony.
An image of Clara flowed over the echo of music. Warmth spread through his blood as he pictured her sprawled asleep, the sheets winding around her pale limbs, her hair spilling in ribbons across the pillows. His body stirred. Tempted though he was to return upstairs and wake her, he hunched his shoulders and glided his left hand over the keys again.
A movement at the corner of his eye caught Sebastian’s attention. His hand stilled as he turned. A cast of light framed Clara, caution etched in her quiet steps as she approached. Sebastian let his gaze wander over her, appreciation swelling as he noticed the satiation beneath her wariness, the lingering flush painting her skin, the tousle of her hair that she’d leashed back with a trailing ribbon.
Clara slid her tapered hand over the glossy surface of the piano. “Didn’t you give this to the Society of Musicians?”
“They returned it after theirs was repaired.”
Clara pressed an A on the keyboard. “The last time I heard you play, I was seventeen years old. I’d taken lessons the summer before.”
“You didn’t care for the lessons, I gather?” Sebastian asked.
She lifted her shoulders in a slight shrug. “I never had much of an ear for music.” Her mouth twisted with wry amusement. “Even before I lost part of my hearing.”
Sebastian swallowed a tide of anger, hating what had happened to her. Wanting to make things right for her. Wanting to fix them.
“Ah, well.” He straightened, letting his hands slip from the keys. “No doubt I wasn’t much of an instructor back then.”
“Do you still teach?”
“No. I’d intended to return to it this past summer. Then came the Weimar position and the difficulty with my hand…my former students and their parents have asked if I intend to teach again but I don’t see how it’s possible.”
If his students returned, he’d be a terrible instructor these days. He could hardly remember tetrachord exercises, much less how best to teach them.
“Your left hand still works,” Clara said. She smiled at him, a pink blush coloring her cheeks. “As I well know.”
He returned her smile, heat rising in his chest. Only because of her had he begun to feel emotions other than despair and anger again. Welcome emotions—pleasure and hope and satisfaction. Happiness.
Clara reached out a hand as if to touch his hair, then lowered it again to the piano surface. “You don’t sleep much, do you?”
He shook his head, rubbing his rough jaw. Despite the satiation of his body, he was loath to admit to his inability to grasp even a sliver of restful slumber.
“Doesn’t matter.”
“What do you do, then?” She pressed a C. “Compose?”
“Haven’t in some time.”
If he’d expected sympathy—and to his embarrassment, he suspected he had—he was disappointed when Clara gave him a mild glare.
“You’ve stopped composing as well?” she asked. “Why?”
“I haven’t got any ideas. Can’t hear any music. Not even a melody.”
“You were just playing something that sounded like music to me.”
“That doesn’t mean it was good.”
Her breath expelled on a hiss of exasperation. “So you’ll just give up? You didn’t achieve your success by not working at it, did you?”
“Clara, I can’t play the piano anymore,” Sebastian said, his jaw tensing.
“Why can’t someone else play while you write the music?”
Sebastian flexed his hand. He didn’t know if he could bear watching someone else do what he wanted to do. What he
should
do himself.
“It’s not what you’re accustomed to,” Clara said, “but that doesn’t mean you lack the courage.”
“It has nothing to do with courage.”
“Of course it has to do with courage,” Clara said. “Any idea, any change, takes courage to implement. Uncle Granville is constantly testing his ideas, trying new mechanisms and connections and all that sort of thing. He’d never know if something would work if he didn’t attempt it.”
“That’s fine if you’ve got the ideas to begin with.” Irritation prickled Sebastian’s spine as he thought of the courage he knew it cost her to confront her father. “I thank you for your thoughts on the matter.”
“No, you don’t.” Her eyes burned with determination. “This is the first true obstacle you’ve faced, isn’t it? Not even the scandal of your parents’ divorce affected you the way it did your brothers. In fact, if it weren’t for Alexander’s renunciation of your mother, you wouldn’t have resisted seeing her, would you?”
Sebastian slammed his fists onto the keys with such force that Clara jumped. The resounding crash vibrated through the room in a distortion of dark colors. He shoved away from the piano and stalked to the sideboard, where a decanter of brandy sat. He downed a glass, appreciating the burn as it seeped into his blood, then poured another and strode to the hearth.
“You know you can do it, Sebastian,” Clara said, her voice quiet but resolute. “You’re just afraid to.”
Bloody hell.
Sebastian hated the shame crawling up his throat, the bitter taste of truth. Self-directed rage speared through him.
He clenched his hand on the glass and threw it at the flames. The glass shattered against the stone hearth, the liquor bursting into a fireball as the shards crashed against the logs and began to blacken.
Clara’s hand settled on his back, the heat of her palm burning through the linen of his shirt. No apology appeared forthcoming from her, and for that, oddly enough, Sebastian was glad. He did not want his wife to apologize for speaking the truth.
“You’re not a coward,” she murmured, sliding her hand beneath the loose shirttails to touch the naked skin of his lower back. “Don’t let anyone believe you are. Don’t believe it of yourself.”
She let out a long breath and shifted behind him. Her warm hands curved around his waist to interlace across his stomach. She pressed her forehead against his back and tightened her arms, her body locked soft and warm to his. Sebastian covered her hands with his left hand and stared at leaping flames.
A humorless laugh rose in his throat. He had anticipated none of this when he agreed to marry Clara Winter. And he was not at all comfortable with the realization that she could illuminate the darkest corners of his soul and reveal things he didn’t even want to acknowledge to himself.
“Rather than concerning yourself with me, we should concentrate on reaching an agreement with your father,” he said, leveling his voice into a flat, practical tone. “That’s the reason we married.”
He felt her stiffen against his back, and then her warmth left him as she stepped away. Her hand slid across his torso in a lingering caress.
“That isn’t the only reason we married,” she murmured.
Sebastian’s chest constricted. An odd recollection pushed at the back of his mind—a memory of the day he’d encouraged Alexander to do something that would make him happy. Sebastian had known that
something
meant pursuing Lydia Kellaway. At the time, he had been happy with his own life, performing in both concert halls and taverns, courting pretty women and attending social events as if their family had suffered no scandal whatsoever.
He wanted that again, though he knew it had nothing to do with the accolades and everything to do with the fact that his music had once brought people pleasure. It had once brought him pleasure.
Sebastian turned to face Clara, forcing his right hand to the side of her face. He didn’t like the way she was looking at him, with a soft admiration that he no longer deserved.
“Do not imagine I am the man you once admired,” he whispered, his voice rough. “I am not. If you thought you were marrying that man, then you’d best rid yourself of any romantic notions immediately.”
She covered his hand with hers. “I once thought I loved you. And I did, from afar. I loved everything I thought you were, loved everything that was bright and glowing about you, but I never really knew you. Not the way a woman should know the man she loves.”
A foreign sensation threaded through Sebastian’s pounding heart. The strength spilled from his right hand, his fingers stiffening against Clara’s smooth cheek. He tried to pull away. She tightened her hold.
“I know you now,” she whispered. “I know the sorrow you’ve locked inside your heart. I know the depths of your loyalty. I know you are still the man you once were, but also that you’ve irrevocably changed. I know you the way a woman knows the man she loves.”
He stared at her. The sound of his pulse filled his head. Clara turned her face to press her lips against the palm of his damaged hand. Warmth skimmed up his arm, into his blood. A ribbon of hair trailed over Clara’s neck as she kissed the crooked angle of his finger.
Different. She was so different from the women he had once known. Those women would never have dared to unearth the dark shame of his fear and challenge him not to surrender. They would not have forced him to question his decision to shun music altogether.
And none of them would have made him feel this way—hopeful and wary and determined, all at the same time. Clara made him want to succeed, for her sake if not his own. She made him want to fix the broken parts, to believe he could find his way back to music again. She made him want to be as loyal to himself as he was to his brothers and to her.
She made him want to be a better man.
A bolt of vitality arced between them, sudden as a lightning strike. He lowered his head as their mouths collided fiercely. The world dropped away, subsumed by the supple warmth of Clara in his arms, the press of her lips and soft bow of her body.
Sebastian cupped the back of her neck to deepen the kiss, a rich, blue wave swelling beneath his heart. A sigh escaped her as her unfettered breasts crushed against his chest. Arousal spiraled into him, pooled in his lower body. Clara shifted, rubbing his rough cheek with her smooth one, sliding her mouth to his ear. Her breath caressed his neck.
“I want so badly to love you,” she murmured into his ear.
Sebastian’s heart jolted. He pressed his lips against her right ear and whispered, “Me? Or the man I once was?”
“
You.
But I can’t.”
The remorse coloring her tone sliced into him, killing the fresh hope elicited by her words of love. Clara lifted her head, a veil descending over her expressive eyes, and he felt her severance from him as tangibly as if she had walked away from him.
“You can’t,” he repeated.
Clara shook her head, fixing her gaze on the unfastened buttons of his collar. She placed a trembling hand on his chest. “Whenever I am with you,” she said, “when I think about what I feel for you, when I allow myself to
feel
it, I am not thinking about my son.”
“That does not mean you care any less for him.”
“And yet for the past year I’ve thought of nothing but him. Until I met you.”
“Clara, you asked me to marry you for the sole purpose of regaining custody of Andrew.”
“That wasn’t the sole purpose.” She spoke beneath her breath, almost a whisper, not looking at him.
“Clara.” He tucked his hand beneath her chin and lifted her face to his. “You are not abandoning Andrew by casting your thoughts elsewhere. You are abandoning despair and hopelessness. You are believing in something more. Since I met you, I have thought less and less about all I’ve lost with the injury to my hand. Instead I remember that I would not have met you had I still been at Weimar. Had I still been performing.”
Clara’s gaze searched his, her eyes luminous. A dark understanding passed between them—the realization that they also would not have met had she remained at Manley Park with Andrew.
Beneath his fear, like a seed buried in the soil, Sebastian knew they had a chance at happiness. He had known that since the moment Clara proposed. He wouldn’t have agreed otherwise, wouldn’t have insisted that their marriage be real.
Yet that chance of happiness was contingent upon the results of their meeting with Fairfax, because Clara would never let herself be happy knowing her son remained under Fairfax’s control.
Sebastian cupped her face again with his damaged hand, his disability now inconsequential in the shadow of his resolve. He would not only help Clara prevail over Fairfax; he would also prove worthy of the love she kept leashed in her heart. And he would start by being as honest with her as he knew how to be.
“I love you, Clara. And one day, when we have Andrew back, I hope you will allow yourself to love me in return.”