amount of screaming would convince her father to admit her.
Just the opposite. Now that she’d caused a scene, Fairfax might very well fortify his stronghold around Andrew.
A fresh wash of tears streamed down her face. Sebastian sat beside her as the carriage rattled into motion. She stared at him, the hard set of his jaw, the burn of his dark eyes. Contained energy vibrated from him, as if he sought to keep leashed a vivid anger.
Awareness seared through Clara’s despair—the memory of his touch, his mouth, the cloak of forgetting he offered her without the slightest knowledge that he held such power.
The carriage lurched to the right, tossing her closer to him, and the length of his thigh pressing through her skirts sent a bolt of need arcing through her. Clara released the tight breath from her lungs, forced the anguish down into an icy ball, burning it beneath the simmering heat Sebastian’s presence wrought in her.
He will banish all that is painful and leave nothing but pleasure.
There could be, Clara knew, a fragile thread between pain and pleasure, a thread broken with a brush of fingertips. But she alone could withstand Sebastian’s ability to cause her pain by sealing her heart against him, even as she opened her body to him.
With a muffled groan, she twisted on the seat to face him, her skirts tangling as she clambered to her knees and wound her arms around his neck. Shock rippled through his lean, muscled frame as he started to speak, his left hand grasping her hip to steady her in the shaking carriage.
Clara slanted her lips hard over his, relief billowing in her at the first touch of his beautiful mouth, the scrape of his whiskers delicious against her palms as she positioned herself to deepen the kiss. Thought fell away, subsumed by the heat breaking over her skin.
Sebastian’s fingers tightened on her hip, the strength of his hand burning clear through her skirts. She thrust her hands into his hair and relished the glide of the thick strands against her palms. She moaned against his mouth and shifted to straddle his hard thighs, pressing herself against him.
Sebastian cursed, the sound deep and guttural between them. Clara gripped his shoulders as if he were the only secure element in a sea foaming with angry waves. His breath was hot, his restraint evident in the tight muscles of his arms, the stiffness of his grip as he sought to keep space between them. Not wanting to allow it, Clara thrust her tongue past his lips, drank him in, and reveled in the sizzling desire traversing her every nerve.
Desire. That was it, the elusive sensation that had spiraled inside her from the moment he’d first allowed his dark, appreciative eyes to peruse her body. From the moment she had stared at his throat and wondered what it would feel like to press her lips to the smooth, taut column.
She gasped, breaking the kiss as her fingers fumbled to unravel the bonds of his cravat, to release the buttons of his collar and bare his skin to her seeking lips.
Sebastian’s hands enveloped hers, his breath brushing the fine hairs sweeping across her temple. “Clara.”
“No.” She ripped at the cravat, sent the buttons of his shirt clattering to the carriage floor. Even in the dusky light she saw the hollow of his throat pulsing with the beat of his heart, betraying the response of his body.
She pressed her mouth to that hot indentation at the base of his throat, clenching her fingers into his arms as she flicked her tongue out to taste the salt of his skin. Sebastian groaned, low and rough, a sound that rippled through her blood.
Emboldened, she thrust herself against the muscled planes of his thighs. Her knees hugged his hips. Shocked pleasure cascaded upward when the core of her body shifted to enfold the hard swell in his trousers, her thighs clenching around him with instinctive need.
Heat shot across her skin. And then, eliciting a burst of triumph, Sebastian was kissing her in return, his mouth rough and desperate, his hands yanking up the folds of her skirts and petticoats to grasp her thighs and press her more tightly against that male arousal that had never before evoked such a sharp, sudden yearning in Clara.
She shifted, writhed, her mouth locked to his. She smoothed her hands over his chest, imprinting the feel of his muscles in her mind, the heat of his skin burning through the fine linen