“What did you say to him?” Clara asked when Sebastian returned to her side.
“That I’ll contact your father tomorrow to discuss the matter of Wakefield House,” Sebastian said.
“Already?”
Sebastian nodded, brushing a coil of hair away from her forehead. “My brother’s solicitor has already started to draw up the papers. I told him to do so the day you proposed.”
“What if I hadn’t found the plans?”
A warm, wicked light flared in his eyes. “Then I would have devised another way to make you my wife.”
Darkness fell. Clara watched the curve of the moon melt against the sky. Her pulse shimmered through her veins, settling into the nervous beat of her heart. She slid her hand across the worn, wooden box resting on the table beside her and unfastened the catch. The tangle of ribbons inside gleamed incandescent, like a pearl embedded in an oyster.
Clara lifted the ribbons from the box, pooling them in a colorful mass on the table. The door clicked open behind her, and then she was no longer alone.
She turned. He wasn’t looking at her. His dark head was bent, a swath of thick hair covering his forehead, his attention on the knot of his cravat as he tugged at it with his left hand. His right hand remained at his side, the fingers curled toward his palm.
Clara allowed her gaze to wander over him—the breadth of his shoulders and length of his strong legs, the way his waistcoat hugged his lean torso, the drape of his coat, which had managed to collect numerous wrinkles over the course of the day.
A slight smile pulled at her mouth. Good thing she hadn’t expected him to deck himself out in all sorts of finery for their wedding night.
Not that she had, either. Until this moment she hadn’t considered he might expect her to wear a fashionable peignoir of silk and lace. Unnerved, Clara tugged her dressing gown more securely over her plain cotton shift and waited.
He twisted the catch of the pin holding his cravat in place. The fastening gave way, allowing him to tug again at the knot close to his throat. As the folds of cobalt-blue silk spilled into his hand, his eyes met hers. He pulled the silk from his collar and dropped it to the floor before approaching.
“From the studio?” He scooped the ribbons into his left hand and let them stream through his fingers.
“They were my mother’s. She had very beautiful dark hair and she loved to wear colorful ribbons.”
A cherry-red ribbon trailed from his hand as he held it against her burnished hair. “Do you wear them?”
“Sometimes. More often when I was a girl.”
She remembered that her mother had liked to tie the ribbons into Clara’s hair as well, how perfectly she was able to shape the bows. Clara cupped her hand beneath Sebastian’s, catching the tangle of fabric as it fell from his fingers. She dropped the ribbons into the box and closed the lid.
Sebastian’s dark gaze swept her from head to foot and back, lingering on the neckline of her gown, which exposed a shallow curve of bare skin. He was close enough that she could see the gleaming dampness of his hair, his smooth, clean-shaven jaw that she wanted to stroke with her lips.
A tremble coursed through her blood. She’d be lying if she said she had not imagined this moment, the taut, fevered space just before the consummation of their union. But her speculations had been pointlessly twisted with memories of Richard, tangling the fearful, young virgin she’d been with the woman she was now. No longer young. No longer a virgin.
But fearful…?
Sebastian cupped his left palm around her nape, his fingers warm and strong, then reached to loosen the pins restraining her hair. In moments, her hair uncoiled in long skeins around her shoulders. Warm appreciation glowed in his eyes. Her heart hammered.
Fearful still, yes. Not because the dire portent of physical intimacy stretched between them and the bed, but because he aroused such a flurry of emotions, like butterflies spiraling and cascading through her very soul.
Because she wanted him.
Clara still didn’t understand it. She didn’t know its source or its end, this desire sparking in her blood, at once exhilarating and terrifying. All she knew was that it made her crave his lips, his hands on her bare skin, made her yearn with the need to touch him in return.
Sebastian dragged his fingers through a swath of her hair, softly pulling