“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