A Passion for Pleasure

chapter Eleven


The 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.”