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As their skin touched, her eyes met his, and she saw that that polite smile was gone from his face. Edward regarded her with a look that was deathly serious—and serious in a way very different from his usual grim expression of banality. No, there was something sunken deep in his eyes as he looked at her, a presence she had the strangest notion was mirrored deep within herself as well.
Then the moment passed. They looked away, he released the book, and she managed not to drop this one to the floor.
Clara was never quite able to remember exactly what happened after that. She surmised she must have stumbled through some further pleasantries, and then, the next thing she knew she was closing her door in her room.
She looked at the book in her hands and saw that she was trembling. Her heart was hammering in her chest, and her breath came quickly, shallowly. More than that, there was something else, as well, some strange hunger deep within her that she had never felt before. It was almost like feeling sick: her stomach felt so shaky, her body light enough to turn somersaults in the air, yet it was an undeniably pleasant sensation.
As she tried to puzzle through what she was experiencing—whether she might have caught a chill, perhaps, or had lost her breath walking through the house more quickly than she had realized—her mind supplied only a recurrence of the moment that had just transpired in the library.
“Mr Morton…” she murmured.
His hands, so much larger and stronger than her own. His eyes, filled with something that she could only call ardour. His mouth, twitching as though he had something to say to her, yet kept mum.
It was just a touch, she breathed. What is it about Mr Morton that makes me feel this way?
* * *
“Clara?”
She sat up, blinking and confused. “Yes?” Clara answered, rubbing the sleep from her eyes and trying to deduce what was going on.
Must have fallen asleep in my clothes, she thought. What time is it? What day? What was I…?
And just as Sophia Fitzroy walked through the door, Clara felt herself flooded with the memory of what had just passed through her, of the intense feelings that had come in the wake of her chance touch by Mr Morton.
“Oh, Sophia!” she cried, falling into her friend’s waiting arms in the late afternoon light. She was instantly relieved to feel Sophia squeezing her back, and whatever was possessing Clara was released in a minute of confused sobs.
“Clara, my dear, what’s become of you?” Sophia asked as soon as Clara caught her breath. “Have those awful sisters of yours done something terrible to you?”
Clara shook her head, shedding the last of her tears. “No, nothing like that. It’s…well, it isn’t anything at all terrible, I don’t think.”
Sophia sat on a nearby ottoman and gestured for Clara to take a seat nearby. “Tell me all about it, whatever it is.”
“Oh, but I am being such a terrible hostess!” Clara said with a terrible shock. “Forgive me, Sophia—are you just here for a visit, or for some other business?”
Sophia reached her hand over and patted Clara on the knee gently, a sympathetic smile poured across her face. “Nothing of any kind of importance. I only came by to invite you to a dinner party at my house.”
Clara took a deep breath, a hundred different reactions wrestling for control within her. Another dinner party! Would it be like the last one, she wondered? Would that be a wholly good or bad thing, even? She had rather enjoyed that evening by the end of it, but only after adding two or three grey hairs to her head with fretting about her half-sisters.
“Before you get too bundled up in worry about it,” Sophia said soothingly, “you should know it will be a very small affair.”
“That’s good, I suppose.”
“Just the two of us, my parents and a handful of their guests—you know how boring they tend to be, nothing to fear there except falling asleep.” Clara giggled at this characterization of the Fitzroys’ kind of company “And of course the Duke and that guardian, Mr Morton.”
Clara’s heart leapt back into her throat. “You’ve invited them?”
“Of course. That’s why I came by.” Sophia drew in a dismayed breath. “Is there some reason I shouldn’t have?”
Tired of its afternoon of leaping, Clara felt her heart settle into a steady routine of standing somersaults instead. “No, no, not at all. It’s just…” She burst out laughing, mortified by how difficult she was finding it to simply say the damn words.
“Oh, Sophia, I’ve just become completely smitten with Mr Morton!”
Sophia blinked, then laughed in her own charmingly overloud way. “Why, Clara, is that all? My word, I’d thought someone had come after you with an axe or something, the way you’ve been carrying on!”
Clara hid her face in her hands, feeling herself turn as red as a beetroot.
Sophia laughed again, shaking her head as she cast a look to the door. “But surely this isn’t the first time you’ve found yourself attracted to a man, is it? I remember a certain scullion in the Fitzroy household that you were quite sweet on indeed. What was his name again, with the spotty face?”
