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The sight of her tall, strong lover so broken, so devastated, provoked a surge of sympathy from within her. More than she had ever wanted anything, Clara wanted to dash forward, to hold him, to kiss him and comfort him and tell him that everything would be all right, that they could still be together.
Yet as Mr Finch had once observed, Clara was a fundamentally sincere person. And she could not lie to him now.
“I’m sorry, Edward. But this is the way it must be. You are a wonderful man, Mr Morton, and you deserve all the world’s happiness. I pray you find it with a woman more deserving than I.”
She felt her resolve vanish as his arms wrapped around her, pulling her in for a tender embrace.
“Please,” Clara said, struggling to hold back tears. “If you have ever loved me, do not make me fight you now.”
But as he wordlessly brought his lips down upon hers, Clara could not resist the burning desire she felt within her. Just one kiss, she told herself. If they never kissed again, if they could not be a part of one another’s life, then this kiss must serve for her whole life.
And truly, it was a kiss for the ages. It was as though the brush of his lips against hers carried her aloft into the heavens, far away from the trivialities of the St. George household. The touch of his hand upon the back of her head, his fingers running through her hair, his strong frame that loomed over her and pressed against her full breasts—Clara clung desperately to each facet of the experience, to preserve it in her memory for all time. She felt her insides turn to jelly, her knees quake, and as her lips quivered and brushed against his, she knew how terribly she wanted to surrender to the yearning within them both.
But then, before she lost herself entirely to her innermost desires Clara broke the kiss. Without a word, without daring to look at his tear-stained face, she turned away and walked out of the library.
* * *
Damn fool. You should have known better than to put yourself in the path of such irresistible temptation.
No matter how many times he had been there, Edward could not deny that the Duke’s study was a grand place. Elegantly lit by an ornate golden chandelier, packed with bookshelves that were stuffed full of the finest volumes, young Christopher wanted for nothing in his studies. Even as monotonous as helping His Grace with arithmetic or rhetoric became at times, Edward always found some new detail in a painting or ornament that would dazzle his eye.
Yet it was all utterly lost on Edward this day.
Nodding at the Duke’s answer he wrote in his lesson book, Edward had no sooner paused in his supervision of Christopher’s work than he was once again absorbed in the same thoughts that had plagued him constantly.
What were you thinking, trying to have everything at once? he cursed under his breath. As though somehow all the problems that would arise from pursuing Clara could be made to disappear simply because you wished it to be so?
The hours since Clara had ended their affair had been the longest and most wretched of his life. Though she remained cloistered away in her chamber, day and night all he could think, all he could see was the gentle, beautiful face of Clara—flickering in the firelight, peering out at him between the lines of his reading material, smiling up at him from his cup of tea.
He found he was continually glancing up, thinking that the scratch of the Duke’s pen or footsteps elsewhere in the house was actually the sweet voice of his beloved Clara, calling to him, saying his name.
“…Edward?”
Edward felt the floor rise up to meet him as he nearly fell out of his chair in surprise. He managed to steady himself to see Christopher had set down his pen and was looking at him intently.
“Yes? Yes, what’s, er, what’s the matter, Your Grace?” he stammered, settling more comfortably into his chair and smoothing back his hair.
“Nothing’s the matter,” said Christopher in a distant voice. “Only you haven’t answered the question I asked you three times now.”
“Oh!” Edward blushed, adjusting his cravat awkwardly. “I beg your pardon, Your Grace, my thoughts must have been elsewhere. This was a question about your mathematics problem, then?”
A peculiar look came over the young Duke’s face as he looked up at his guardian. “You and Miss Clara…did you get into a fight?”
The corners of Edward’s vision blurred and narrowed menacingly. His throat suddenly cracked and dry, he sputtered, “What…what do you mean, Your Grace?”
Christopher leaned back in his chair and crossed his arms. “Edward, please don’t demean us both by pretending otherwise. I am no longer a child, as you have been so fond of reminding me. You and Clara are clearly in love with one another.”
Heaven help me, have I allowed even our ruined affair to compromise my abilities as guardian just as Helena warned me?
“I…Your Grace…” he began to protest.
“I have seen the looks you give each other at the breakfast table. I had never seen you act in such a manner around anyone. Add to that her recent absence from our meals and the fact that you both have been extremely distraught since my sisters visited the other day,” Christopher enumerated on his fingers, “and the only reasonable conclusion is that you have had an argument of some sort.”
Edward felt his mouth drop open, yet discovered he could do little to prevent it from hanging agape. First he began to bluster as best he could, making dismissive, nonverbal noises to indicate how ridiculous this proposition was.
Finally, he managed to choke out some words of denial. “Your Grace, I…even if this accusation were the case—which it most assuredly is not, I promise you that—surely it would not be appropriate to discuss such matters with…and not with your half-sister, of course, that would be…utterly ridiculous.”
Seeing the look on his ward’s face—this new, mature look of understanding scorn—Edward gave up mid-bluster and released the rest of his breath in a great exhalation of surrender, sinking lower into his chair as he did so.
