Chapter 9
Elizabeth had meant only to rest for a quarter hour before dressing for Pemberley, but the little chamber at the Lambton inn was warm, quiet, and dim behind its drawn curtains, and her thoughts, having run too long in one direction, at last drew her after them into sleep.
She was again in that moonlit room, standing beside the bed with her nightdress cool against her skin and Mr. Darcy before her.
Only now the dream did not break where memory had broken it.
His hands were braced on either side of her, his body held above hers by a restraint that seemed almost to tremble, and his eyes moved over her face as if every breath she took had become precious to him.
She ought to have been frightened by such nearness; instead, every nerve in her body seemed to lean toward it.
Her Christian name on his lips had been the last word he spoke, and after that there was only breath, moonlight, and the terrible intimacy of silence.
Elizabeth lifted her fingers to his coat, and though some distant, waking part of her knew she ought to push him away, the dreaming self knew no such wisdom.
She drew him nearer by the smallest pressure, and felt, with a bright shock of triumph and helplessness, the instant his restraint suffered for it.
His breath changed first. Then his whole body did.
The careful distance between them lessened until she could feel the heat of him through linen, stays, and every fragile layer propriety had placed between her skin and his.
His mouth hovered near her cheek, not touching, not yet, while his breath moved over her like something more intimate than a kiss.
At her temple, beside her ear, along the frantic pulse in her neck, he lingered so closely that her body answered as if he had already claimed each place.
Her back arched before she could command it; her fingers tightened in his coat; a soft, broken sound rose in her throat, and the shame of wanting him was swallowed at once by the greater shock of wanting him more.
She should have gathered every rule she had ever been taught and placed it between them like a locked door.
Instead, she turned her face toward him, her lips seeking the warmth he still withheld, and for one suspended instant his control seemed to fail.
His mouth brushed hers—only brushed, only enough to make the whole dream flare white and hot behind her closed eyes—and then he drew back with a soundless violence, as if even in sleep he would not take what she had not freely offered.
Elizabeth followed him.
She could not help it. Her hand slid higher against his coat, feeling the hard beat of his heart beneath her palm, and when he bent again, the kiss was still restrained, still careful, yet no longer imagined by half.
It was warmth, pressure, breath; it was his self-command trembling against her wanting; it was the shocking sweetness of being held beneath a man who desired her and yet seemed to worship every boundary he strained against. His hand found her waist, firm through the thin linen, and the touch sent heat spilling through her, low and helpless, until her whole body seemed to lift toward him in answer.
“Do not go,” she whispered.
He did not answer, but his forehead lowered to hers, his breath unsteady against her mouth, and the restraint in him felt like a drawn bow.
Elizabeth’s fingers curled into his coat as if she could keep him there by touch alone, and desire moved through her in slow, consuming waves, across her breast, down through her stomach, beneath every trembling place where linen and honour still lay between them.
She felt not fallen, not ruined, but awake—dangerously, gloriously awake beneath the weight of being wanted with reverence.
“Lizzy, are you awake?”
Elizabeth woke with a gasp, one hand at her throat, her heart racing so violently that the room swam before her. For a moment she did not know whether she was disappointed or ashamed. Then she sat up, pressed her hot face into her hands, and whispered, “Heavens.”
By the time they reached Pemberley, she had recovered every outward appearance of composure and almost none of the inward reality.
Dinner unfolded with a splendour less oppressive than she had feared.
The house, which had yesterday seemed all portrait, judgment, and revelation, was now alive with candlelight, low conversation, silver, glass, footfalls, and the faint scent of roses arranged along the table.
Miss Darcy’s sweetness softened the party; Mr. Bingley’s open good humour warmed it; even Miss Bingley’s polished remarks could not wholly disturb the strange, growing sense that Elizabeth had been welcomed into something intimate.
Mr. Darcy was attentive without presumption, and that very restraint made his attention feel more dangerous.
He asked whether the fish had pleased Mr. Gardiner, whether Mrs. Gardiner found the road from Lambton fatiguing, whether Elizabeth preferred the view from the north windows or the south; yet even these harmless questions seemed to carry a private warmth beneath them, as if he asked not merely for her opinion, but for the pleasure of watching her lips form an answer.
Nothing in his manner exceeded propriety, yet everything in it found her.
When she reached for her glass, his eyes lowered for the briefest instant to the movement of her fingers against the stem, and the look was gone so quickly she might have imagined it, had her whole hand not warmed inside her glove.
When she laughed at some easy remark of Mr. Bingley’s, Mr. Darcy’s expression altered across the table, not into a smile exactly, but into something deeper and more intent, as though her laughter had touched him somewhere beneath the waistcoat and linen.
A servant leaned between them to move the wine, and Mr. Darcy’s hand shifted back to make room, coming so near her own that the edge of his glove nearly brushed hers.
It did not touch. It could not touch. Yet the almost of it ran through Elizabeth’s wrist, up her arm, and into her chest with such startling force that she forgot what Mrs. Gardiner had just said.
She felt the heat of him across that narrow inch of candlelit air; she saw the disciplined stillness of his fingers, the faint tension in his knuckles, and knew, with a shock that made her breath shorten, that he was as aware of the distance as she was.
Then he looked at her.
Only for a moment, only over crystal and candlelight and the innocent gleam of silver; but his gaze settled upon her as his hand remained near hers, and Elizabeth felt again the dream of him above her, silent and restrained, wanting and withholding.
Her cheeks warmed, her throat tightened, and she lowered her eyes before anyone else could see what Mr. Darcy, she feared, had already understood.
After dinner, as the party moved toward the music room to hear Miss Darcy play, Elizabeth fell half a step behind to admire a narrow painting in the passage. When Elizabeth turned, Mr. Darcy was there.
They were not hidden, not truly; voices sounded only a few yards ahead, and candlelight lay openly along the corridor, touching the gilt edge of a frame, the polished rail of a chair, the dark sleeve of his coat.
Yet the space between them seemed to narrow at once, as if the rest of the house had gone on without them and left them behind in a warmer, more dangerous stillness.
“Miss Bennet,” he said, very low.
“Yes, Mr. Darcy?”
“I hope you have found the evening tolerable.”
“Tolerable?” she repeated, and because her nerves were too alive for solemnity, a little smile came to her. “You underrate Pemberley dreadfully, sir. I have been in danger of admiring everything.”
His eyes warmed. “Everything?”
“Nearly everything.”
“That is a severe qualification.”
“It is a necessary one. A lady must preserve some independence of judgment, even when surrounded by excellent fish, fine candles, and very obliging hosts.”
The faint smile that touched his mouth made her pulse stumble.
He stood near enough that she could see the small movement of his throat when he swallowed, the brief tightening there, the visible effort of a man mastering words before they could master him.
The sight should have been nothing, only an ordinary motion beneath the crisp white of his cravat; yet Elizabeth’s gaze caught upon it, and in an instant the candlelit passage blurred into moonlight, linen, and the hush of her dream.
His breath near her cheek. His mouth hovering at her throat. The heat of him braced above her, silent and trembling with restraint. Her own fingers twisted in his coat, drawing him nearer when every rule of waking life would have commanded her to push him away.
The recollection flashed and vanished, but it left her burning.
Her cheeks warmed so violently that she was certain he must see it, and she lowered her eyes to her fan, though the little painted sticks offered no safety at all.
They trembled in her gloved hands, and the narrow space between them seemed to pulse with everything she had imagined and everything he was too honourable to do.
“I am glad,” he said, his voice lower than before, “if you have felt yourself welcome here.”
Elizabeth looked down, then up again. “I have. More than I expected.”
A small silence followed. It was not empty.
It seemed full of everything they did not say: Hunsford, the letter, the gallery, his hand at her waist, her dreams, the terrifying sweetness of finding him kind.
Mr. Darcy’s gaze lowered for one brief instant to her mouth, and though the look was swift, it was not careless.
It was restrained with visible force, dragged back almost as soon as it had fallen, as if even the act of seeing her lips had brought him too near some forbidden edge.
Elizabeth felt it everywhere.
Heat rushed beneath her skin, down her throat and under the tight line of her stays, until her breath shortened and her lips parted before she could command them.
His eyes darkened at that small betrayal.
His hand, hanging at his side, tightened once, the fingers closing hard against his palm, and the sight of that effort—of all he would not do, all he would not take, all he would not even allow himself to ask—sent a tremor through her more dangerous than touch.
She remembered the dream of his mouth brushing hers, the silent force of his body held above her, the restraint that had made desire feel like reverence, and for one reckless instant she wondered whether he too was thinking of the distance between them not as space, but as something to be endured.
“Miss Bennet,” he said again, and this time her name sounded less like address than confession.
Her fingers closed harder around her fan. “Yes?”
His eyes returned to hers, dark with an emotion disciplined almost beyond bearing. “There is something I have wished to say to you since yesterday.”
The voices ahead grew fainter; Miss Darcy’s shy laugh floated back from the music room, then faded.
Elizabeth should have moved toward it. She should have remembered where she was, who he was, who might turn and see them.
Instead she remained still, her whole body aware of him: the breadth of his shoulders, the controlled rise of his breath, the charged inch of air between his coat sleeve and her glove.
Mr. Darcy drew breath, and Elizabeth, caught between propriety and the dangerous wish to hear him say anything at all, could only wait.