Chapter Eight
WICKHAM WOKE BECAUSE she was trying to climb out of the bed. He laughed softly and sat up. She was nude and beautiful, and he put his hand on one of her perfectly shaped breasts, and put his mouth to whatever he could kiss. She turned to him, eyes wide.
“Sorry,” she whispered. “It’s only that you both fell asleep, and I’ve just been lying there—”
“Yes, a good joke from God himself, making men exhausted afterward,” said Wickham, kissing her again, palming her pretty breast. “And women just as chipper as a spring rain, especially considering it tends to take women longer to find their apex. It makes no sense, truly.” He climbed out of the bed and helped her up.
He crossed the room to Darcy’s wardrobe and pulled out more of the man’s banyans.
He handed one to Elizabeth and pulled another over his bare skin.
She shrugged into it. It was big on her, pooling on the floor, but she looked rather adorable with her hair mussed, and he couldn’t help but think of how sweet and biddable she’d been when he urged her to take him in his mouth.
Perhaps it had been wrong of him to do it.
He’d had women who made sex their trade refuse to do it, saying it was filthy and unnatural.
She was the daughter of a gentleman and Darcy’s wife, and he had just touched her face and guided himself in there as if it were a normal sort of thing, as if women just suckled men’s pricks at teatime daily.
Such an entitled thing to do to a woman like her, but perhaps that had been part of its allure.
Darcy was right, in the end. He could never have a woman like this on his own. He must be grateful, he supposed, grateful for this. She would never have been his wife.
If she had been his wife, he likely wouldn’t have felt entitled to her mouth.
He couldn’t stop himself. He reached out and ran his thumb over her bottom lip.
She looked up at him from beneath her eyelashes.
He pressed his thumb into her mouth and she sucked it, without having been asked. He groaned and kissed her jaw. “You’re perfection, Lizzy,” he breathed in her ear, easing his thumb out.
She looked back at Darcy, still asleep on the bed, totally bare, lying on his side, his body covered in dark hair, his soft prick lying against his leg.
Wickham gazed at the man too.
“We should—”
“Not wake him,” said Wickham. “Let him sleep.”
“I was going to say cover him,” she said.
Wickham shrugged. “If you will.”
She padded over, careful not to trip on the long banyan, and pulled blankets up over his sleeping form.
Wickham sat down in front of the fire. There was bread and cheese siting out on a table and some apples and hothouse oranges. He picked one up and forced a thumb under the skin, peeling it.
She came over.
He nodded at the other chair, offering her an orange section.
“Thank you,” she said, taking it.
He ate one himself.
She licked the orange juice off her fingers. She was stunningly beautiful.
He gazed at her, his body tightening in a confusing haze of desire and happiness and longing, because he had to admit this little game of theirs had suddenly become quite complicated. “Was he right?” he breathed.
She looked up at him. “About what?”
“Do you like it, being with both of us?”
“Well, I think any woman would be intrigued by the notion of—”
“No,” he said, shaking his head. “Trust me, no. I know this from experience, from going out to try to offer women payment for such a thing, and many of them are horrified and disgusted.”
She shrank into the banyan.
“That’s not commentary, Mrs. Darcy,” he said.
She looked startled at the name.
“I only mean, obviously, if you like it, I’m pleased.”
“You don’t wish to have me all to yourself?” she said pointedly.
He offered her another orange section.
She took it.
He contemplated the orange itself, the glistening golden color of it, the smell of its sweetness.
“I don’t know. It doesn’t matter. That isn’t what happened, and that will never happen now.
I shall never have you alone. He will. You two will have…
” He shook himself. “I shall only have you under his watch, and that is the way of it, and there is no point in wanting it another way.”
“What if I want you on my own without him there?” she said. “What if I ask him for it? After I’m with child, obviously, so that he doesn’t have to worry about…” She popped the orange in her mouth and chewed. “About raising your bastards.”
He chuckled. “Oh, God in heaven, that he said that.” Wickham hadn’t quite thought of it, but he wondered if part of his going after Georgiana had been something like that, some idea of seeding himself into the Darcy family, his own offspring being connected to Darcy by blood.
They weren’t really brothers, but it would be a way to make them blood, sort of.
“I think if I am going to be used as your broodmare, and if getting me with child is going to be done as some sort of filthy little game between the two of you, I should be given some say in it,” she said, and reached out her hand for another section of orange.
“Oh,” he said, swallowing. “Yes, certainly, I’m sorry. What that must feel like for you.” He handed her two more pieces of orange. “You aren’t a broodmare, Lizzy, I swear it to you.”
“I am something,” she said. “And it is not an equal or anything of that nature. He thinks you are in love with him—”
“He is in love with me,” countered Wickham.
“Yes,” she said. “Well, whatever it is you are with each other, whether it’s love or some twisted version of love that has gone sour, as he says, it is about the both of you and not truly about me. Even that, at the end, both of you buried inside me, you were looking at each other.”
He shook his head, but he felt uncomfortable. “Obviously, it’s about the woman.”
“The woman, do you hear yourself?”
“Well, if we only wanted to… with each other, you wouldn’t even be here.”
“Mmm,” she said, eating a piece of orange.
He eyed her, swallowing. She was wrong. “Elizabeth, I want you.”
“Certainly,” she said. “You are quite eager for your chance between my thighs. But I think you want me because he wants me, and I think he wants me because you want me, and I don’t know if either of you really want me at all, or if it much matters if I’m me or some other woman.
Any collection of fillable holes would suffice. ”
“No,” he assured her. “No, you are different.”
“You both keep saying that, but I don’t feel different. I feel as if I have been dropped down in the middle of a story that had a number of chapters before I arrived, and I am just some small character, some foil written to spur you both to whatever it is you are meant to do together.”
“We don’t do things together, Lizzy,” said Wickham. He sighed. “We are always at odds.” He leaned forward. “The women, they always…”
She raised her eyebrows.
“It is always this way. I find them, I charm them, I… pleasure them. He watches and then he…”
“He what?”
“Fucks them,” he said. “You were there. You see how he is. And yet, though I am the one doing all of the work and all of the wooing, the women always want him. Because he is handsome and rich and he has that voice, I suppose.”
She looked at him, as if she was amused. “What voice?”
“You know what voice. You heard it. That commanding voice of his when he tells you what he wants when he orders you about.”
“Oh, that voice.” She smiled. She held out her hand. “More orange?”
He gave it to her.
She ate it, chewing slowly. “So, if I truly like you both, then, you think that makes me different.”
“Perhaps,” he said, nodding. “Here is what I think will happen, if you wish to know the way of it, Lizzy. He has paid someone to fill in for my commission, so I am here, at his disposal, and he will wish me to service him and service you for a month, maybe three or four, however long it takes until you are with child. Then, I shall have my reward, and he will enjoy that rather a lot. He always does. We’ll have another month or so, and he’ll get bored of it, and you’ll be sick with the babe growing in you, and your breasts will be sore and you’ll be tired all the time, and it will all just end. ”
She raised her eyebrows.
“Yes, by autumn, I think, he will have you in some estate he has made ready for you. He will leave, and I shall be sent off. He’ll come back to see the babe born, and then will be off again.
He will make it his business to get you with child at least once more, but otherwise, you will be some youthful mistake he made, when he went out of his head and married some inappropriately situated girl with a pretty face and lovely tits, and he’ll chalk it up to youthful idiocy and the two of you will live separate lives. ”
“Well,” she said. “You have such an opinion of him, I see.”
“I am sorry, Lizzy,” he said. “But it would be better, really, than if I had gotten to marry you. I am sort of dreadful with money. I wasn’t taught how to conserve. I’m a bit impulsive. I do things and regret them.”
“Do you?” She eyed him. “Do you regret taking me into the woods?”
He shook his head. “No, not at all.”
She let out a breath and eyed Darcy, sleeping in the bed.
“I think there is one place you have it quite wrong, and that is that he won’t be coming back to you, again and again, perhaps not with me, but with some other woman, I think, and you and he will be playing your little games until you are old and gray. ”
“No.” Wickham shook his head. “We have not done this since Mrs. Younge.”
“Am I to know who that is?”
“Miss Darcy’s companion.”
“You were sharing his sister’s companion?” said Elizabeth, shaking her head.
“Why do you think she was so amenable to help me elope with the girl?” said Wickham. “She was angry with him. Hurt. She had fallen in love with him. They always do. And he had thought that giving her a position, paying her a salary, was supposed to make up for the fact he’d tired of her.”