XXXIV Not Today
XXXIV
Not Today
Her hands found his face — the jaw she had traced before, the cheekbone, the brow — and she drew him towards her. When her mouth found his in the dark, she was asking nothing — she was answering.
He kissed her back with everything he had, the whole of his accumulated restraint going at once, and she pulled him closer still, and he came with her without resistance, no argument left in him.
Her fingers moved from his face to his coat, finding the lapels, and the deliberateness in it was unmistakable — not urgency but intention, the difference between falling and choosing.
He rose from beside her chair, and she rose with him. He had her against him entirely, both her arms around him, her face turned up. He kissed her throat, the hinge of her jaw, the corner of her mouth. She made a growling, contented sound low in her throat that undid the last of him.
Her hands moved to his coat. The lapels first, then the row of buttons, taking them one at a time.
He stood very still and let her. The coat slid back at the shoulders, and she tossed it—heaven only knew how he would find it later in the dark.
She went on to the waistcoat and undid that, too.
By the time her fingers found the line of his shirt at his throat, his breath had stopped being orderly.
His own hands had been at her waist, not asking for more.
They moved now. Along the line of her bodice, the muslin under his fingertips, the warm skin above.
He bent and put his mouth where his hand had been — the line where her bodice met her, the small hollow above the bone.
She drew a breath he could feel against his cheek.
Then she took his wrists, both of them, and brought them around behind her, and put his fingers on the buttons of her gown.
He stiffened. “Elizabeth… are you sure?”
“Yes.”
The buttons gave one at a time. He had not unfastened a woman’s gown in his life, and he did not need to know how.
The system was clear enough. Her gown loosened.
She let it slip off her shoulders and stepped out of it with little help from him.
She had on a chemise and stockings, and his hands found her again at the waist and pulled her into him, and the difference of so little fabric between them was nearly more than he could bear.
They moved together to the bed in the dark he knew by memory.
She was curious this time — not desperate, not passive, attending with her whole intelligent self to everything her hands could tell her. She had her palms on his shoulders and then his chest, exploring him in the most intimate detail. He held very still under it, forcing his breath in… out… in….
“You are warm,” she said, almost to herself.
“You are cold.” He drew her closer, his hands moving over her back, her sides, learning her the way he had before and finding her different this time — aware and needing in a way she had not been the first time, not yielding but meeting him, her hands still moving, asking things he answered with his own.
She found the scar along his ribs — old, from a fall at Cambridge, nothing too serious — and her fingers traced it. “Tell me.”
“A horse. Years ago. It is nothing.”
She traced it again, slowly, as though memorising it, and the gentle attention of it broke him open in a way the hot urgency had not.
She was cataloguing him. In the dark, in the only way available to her, she was learning the face and the form she had never been given in the light, and he lay still and let her, and it undid him, every place her hands moved.
Her hands moved lower, and the slow descent of them undid him well before they arrived.
When she found him, her fingers came tentative, uncertain of what they had reached for, and the first soft closure of her hand around him drew out the breath he had been holding against his teeth.
The whole of him narrowed to that single point of contact, to the light, exploring pressure of fingers that did not yet know their business and were set on learning it.
She measured him as though committing the shape of him to memory, her grip easing and returning, testing his length and his heat with a curiosity that frayed what was left of his self-command, and the labour of holding still beneath her hand took everything he had.
She heard the breath go out of him. Her breathing changed, her hand stilled — and then moved again with more purpose. “Does that—”
“God, yes,” he said, quaking before she could finish.
She did it again — the same slow draw of her hand, surer now, as though the first pass had taught her something she had set out to prove. The second stroke was worse than the first, or better; he had lost the distinction.
She had been learning his length, firm in her grip, and he had borne that. This was different. This was the skin itself, loose enough to move, and when she drew it up over the head and let it slide back down, the sensation arrived nowhere he had words for and everywhere at once.
His hips came up off the bed. He had not told them to.
She paused — and then, of course, she did it again, slower, and the second time was unbearable in a way the first had only promised. The skin gliding, the head bared and then sheathed and bared again, each pass lighting something that ran up the whole length of his spine.
“Like that?” Barely a breath. She already knew. She did it again before he could answer, and whatever he had meant to say left him as a groan instead.
He was past speech. Past dignity. There was only her hand and that slow, devastating slide, and his body arching up after it like a plucked string, and the begging that started somewhere low in his throat without his leave — please, and her name, and please again — while she took him apart one stroke at a time and made, he was dimly aware, a soft sound of wonder every time he broke.
He could not bear another moment of it. He took her wrist, drew her hand away from him, and bore her back into the bedclothes, and she let him — sank under him and drew her knees aside, and the welcome of that nearly finished what her hands had started.
He brought his mouth down to her throat, the hollow where her pulse ran quick beneath his lips, then lower, to where the chemise had slipped from one shoulder, and set his lips to the warm skin he had kept his hands from for the better part of an hour.
She was warmer there than anywhere. The taste of her was nearly the end of him.
He drew his mouth along the slope of her, slow even now, learning the give of her and the small catches of her breath that told him where to linger.
She made a low, broken sound he had not heard from her before.
One of her hands came to the back of his head and held him there.
The other took his shoulder and would not let go.
He settled lower, between her thighs, where she had opened to him, and the heat of her against him undid the last of his discipline.
He meant to be careful. He was not, and she did not permit him to be — she told him so in the pull of her hands and the rise of her body, the way she moved against him with the knowledge she had built across these weeks in the dark, intending to be ravished on her own terms.
“George.” She said it as though it were a matter of plain fact rather than discovery, and he answered her with everything he had, and then he was sinking into her, and she was rising to take him, her hands gripping him as though to make sure of him, and then she was all there was.
She shuddered — at first, he feared he had hurt her, but her voice rose on a gasp, and her head was thrown back, and the gasps were rhythmic now. She had her arms around him entirely; her hands were in his hair, at his shoulder blades, at the small of his back.
He moved. She answered. Slowly at first — because he meant to take his time in a way he had not done before — and then less slowly, because slowness could only hold so long against desire, and then not at all slowly, and her hand at the small of his back was urging him on with a force that had no patience in it. He met it. He met all of it.
He had been holding on by an act of will from the moment he had melted into her, and the will was a thin thing today.
It gave way. He tried to slow himself, and she would not let him; her hand pulled him towards her, her body answered him, and he was past help.
He buried his face in her shoulder, and the cry that came out of him was lower and more torn and closer to his own voice than he had ever let her hear.
He had her name in his mouth when it took him, and only by a miracle did he keep from shouting it aloud.
When the shuddering passed, he did not move.
She had her hand at the back of his head and was holding him as if she did not intend to let him go for some while, and he was not going to ask her to.
His breath came back to him by degrees. He kissed her temple.
He kissed her ear. He kissed the corner of her mouth.
Then the last of him withdrew, and he moved down.
“You cannot go yet —” she began to protest.
“Shhh,” he said, against her collarbone. “I am not done with you.”
His hand moved down the length of her, past her stomach, lower, until his fingers found her — slick still from him, swollen, ripe — and he stroked her there, slow and deliberate, with no intention of stopping.
She made a pitched, keening sound he had not heard before.
He took his time. He had to — she was past the point where casual attention would do her any good.
His mouth teased her — at her throat, at her shoulder, at the small hollow above her bone where her chemise had gone, then lower at the warm skin of her breast, testing for the first time the rigid peak he found there — and his hand where his body had been, only now without his own urgency to drown out hers.