The Husband She Had #2
She recovered her wits by degrees, but they were fading as rapidly as she could assemble them. She was warm. She was in his arms, the linen got somewhere about her she did not entirely account for, and his hand was smoothing the side of her ribs while his breath sat at her hair.
He had not finished. She knew that without having to think about it. What he had given himself, while he had been giving her the rest, was a slow, disciplined holding of her that had cost him something she could hear in the way he was breathing.
She moved.
She had no real plan, and no real faculties to make one with, but she had been wanting him for two months, and she wanted him now, and if she did not prevent it, he would set himself to denying himself out of the same impulse that had kept him in her room with the cautioning sentence in the first place.
She was not minded to let him. She twisted slightly, then put her hand on his chest and pushed.
He let her, more from astonishment than from anything else, because she had never done anything of the sort to him before. He went onto his back. She came up on him, took her place astride his hips, and laid her hand against the centre of his chest where she could feel his heart going.
“Elizabeth — we should not —”
“I know what you said. I am not asking you.”
She moved over him before he could find the next sentence.
She was not graceful about it; she proceeded by feel and by what her body was already telling her it wanted, and she gave him no interval in which to gather an objection.
She took him into her with one slow roll of her hips, all the way, and the breath went out of them both.
His hands came up and found her waist and held her there for a heartbeat, the small still point at which he might have stopped her, and then his hands moved with her instead of against her, urging her on, and the moment was past.
What surprised her, by the time they had found a rhythm, was how completely she enjoyed having him under her like this.
She set the pace, and he let her, and she rode him slow at first and then less slow, taking him as deep as the angle allowed, finding the place inside her that the slide of him struck on every stroke, and her own pleasure climbed again, low and sure.
His hands had moved from her hips to her thighs and back, gripping, learning the rhythm she had set and not daring to alter it; once he tried to drive up into her faster than she had decided upon, and she stilled until he subsided, and after that, he took what she gave him and was grateful for it.
His head had dropped back against the linen.
The whisper, when he reached for it, scattered before it was words.
She leaned into him and changed the angle and found it better, and the pleasure that had been climbing began to gather toward something, and she did not slow for it; she chased it on him, using him, her hands flat on his chest and her whole attention fixed on the place where they were joined.
Whoever the man was, she had brought him entirely under her power — was taking her own pleasure from him as she liked and in her own time — and the satisfaction of it was intoxicating.
When he came apart, it was very quiet. His body went rigid beneath her, and she rode him through it — the deep pulse of him spending inside her, the sudden flood of heat, his hands clamping at her hips hard enough to bruise and unable to stop her and not trying to.
She did not stop. She kept moving on him while he was still hard and then, as he began to soften, taking the last of him for her own use, running down the pleasure she had gathered until it broke over her as well, deep and rolling and long, with him still inside her and at her mercy and able to do nothing but be ridden.
Only when she had wrung the last of it from them both did she let him loosen, by stages, until she had nothing left but the heaviness of him under her hands.
The cry she had been listening for since the first night they had been together had not come. Even now, even with her over him, even when his discipline had been broken by every other measure tonight, he had not given it to her.
She sank down against his chest and stayed there. He drew the blankets up over them both and put his hand into her hair and held it there.
The fire had burned low by the time they lay still, and she was against his side with his arm across her, the room warm and entirely dark, and his breathing slowed towards sleep.
She found his hand where it lay near her waist and turned it over in hers, finding the roughness of his palm and the length of his fingers and the small ridges and variations she had been studying in the dark for weeks together.
She drew her thumb along the heel of it.
His breathing shifted in the small, involuntary way that meant he was not quite asleep.
“I have been thinking,” she murmured, against his shoulder, “that you are not nearly as careful as you believe yourself to be.”
His breathing changed. “What do you mean?”
“You kiss my hair when you think I am asleep. You have done it several times now, every time you have left my bed. I have been pretending not to notice, and I thought it only fair to inform you that your efforts in that direction have not gone entirely unremarked.”
The arm around her had gone very still.
“I have also discovered,” she said, “that every night before you sleep you put your hand here” — and she took his hand and brought it to her cheek and held it there, his own gesture, warm against her face — “and you keep it there until you are satisfied I am warm enough, and I have been pretending to be asleep through every quarter-hour of it.”
He was quiet, and the quiet had the shape his silences took when he had been caught.
She turned her mouth against the side of his neck. She put her words against his skin, low enough that he could feel them as well as hear them.
“I have also deduced, from the sounds of your departure during a certain stretch of nights some weeks ago, that you did not stop to dress before you went upstairs — that you gathered your things and made the ascent in the state God made you. Every time. For ten nights together. I have been wondering whether tonight is the sort of night that earns the same compliment, and my imagination has rather run on with the idea.”
The laugh gathered in his chest before it broke. She heard the change in his breathing and the involuntary tightening of his arm, and then it came out — low, barely checked, no sound she had ever had from him in any room they had ever shared.
“Good Lord, Lizzy!”
Lizzy?
He could not know… could never have heard her called that by anyone else. Unless he was…
She made no response and kept her thumb moving. She kept her face where it was. She gave him nothing of her breathing.
“I withdraw the observation,” she said, into his shoulder. “You need not fear that I will strike a flint just for the pleasure of watching you on parade.”
He snorted and covered his mouth as his chest shook. “You are villainous, woman!”
“I am nothing of the kind. I am a very proper and demure wife.” She turned his hand over and resumed her examination — the variation towards the thumb she had been meaning to investigate more thoroughly — and she was unhurried about it, and gave him nothing of suspicion in her voice at all.
He exhaled at length, the slow, loose breath of a crisis past.
She turned his hand over once more and laid her palm flat against his.
Lizzy.
The name her father had used, and Jane, and Charlotte, but no one else who had not known her in another life.
Many a woman named Elizabeth was called Lizzy, but the man whose hand she was holding had used it as if he had had the name in him for months.
That, and the hair she had finally dared to compare tonight, the jaw and the brow…
and she found she was losing the argument she had been making all day.
She set the argument down where it would not bite her — it would still be there in the morning, she knew herself too well to imagine otherwise — and let it lie.
If this were Fitzwilliam Darcy, the man she had taken the measure of in a Meryton assembly room and never bothered to look at more carefully, then she had been wrong about him, and being wrong about him was not the worst thing she had ever been required to be wrong about.
He had told her tonight that he loved her when he had nothing to gain by it, and she had no reason to doubt him.
He had been the man across her supper table for four months, and she had come to care for him in some fashion she had no intention of giving a clearer name to in the small hours, with answers she was dying for and no prospect of getting them tonight.
If this were Fitzwilliam Darcy, the man who once said disguise was his abhorrence, he had some accounting to do for her. Something had broken along that line, but he was too prideful a man to allow it permanently. He would bring her the truth when he could — his dignity would suffer no less.
The name, she could wait for. The man, she was already holding.
In the meantime — and she permitted herself the observation in the privacy of the dark, where no one but her husband, whoever he turned out to be, could be inconvenienced by it — he had given a remarkably good account of himself as a husband.