XLVII Precautions
XLVII
Precautions
One hand came to her waist, the other to the back of her neck, and he kissed her as if he had been starving for the sight of her while standing in front of her all morning.
She moaned faintly against his mouth and rose into him, and the room with its desk and papers and legal peril ceased to matter for several breaths.
“Elizabeth,” he said at last, against her mouth.
“Mm?”
“It is no good. We have to discuss—”
“Hang what we were discussing.” She drew back just enough to look at him, her hands still on his face, and her eyes were dark and certain and entirely fixed on him.
“We can finish discussing it later. I have never seen you in the light the way I have been permitted to see you in the dark, and I am not going to Geneva.” Her thumbs moved against his jaw with an intimacy so unstudied it nearly undid him. “Ask me to stay.”
He held her face with his eyes in the morning light.
The curl at her nape. The flush in her cheek.
The longing in her eyes he had been imagining since Hertfordshire.
But it was not merely her beauty that struck him.
It was the absence of recoil. The extraordinary, impossible fact that she had seen him entirely and was still standing here with her hands on his face, asking not for escape but for permission to remain.
“Stay.”
She came back to him at the word, her hands still on his face, and kissed him as though stay were itself the only thing she had wanted to hear.
He took her by the waist with both hands and lifted her — she made a small, startled sound that turned at once into a laugh — and set her on the edge of the desk.
The papers shifted under her, wrinkling and scattering. He did not care.
“Wait.” It came out against her mouth.
He stepped back half a pace, because if he did not, he was going to take her there on the desk amongst the columns of figures and Webb’s letters, and there was a thing he had wanted for four months and was not going to surrender now. “Wait. I want to look at you.”
“You have been looking at me all morning.”
“Not enough.”
She made a soft sound, almost a laugh, almost not, and her hands fell to her lap. She let him dismantle her — a button here, a pin there, a bit of lace that had no business blocking his view.
He took her in. The light from the slit fell across her shoulder and the side of her throat and the curve of her cheek.
Hair coming loose at her temple — three pins gone, two more half out, the curl he had known against his jaw in the dark for months.
The colour at her throat that he had only ever taken on faith of his fingers.
The place under her ear that he had kissed a hundred times and never seen.
He had touched all of it. He had carried the topography of her in his hands for four months.
Now he was being permitted to set the map against the country.
“Fitzwilliam, I am going to begin to feel inspected.”
“You are being inspected.”
“Is it going well?”
“Extraordinarily.”
She laughed, low. He stepped to her and put his hand at the side of her throat — under her ear — and traced down to the hollow at the base of it with his thumb. Her eyes half-closed, and her mouth softened.
“That. I have wanted to see that.”
“Then keep doing it.”
He kept doing it. He undid two more of the small buttons on the front of her gown without looking down, because he did not want to take his eyes from her face.
Then another. He let his hand rest at the last. Her colour rose under his hand in a slow tide up the side of her throat, and his eye followed it, and he wanted to put his mouth there at every stage.
She drew in a breath that lifted her against his hand.
He drew the gown open at her shoulders and pulled it down her arms and let it fall about her waist. Her chemise was thin from washing, and the light went through it.
The dark peaks of her nipples were more than suggested through the cloth, and something reached down inside him and pulled.
“What?”
He shook his head in awe. “You. I had it half right and half completely wrong.”
“What did you have wrong?”
He traced the edge of her chemise with his fingertips, then dipped down inside to brush the rims of her nipples. They tensed and hardened at his touch, and his own body did something unruly.
“Ah…” Her laugh was a little shaky.
His hands slipped inside to cup her fully. “I had imagined them slightly less… just less.”
She laughed then, properly, and his hands slipped away as she reached up and pulled the last two pins out of her hair and shook her head once.
Her hair came down around her face the way he had known it would come down a hundred times in the dark, and he could not move, because for the first time in his life, he was looking at a woman in the morning light who had loosed her hair because she meant to have him, and that woman was his wife.
“You are not moving.”
“Because I… if I move, I may…”
“Not yet, you may not.” She reached for the waist of his trousers and pulled him closer, even as she was fumbling with the buttons of his fall.
She got one side and the centre cleanly, and he felt a rush of cool air and the shock of the table edge bumping against him as she pulled him the rest of the way to her.
The buttons on the other side followed until his trousers fell slack somewhere over his upper thighs.
He put his hands at her waist again under the loosened gown and drew her to him and kissed her properly, bunching the skirt at her hips and holding her buttocks so he could slide it down to the floor. She lifted her arms around his neck and kissed him back.
He drew back at last and put his hands at the bottom of her chemise. His eyes asked the question his hands were prepared to answer. She nodded once.
He drew it off over her head.
His breath was simply not there. She sat on the edge of the desk with her hair down and nothing on her but the morning, and he had been a man of considerable self-command for twenty-seven years and discovered then that he had never been tested.
“If you do not say something soon, I shall begin to take it personally.”
“You are —” He stopped. “Give me a moment.”
“Take longer than that if you wish. The inspection ought not to be hurried.”
He pulled her close and laughed against her shoulder, a single rough sound that was nearly a sob, and bent to her. The freckle high on her left collarbone. The line of her ribs. The hollow of her throat. He set his mouth to each in turn. Her hand came up and rested in his hair, and stayed there.
“You said all of it. Are you going to inspect all of it?”
“Yes.”
“Should I lie back on your pens and ledgers?”
“In a moment.”
He took her breasts in his hands then, both at once, and looked at her as he did it.
He had touched them in the dark on more nights than he could account for and never seen them full and soft and flushed like this.
She gasped when his thumbs passed over the peaks, and her head went back, and he bent his mouth to her then because he could not any longer not.
He took her in his mouth slowly, the way he had been doing it in the dark, and she made the sound again, deeper, and her hand in his hair tightened.
“Fitzwilliam…”
A shudder trembled through him, and he rewarded her by flattening his tongue and suckling gently. She had only ever called him George in any moment like this, and she said Fitzwilliam now in a voice he had not heard from her, and he set himself to earning the use of it.
When at last he straightened and stripped his own shirt off, she propped herself up on one elbow and looked at him.
He had not been looked at before — not like this, not in daylight, not by her, not with the whole of him laid open to a gaze that took its time.
She let her eyes move over him without hurry and without the smallest pretence of modesty, from his face down the length of him and back, frank and deliberate and entirely unembarrassed, and the slow travel of it raised the colour in his face and a good deal else besides.
He had spent his life keeping himself out of view.
To be examined now, in full light, by a woman who had married him sight unseen and seemed to find the seeing very much to her taste, was an unfamiliar kind of undoing, and his body answered it before he could think better of the matter — rising further under her regard, plainly, so that there was no concealing what her looking did to him.
“You do not disappoint in daylight, Mr Darcy.”
“That is very kind.”
“It is not kindness. It is observation.” Her gaze went over him again. “The shoulders are exactly as advertised. The—” Her eye went lower, and stayed there, and warmed. “The rest of it is rather more than I had been prepared for. Have you been concealing this from me on purpose?”
The frank appreciation in her face did more to him than any touch of her hand had done yet that morning. “I had not thought to display myself for your inspection.”
“You should have. It would have shortened the morning.”
He laughed, and then she reached for him, and the laughing went into the kissing, and the kissing into something else, and he could not stay where he was.
He was dimly aware of his trousers hanging open at the front, of himself plainly out of them and against her thigh as he leaned over her on the desk, of his own indecorum and the fact that he could not be brought to care about it.
His boots were the other consideration. They were entirely in the way, and they were going to have to come off.
That meant sitting down on something to deal with them, which meant taking his mouth away from hers, and he had reached the point at which taking his mouth away from hers had become a thing he was not prepared to do.