XLVII Precautions #3
He began to move. Slowly — because he had had her on a dozen interrupted timetables and a hundred patient, careful nights, and he was not going to hurry the first one in the light. She matched him almost at once, because she had been matching him in the dark for weeks, and her body knew how.
Her eyes stayed on his. He had not known what it would do to him to watch her face.
He found out. The colour rising in her throat.
The small hitch in her breath at the same place every time.
The way her hand on his face tightened when he angled differently, and then tightened more, and then released to slide into his hair.
“Fitzwilliam.” Not a cry or a request. Just his name whispered as if she were reassuring herself that it was him.
He bent and kissed her without breaking the rhythm.
He had been holding back without knowing it; he stopped.
He moved into her harder, and a cry came out of him against her mouth that he had not heard from himself in his life — low, ragged, unguarded, the voice he had refused her for four months breaking out of him at last in a register he had not known he possessed.
Her legs came up around his waist, and she rose into him, and another sound went out of him into her hair, deeper. She had been waiting for him to stop being careful, so he stopped.
He had her then properly. Her hands moved over him — his shoulders, his back, the back of his neck — and her mouth was at his throat, then at his shoulder, and then she said something into his shoulder that he did not catch and did not need to.
He could see her. He could see her brow furrow when he drove into her and smooth when he drew back, see her mouth open on each breath, see the flush climb her face.
He drew up enough to watch her properly, and she opened her eyes and saw him watching her, and the look she gave him then was one he had not seen on her face before — undone, ungoverned, entirely his — and it nearly finished him.
“I am — Fitzwilliam — ”
“I know. I have you.”
She crested beneath him with her eyes still open and on his, her mouth open on a word she could not articulate, and he held her gaze the whole time because he was not going to miss the seeing of it. Her eyes did not leave his even as the rest of her caught and burned under him.
He pressed his face into the curve of her throat.
“Elizabeth.”
It came out broken — not the whisper he had given her for four months, nor the whisper he had taught himself to maintain since July, but the full voice, ragged at the edges, her name in his open mouth against the skin of her throat where she could hear it properly for the first time.
She had gone limp for a few seconds, but now she tightened her legs around his waist and tilted her hips to take him deeper, softer, her body entirely open.
“Elizabeth… my Lizzy!”
Her hand came up and held the back of his neck, and he said it again into her throat, louder. He could not stop saying it.
“Fitzwilliam,” she murmured against his hair. “Darcy. I am yours… make me yours.”
He shattered, and her fingers swept down his back and dug into his flesh, marking him and sharpening every sensation until he could bear it no longer.
He collapsed then, his lips pressing reverently at her collarbone, and he was simply on her, against her, in her, with his face at her throat and his breath ragged.
He shifted at last, and she made a whimper of protest, and he laughed against her shoulder and gathered her against him, and they lay there, her hand on his bare chest, the morning light on her face. He could look at her now without permission and without limit. She was his.
“Fitzwilliam?”
“Mm?”
“You are not sleeping on this bed again.”
He chuckled a little. “I did not propose to sleep on it at the present moment. You had other ideas, and as a dutiful husband —”
“My ‘dutiful husband’ had best not cripple himself sleeping on such a mattress. It is genuinely terrible. It is six inches too short for you, almost narrower than your shoulders, and it is lumpy. I do not understand how you have been doing it for four months.”
“I have been managing.”
“You have been enduring. There is a perfectly good bed downstairs.”
He trailed his fingers in a snarl of her hair. “Trust me, I am aware.”
“I shall expect you in it tonight. And I want the chamber lit properly for supper.”
“You shall have both. But what will Mrs MacLeod say?”
“Probably that the laird has finally got round to the business of trying to provide Auchengray with a young master, and that the baroness has a peculiar smile on her face today. But that is just a guess.”
He laughed and pulled her more closely to his side, turning his face to drink in the scent of her. “The rest is beyond my control, but I shall do my best, at least, to keep the baroness smiling.”
She laughed against his shoulder and smoothed her hand over his naked stomach as if it were the most ordinary thing in the world. The only thought he had clearly was that he had been seen, in full, by the only person he had ever wanted to be seen by, and had not been left.