Chapter 6 A Confession and a Kiss
A CONFESSION AND A KISS
Elizabeth lay with her back against his chest, his arm still careful at her waist, and listened to the storm exhaust itself against the cottage walls. The howling had diminished to a low, persistent moan.
Elizabeth knew she should close her eyes.
She should let the warmth of him and the dying fire pull her under.
Instead, she lay awake and thought about what she could feel pressed against her back, and about the question that had been building in her chest since the assembly at Meryton, sharpening itself against every encounter since.
She had held it back. Through the storm, through the cottage, through the changing and the wine and the conversation and the blankets and the terrible, exquisite hour of lying in his arms while neither of them breathed properly.
She had held it back because asking it would change everything, and she was not certain she was ready for everything to change.
But they were past certainty now. They had been past it since the moment his fist unclenched against her waist.
“Why did you say it?”
The words came out quiet, steady, aimed at the dying fire rather than the man behind her. She felt his body go rigid.
“At the assembly,” she continued, when the silence stretched long enough to fill with its own weight.
“You told Mr. Bingley I was not handsome enough to tempt you. You said it loudly enough that I heard every word.” She paused.
Let the memory sit between them. “I have wondered, since that night, what I had done to deserve such contempt from a man to whom I had never spoken.”
His arm did not move from her waist, but she felt the change in him, a gathering, a bracing, as if he were standing at the edge of something and deciding whether to jump.
“You had done nothing.” His voice was scraped raw. “You had done nothing, and that was the problem.”
She waited.
“I walked into that assembly expecting to be bored. I had been bored at every social gathering in Hertfordshire since Bingley dragged me to the county, and I had made my peace with it. Boredom was safe. Boredom was manageable. And then—”
He stopped. She felt him swallow against the back of her neck.
“Then I saw you.”
The fire crackled. A log settled in the grate.
“You were laughing at something Miss Lucas had said. Standing near the window with the candlelight caught your face, and you were so—” His breath came out unsteadily.
“You were so alive. The way you moved through that room, the way you saw everything and everyone and found it all either fascinating or absurd… I could not look away from you. Bingley was talking, and I could not hear a word he said because every part of me was listening to your laughter.”
Elizabeth felt something crack open in her chest. She did not move. She did not turn.
“And it terrified me,” he said. “Because I had spent half my life learning that feelings like what I felt when I saw you could destroy me the way it destroyed my father. Losing someone you love can hollow a man out until there is nothing left.”
He was quiet for a moment. When he continued, his voice had dropped to a whisper.
“So when Bingley pressed me to dance with you, I panicked. I said the cruelest thing I could think of. I needed to believe it. I needed to convince myself and him and anyone listening that I felt nothing, because the alternative was admitting that I had walked into a country assembly and been undone by a woman I had known for less than an hour.”
The words settled into the silence like stones dropping into deep water.
“It was a lie, Elizabeth. A cowardly, inexcusable lie. And I have regretted it every day since.”
She lay very still. The fire popped. Outside, the wind had gone quiet, as if even the storm were listening.
She turned.
It required rearranging the blankets, shifting in his arms until she lay facing him, and the movement brought them closer than they had been all night.
His face was inches from hers. She could see the firelight reflected in his dark eyes, could see the tension in every line of his face, his jaw tight, brow drawn.
He looked like a man who had handed her a loaded pistol and was waiting to see where she aimed it.
“You are telling me,” she said, very carefully, “that the most insulting thing anyone has ever said about me was, in fact, the opposite of what you meant.”
“Yes.”
“That you called me barely tolerable because you found me—”
“Devastating.” The word left him as if pulled by force. “I found you devastating, and I have not recovered since.”
Something moved through her that she could not name. She reinterpreted every cold look, every stiff silence reread. The proud, disagreeable man who had watched her across rooms and said nothing, not because he disdained her, but because he was afraid.
She should have been angry. She should have deployed the wit that had always been her sharpest defense, should have made him pay for weeks of wounded pride with a remark so cutting he would feel it for years.
Instead, she kissed him.
She did not plan it. There was no decision, no weighing of consequences.
One moment she was looking at his face and the next her mouth was on his, her hand finding the side of his jaw, and the sound he made — low, broken, desperate — sent a bolt of heat through her body that obliterated every rational thought she possessed.
He froze. For one terrible heartbeat he was motionless beneath her mouth, and she thought I have made a catastrophic mistake.
Then his hand came up to cradle the back of her head, and he kissed her back with a ferocity that stole the breath from her lungs.
His mouth was hot and demanding and nothing like she had imagined a kiss would be.
There was no gentleness in it, no polite restraint.
He kissed her as if she were the answer to a question he had been asking his whole life, his lips parting hers, his tongue finding hers with a sureness that told her he had thought about this — had lain awake in his bed at Netherfield and imagined this — and the knowledge of it made her dizzy.
She gasped against his mouth and he swallowed the sound, one hand tangling in her loose hair while the other slid down her back, pulling her against him with an urgency that she answered without thinking, her body pressing into his, her fingers curling into the fabric of his shirt.
They were still on the floor, still wrapped in blankets, but the blankets were coming undone, shifting and sliding as they moved against each other, and Elizabeth could feel the heat of his body through the wool with a vividness that made her skin burn.
She was naked beneath the blankets. She had been naked for hours, lying against him, and now the barrier between his hands and her bare skin was gossamer-thin and getting thinner.
His mouth left hers and found her throat.
The sound she made was not one she recognized, low, pulled from somewhere at the base of her spine.
His lips traced the line of her neck, teeth grazing the sensitive skin below her ear, and she arched into him with a shamelessness that should have shocked her.
It did not shock her. Nothing about this shocked her.
Everything about this felt as inevitable as the first movements of an avalanche.
“Elizabeth.” His voice was wrecked, muffled against her collarbone. “Tell me to stop.”
“No.”
His groan vibrated against her skin. His hand found the edge of the blanket where it had slipped from her shoulder, and he paused. Just one breath, one fraction of restraint, then he slid his palm beneath the wool and onto her bare skin.
The shock of contact ran through her like lightning. His hand was hot, his thumb tracing the curve of her rib, just below her breast, and Elizabeth made a sound that was not quite a word and not quite a plea but somewhere devastatingly between.
His hand moved higher. Slowly, as if giving her time to stop him. She did not stop him. She dug her fingers into his hair and pulled his mouth back to hers and kissed him with an urgency that matched his own.
When his palm closed over her breast, she broke the kiss with a gasp.
His thumb brushed across the peaked center.
She bucked her hips against him, a movement beyond her control.
A blush spread from her cheeks to her chest. His breath caught.
She felt him press his hard length against her hip, and the knowledge that he wanted her as desperately as she wanted him, that his body was answering hers with the same blind, unthinking need, sent a flood of heat between her thighs that made her vision blur.
His mouth found her breast.
The blanket had fallen away from her shoulders, and the cool air against her heated skin lasted only a moment before his lips replaced it, warm, impossibly warm, his tongue circling and his teeth grazing with a tenderness that was somehow more devastating than roughness would have been.
Elizabeth's fingers tightened in his hair.
Her back arched. She was making broken, breathless sounds that she would die of embarrassment about later and she could not make herself care because his hand had slid to her hip and his thumb was tracing the hollow of bone there and every nerve in her body was concentrated on whether that hand would move lower.
She wanted it to.
God help her, she wanted it to, wanted it with a ferocity that frightened her, because this was the wanting she had sworn never to feel, the wanting that had trapped her mother, that had burned bright and then burned out, that had left two people stranded in a marriage of ash and contempt.
“Fitzwilliam.”
The name ripped out of her — not a decision but an involuntary surrender, four syllables spoken on a ragged breath, and the effect was seismic.
He went still. His mouth left her breast. His hand stopped where it was, curved around her hip, trembling.
He raised his head and looked at her, and the expression on his face was something she would remember for the rest of her life: stripped bare, shattered open, raw with a wanting so profound it looked almost like grief.
“Say it again,” he whispered.
“Fitzwilliam.” Softer this time. Deliberate. She watched the word land on him like a blow and felt the power of it, the intimacy, the crossing, that she had held this back for hours and chosen this moment to give it to him.
He kissed her again, hard, his hand cradling her face, and she tasted in it the desperation of a man who was holding the edge of a cliff with his fingertips and choosing to let go.
But he did not let go.
He pulled back. The effort it cost him was visible in every line of his body — the rigid arms braced on either side of her, the heaving chest, and she could see the muscle in his jaw jumping beneath his skin.
His eyes were dark, almost black in the firelight, and they moved across her face as if memorizing it.
“Until we are wed.” The words came out raw, ragged, spoken between harsh breaths. Not a statement of principle. Not a calm assertion of honor. A rope thrown to a drowning man by his own shaking hands. “I will not — I cannot — we must wait until we are wed, or I will —”
He could not finish. He dropped his forehead to hers and breathed, his whole body shaking with the effort of stopping.
Elizabeth lay beneath him, bare from the waist up, her heart hammering so violently she could feel it in her teeth, and understood two things with perfect, terrible clarity.
The first was that she had wanted nothing in her life the way she wanted this man in this moment.
The second was that this blinding, obliterating need, this willingness to throw away everything she valued to feel his mouth on her skin was what she had spent her life swearing she would never feel.
This was passion without knowledge, desire without certainty.
She had known him for weeks. She had spoken to him a handful of times.
And tonight she had nearly given him everything.
This is how it starts, whispered a voice that sounded like her mother's and her father's and her own, all tangled up. This is how the trap closes. Not with force, but with wanting.
Mr. Darcy — Fitzwilliam — rolled away from her and lay on his back beside her, one arm thrown across his eyes, breathing as if he had run a great distance. The firelight played across his chest, still heaving, and Elizabeth could see the evidence of his restraint straining against his breeches.
She pulled the blankets up to her chin and stared at the ceiling and felt the warmth of the last few minutes drain away, replaced by something cold and sharp and familiar.
Fear.
Not of him. Never of him. She understood that now with a certainty that only made everything worse.
She was afraid of herself.
Of the woman who had pulled his mouth to hers and arched into his hands and spoken his given name like they had earned such familiarity.
Of the woman who had wanted him so much she had forgotten to think.
That woman felt like her mother — young, passionate, certain — and Elizabeth knew how that story ended.
In a library filled with sarcasm and a parlor filled with nerves and five daughters who had learned the shape of disappointment before they learned to read.
She could feel him beside her. His breathing was steadying. His arm was still across his eyes. She wanted to reach for him. She wanted to flee.
Elizabeth did neither. She lay in the dying firelight and listened to the silence where the storm had been and told herself that in the morning, when the light returned, she would know what to do.
She was lying. She knew what she was going to do.
She would run.