Chapter 13 The Promise
THE PROMISE
They kissed again. It was a kiss that was less about want and more about confirmation. You are here. I am here. This is real.
When Elizabeth pulled back, her hand was still on his jaw. She could feel his pulse beneath her fingertips, fast and steady.
“If I had made it back to Longbourn before anyone discovered us here,” she said. “If there were no compromise, no scandal, no obligation.” She searched his face. “Would you have pursued me?”
His eyes were very dark in the gray light.
“I would have called at Longbourn the following afternoon,” he said.
“I would have endured your mother's nerves and your father's irony and Mr. Collins's sermonizing. I would have asked you to walk with me, and you would have refused, and I would have asked again the next day, and the next, until you either agreed or told me plainly to stop.”
“And if I had told you to stop?”
“I would have stopped.” His thumb traced the line of her jaw.
“And then I would have found a way. Written to you, perhaps. Badly. I am not good with letters. But I would have tried, because the alternative was spending the rest of my life knowing that I had found the one woman in the world who made everything make sense, and I had let her walk away because I was too proud or too afraid to fight for her.”
Elizabeth looked at him for a long moment.
The cut on his cheekbone and the stubble darkening his jaw.
He looked nothing like the man who had stood in the Meryton assembly rooms and pronounced her merely tolerable.
He looked like a man who had ridden into a storm for her, searched through fog for her, held her while she wept, matched his deepest wound against hers, and was now lying in a freezing cottage in his shirtsleeves telling her, with absolute steadiness, that he would have fought for her.
“You would have been terrible at letters,” she said.
His mouth curved. “Abysmal.”
“Long, ponderous paragraphs about your ardent admiration and your struggles against your better judgement.”
“Very likely.”
“I would have hated every word.” She leaned closer. Her lips brushed his. “And read them a hundred times.”
She kissed him.
She felt the moment he understood. The careful restraint that had held him rigid all night dissolved. His arms came around her and pulled her flush against him, and his mouth opened beneath hers, and the sound he made was low and rough and went through her like a flame touching tinder.
She rolled him onto his back.
It was graceless and sudden and she did not care. She was straddling his hips, her shift rucked up around her thighs, her hands braced on his chest, and the position put his hard length against the aching center of her, and they both went still.
His hands had found her bare thighs. His fingers were gripping hard enough to leave marks, and his chest was heaving, and the look on his face was something she wanted to remember for the rest of her life — stunned, undone, desperate.
“Elizabeth.” Her name came out strangled.
“I want this,” she said. Her voice was steady. Her hands were not. “I want you. Not because we are trapped here. Not because propriety demands it. I am choosing this.”
“You do not have to —”
“Fitzwilliam.” She flattened her palms against his chest and felt the hammer of his heart against her hands.
“I have spent twenty years being sensible about wanting things. I have been so careful, so measured, so terrified of making the same mistake my mother made.” She rocked her hips against him. “I am finished being careful.”
She reached down and gathered her shift in both hands and pulled it over her head.
The air hit her bare skin, and she shivered, not from cold but from the way he looked at her.
His gaze moved over her body with the focused intensity of a man seeing something he had imagined a thousand times and finding the reality so far beyond the imagining that his mind could not encompass it.
Her breasts, her waist, the flare of her hips, the dark curls between her thighs where she sat astride him.
He looked at all of it, and the hunger on his face was so raw, so naked, that she felt it in her own body like a physical touch.
“You are staring, Mr. Darcy.” She heard her own voice, breathless but carrying the teasing edge that she could not seem to abandon even now. Especially now. “One might think you had never seen a woman before.”
“I have never seen you.” His voice was rough. His hands slid from her thighs to her waist, spanning it, his thumbs brushing the undersides of her breasts. “And I suspect that everything before this moment has been a very poor preparation for the reality.”
“Flatterer.”
“Honest man.” He sat up beneath her, and the movement pressed him harder against her, and the friction sent a bolt of sensation through her that made her gasp. His mouth found her throat. Her collarbone. The slope of her breast. “Tell me what you want.”
“I want your shirt off.” She was already pulling at it, and he helped her, dragging the linen over his head and tossing it aside, and then she had her hands on his bare chest and she understood why he had been staring.
He was beautiful, warm and alive beneath her palms, the muscles of his shoulders and chest hard from riding, a faint trail of dark hair running down his abdomen to disappear beneath his small clothes.
She traced that line with one finger and felt him shudder.
“And these,” she said, hooking her fingers in the waistband.
His laugh was strained. “You are going to kill me.”
“Not before you have been useful to me, I hope.”
He laughed again, the sound startled out of him despite the intensity of the moment, and the sound broke some last barrier of formality, of performance, of trying to be equal to the magnitude of what they were doing.
He lifted his hips, and she helped him with the breeches, and then he was naked beneath her and the evidence of how much he wanted her was impossible to ignore.
She looked. He watched her look, and the vulnerability in his expression, the flicker of something almost like uncertainty in a man who was uncertain about nothing, made her heart crack wide open.
She took his face in both hands and kissed him, and when she pulled back she said, “I want everything. I want all of it. I want to know what it feels like when you stop being so bloody controlled.”
His restraint, already shredded, shattered.
He flipped them. She was on her back and he was above her, the weight of him braced on his forearms, and the sudden shift made her gasp with something that was not quite surprise and not quite need but some fierce compound of both.
He kissed her mouth, her jaw, the hollow of her throat where her pulse was hammering.
He kissed the space between her breasts, and she arched up into him, her fingers digging into his shoulders.
His mouth found her breast.
The first touch of his tongue against her nipple sent a shock through her that had nothing to do with cold and everything to do with the coiling heat that was building low in her belly, tightening with every pass of his tongue, every scrape of his teeth.
She heard herself make a sound she had never made before — a low, ragged moan that would have mortified her an hour ago and now seemed like the most honest thing she had ever uttered.
“More,” she said. “Fitzwilliam. More.”
His mouth moved lower. Across her ribs. Her navel. The soft skin below it. His hands were on her hips, holding her still, and she realized where he was going and her breath came sharp and her thighs fell open for him.
His mouth found her.
She cried out. Her hand flew to his hair, gripping hard, and the intimacy of what he was doing was so acute, so overwhelming, that for a moment she could not separate the physical sensation from the emotional one.
This was vulnerability in its most literal form.
Elizabeth had sworn she would never let a man see the truth of her, lying bare and open beneath the mouth of a man who had matched his wound against hers and found that they fit.
He was not tentative. He was thorough, focused, attentive to every shift of her hips and every catch of her breath, adjusting pressure and rhythm in response to her body's signals with the same fierce concentration he brought to everything he cared about.
His tongue traced slow circles against the place where all her nerve endings converged.
The pleasure built in waves, slow at first, then faster, then cresting toward something she could feel gathering at the base of her spine like a storm about to break.
This, she thought, and the word rang through her like a bell. This is what I feared. And it is not a trap. It is not the beginning of a slow poison. It is —
She stopped thinking.
The wave broke. She arched off the blankets with a cry that she could not have silenced if she tried, her whole body seizing around the pleasure as it pulsed through her in long, shuddering contractions.
His mouth stayed on her, gentling, drawing out every last tremor until she was gasping and boneless and her fingers had loosened their grip in his hair and her eyes were wet with something that was not pain.
He kissed his way back up her body. Her hip. Her ribs. The valley between her breasts. Her throat. Her mouth. She tasted herself on his lips and the intimacy of it was staggering.
“Come here,” she said, and pulled him up to her, and she could feel him hard against her thigh. She kissed him and tasted herself on his mouth and the intimacy of it was staggering, and she thought: I want to know him the way he just knew me. I want to undo him the way he undid me.
She had never touched a man like this. Never taken such liberties. She feared she would make a poor showing, but she would not let fear hold her back again.