Chapter 13 The Promise #2
Her hand slid down his chest, across the flat plane of his stomach, following that trail of dark hair she had traced earlier, and she felt the moment he understood where she was going because his breath stopped. His whole body went rigid, and his hand caught her wrist.
“You do not have to —”
“I know I do not have to.” She held his gaze. “I want to. Tell me how.”
The sound he made was somewhere between a groan and a prayer.
He released her wrist. She wrapped her fingers around him and felt him jolt at the contact, felt the heat and the hardness of him and the way he pulsed against her palm, and a rush of power went through her that was nothing like the power she wielded with her wit.
This was older. More fundamental. The power of a woman who has reduced the most controlled man in England to a single shaking nerve.
“Like this?” she asked, and moved her hand, experimentally, and his hips bucked against her.
“Yes.” The word was barely audible. “God. Yes.”
She watched his face as she learned him.
The way his eyes lost focus when she tightened her grip.
The way his jaw clenched when she found a rhythm.
The way his hands fisted in the blankets and his breathing came in short, harsh gasps, and his control, that famous iron control, came apart thread by thread beneath her fingers.
She kissed his throat. His collarbone. The place where his pulse hammered against his skin. “I want to see you,” she said against his neck. “I want to see what you look like when you stop holding on.”
He said her name as if it were the axis on which the world turned. As if the syllables contained everything he had ever wanted and everything he had ever feared, held in the space of a single word.
“Elizabeth.”
His body arched. She felt him shudder, felt the hot spill of him across her fingers and his stomach, felt the raw, broken sound he made against her throat, and the fierce joy that roared through her was almost as intense as her own release.
She had done this. Had held this man in her hand and made him come apart, and the knowledge was intoxicating and sacred and hers.
He lay gasping, his face pressed against her neck, his heart slamming against her ribs. She kept her hand on him, gentle now, feeling the aftershocks pulse through his body, and she pressed her lips to his temple and tasted salt.
“Are you weeping, Mr. Darcy?” she asked.
“Certainly not.” His voice was wrecked. “I am merely suffering from an excess of dust in this cottage.”
She laughed. The sound surprised her, a real laugh, full and unguarded, ringing off the stone walls and the conservatory glass. He lifted his head, and he was smiling, and his eyes were bright, and the combination of his smile and his wet lashes and the absurd dignity of his denial.
He cleaned them both with his discarded shirt, and then they lay, her head on his chest and his arm around her and the gray light washing over them both. She could feel the entire length of his body against hers, warm and spent and real.
His hand traced slow patterns on her bare back. She felt him stirring against her hip again, and the knowledge sent a curl of heat through her belly that had no business being there so soon after what they had just done.
“There is more,” she said. It was not a question. She could feel the shape of what they had not yet done, the space they had deliberately left unfilled.
“Yes.” His voice was low. His thumb traced the curve of her ribs. “There is more.”
She lifted her head to look at him. His eyes were dark, steady, wanting.
“I want it,” she said. “All of it. I want to know what it feels like to have nothing between us.” She watched his pupils dilate, felt his hand tighten on her hip. “But not here.”
He went very still.
“Not because I am afraid,” she said. “I think we have established that I am finished being afraid.” She traced the cut on his cheekbone with one finger.
“I want it in a bed that is ours. On a night when no search party is coming. When we have time, and warmth, and I can take as long as I want learning the rest of you without worrying that my cousin or my father or a tenant is about to hammer on the door and deliver a homily about the sins of the flesh.”
The laugh that broke out of him lit his face.
“That,” he said, “is the most persuasive argument for marriage I have ever heard.”
“I thought it might appeal to your sense of strategy.”
“My sense of strategy.” He pulled her closer, his mouth against her hair. “I was thinking of something rather less strategic and more urgent.”
“Patience, Mr. Darcy. You have waited ten years to feel something. You can wait a few more weeks to feel everything.”
“I am not certain I can, in fact.”
“Then you will simply have to suffer. I understand you are very good at it.”
He kissed her forehead. The bridge of her nose. The corner of her mouth.
“I am going to marry you,” he said. “At the earliest possible opportunity. I intend to procure a special licence and subject you to the shortest engagement in the history of Hertfordshire.”
“My mother will be beside herself.”
“Your mother will be beside herself, regardless. I believe dogs in the next county will be startled by her rejoicing.”
She touched his face. His cheek, where the branch had cut him. His jaw, rough with stubble. The corner of his mouth where his smile sat.
“My father would have liked you,” he said. “Very much.”
It was, she understood, the highest compliment he knew how to give.
They lay, his body heavy against hers in a way that felt like shelter rather than weight.
She ran her fingers through his hair and listened to his breathing slow, and outside the conservatory glass the snow continued to fall, soft and unhurried, and the cottage held them the way it had always held the people who needed it, with patience, with warmth, with the quiet understanding that some storms are not meant to be survived alone.
“We should dress,” she said. “Before they find us like this and the scandal becomes truly spectacular.”
He made a sound that suggested dressing was the last thing on his mind.
“Fitzwilliam.”
“Five more minutes.”
“You sound like my sister Lydia refusing to come down to breakfast.”
“I resent that comparison more than I can express.” But he was smiling against her skin, and his arms tightened around her, and neither of them moved.