Chapter 7 The Rainstorm #2
"Nor do I. But --" He pressed his forehead against hers, breathing hard.
Their joined hands trembled between their chests.
"But I need you to understand what this is.
For me. This is not -- I am not a man who does this.
I have never --" He struggled. She waited, because his struggle was more eloquent than most men's fluency.
"You are not a diversion. You are not a moment of weakness.
If we continue, it will mean something. It will mean everything. And I need to know that you --"
She kissed him. Softly, slowly, with all the tenderness she had been afraid to feel.
"It means something," she said against his mouth. "It means everything."
His restraint broke. Not violently -- Darcy did not do violence -- but completely, like a wall crumbling inward, and suddenly his hands were in her hair, pulling pins loose, letting the heavy mass of it fall across her shoulders, and he buried his face in it and breathed her in as though she were air.
She pushed the waistcoat off his shoulders. He let her. Her fingers found the linen of his shirt, the warmth of his skin beneath, and the first touch of her hand against his bare chest made them both freeze for a moment, the intimacy of it a shock even after everything that had come before.
He was warm. So warm. The muscles of his chest were taut beneath her palm, and she could feel his heart slamming against her hand, as fast and desperate as her own.
She spread her fingers, feeling the breadth of him, the reality of him, and something shifted in her understanding of what this was: not a surrender, not a defeat, but a claiming.
She was claiming him, and he was letting her, and the trust implicit in his stillness -- in the way he stood motionless while her hands explored him, his eyes closed, his breath ragged -- was the most intimate thing she had ever experienced.
"You are trembling," she said.
"Yes."
"Why?"
He opened his eyes. In the firelight, they were almost black. "Because I have wanted this for so long that now that it is happening, I am afraid I will wake up."
She kissed his chest, just over his heart. He made a sound that was almost a sob.
His hands found the laces at the back of her gown. He paused there, his fingers resting against the fabric, asking.
"Yes," she said.
He loosened the laces slowly, carefully, with the focused attention of a man performing something sacred.
The bodice loosened. The fabric shifted, slipping from her shoulders, and the cool air of the library kissed her skin for an instant before his mouth was there, pressing warmth into the newly exposed curve of her shoulder, her collarbone, the swell of her breast above her stays.
She arched into him and stopped thinking.
His mouth traced the edge of her stays, and his hands held her waist, and the combination of his breath and his lips and the slight roughness of his jaw against her sensitive skin was a kind of exquisite torment that built and built without release.
She was making sounds she could not control -- small, breathless sounds that escaped her between gasps -- and her fingers were twisted in his shirt, pulling it free from his breeches, needing the feel of his bare skin under her hands.
He lifted his head. His hair was wrecked, falling across his forehead, and his lips were swollen, and he looked utterly undone. "Elizabeth. We must stop."
"I know."
"If we do not stop now, I will not be able to."
"I know."
They stared at each other. The fire popped.
The rain continued its assault on the windows.
Somewhere in the house, a clock chimed eleven, and the mundane sound was a thread connecting them to the real world, the world where they were not yet married and this library was not their bedroom and the door was only barely closed.
Elizabeth pulled her bodice up. Darcy stepped back, his chest heaving, his shirt untucked and half-unbuttoned, looking like a man who had been in a fight he was losing and winning simultaneously.
"That was exceedingly improper, Mr. Darcy," she said, and her voice was shaking, and she was smiling, and she could not stop either.
"We are engaged, Miss Bennet," he said, and his voice was rough as gravel, and he was almost smiling back.
"So we are." She reached up and touched his face, tracing the line of his jaw, the corner of his mouth. "Perhaps we should be improper again."
"Not tonight."
"No. Not tonight." She pressed her lips together. "But soon."
The promise hung in the air between them, electric as the storm outside. He caught her hand and pressed his lips to her palm, a gesture so tender after the intensity of what had preceded it that Elizabeth felt her eyes sting.
"Goodnight, Elizabeth."
"Goodnight, Fitzwilliam."
She left the library on unsteady legs, her hair loose, her gown askew, her body humming with an energy that had nowhere to go. In the corridor, she caught her reflection in a hallway mirror: flushed cheeks, swollen lips, wild hair, eyes bright with something fierce and new.
She looked like a woman who had been thoroughly kissed and improperly touched and was already calculating how soon it could happen again.
She grinned at her reflection and went to find her bedroom, and if she lay awake for an hour feeling the ghost of his hands on her skin and his mouth on her shoulder and his heart slamming beneath her palm, that was her business and hers alone.
In the library, Darcy sat on the floor with his back against the bookshelf, his shirt open, his cravat somewhere on the carpet, the fire dying beside him, and pressed his hands against his face, and laughed.
Quietly, helplessly, the laughter of a man who had been holding his breath for weeks and had finally, finally been allowed to exhale.
She had kissed his chest. Over his heart. As though she were making a promise with her lips.
He sat in the library and watched the fire burn down to embers, and he thought: I will remember this night for the rest of my life. The rain. The fire. Her hands on my skin. The way she said yes.
He would. He did. For as long as memory lasted.