Chapter 11 The Night Garden #2
He lifted her. Stood, her legs wrapping around his waist, and carried her the three steps from the bench to the soft grass beyond the gravel path.
His coat was somewhere -- he had brought one, she realized, even in his haste, and he spread it on the ground with one hand while holding her with the other, and the practicality of the gesture, the care of it, made something in her chest bloom.
He laid her down on the coat and knelt over her, and the moonlight turned his skin to marble and his eyes to dark pools, and she reached for him and pulled him down.
They undressed each other slowly. Not with the fumbling urgency she had expected but with a deliberate care that turned each piece of clothing into a conversation.
Her nightgown, lifted over her head, her arms raised, his hands steadying the fabric so it did not catch on her hair.
His shirt, pulled off and discarded, the lean muscles of his chest silvered by the moon.
Her stays, unlaced with fingers that had learned the language of laces across multiple encounters and now spoke it fluently.
Each revelation was met with stillness, with looking, with the intake of breath that meant I see you and the exhale that meant you are beautiful.
She had expected to feel exposed. She felt free.
"You are extraordinary," he said, and his voice cracked on the word, and she understood that this was as new for him as it was for her: not the act itself, perhaps, but this, the being laid bare before someone who mattered.
"You are trembling again," she whispered.
"I am terrified."
"Of what?"
"Of wanting this too much. Of not being -- of hurting you."
She touched his face. Her fingers traced his jaw, his lips, the furrow between his brows. "I trust you," she said, and meant it with every fiber of her being, and his eyes closed as though she had given him absolution.
He kissed her throat, her collarbone, the curve of her breast, and she arched into the contact, her hands fisting in the coat beneath her.
His mouth traveled lower, learning the geography of her body with the methodical attention he brought to everything, and she discovered that the sounds she made were not the sounds she expected -- not elegant or composed but raw, involuntary, sounds that came from a place beneath language.
"Fitzwilliam --"
"I know."
"Please --"
"I know."
He entered her slowly, watching her face, his weight braced on his forearms, his whole body taut with the effort of restraint. There was a moment of pain -- sharp, unexpected, her body protesting the intrusion -- and she gasped, and he froze.
"Elizabeth?"
"Do not stop." She gripped his shoulders. "Do not you dare stop."
He did not stop. He moved, slowly, giving her time to adjust, and the pain receded like a tide, replaced by a fullness that was strange and overwhelming and then, gradually, exquisite.
She began to move with him, finding a rhythm that was theirs, that belonged to no one else, and the sensation built in waves, each one carrying them further from the shore.
She laughed once, breathlessly, because his elbow slipped on the coat and he nearly crushed her, and the look of mortified concern on his face was so perfectly Darcy that the laughter was inevitable.
"Are you laughing at me?" he asked, incredulous, braced above her with grass in his hair and moonlight on his skin.
"I am laughing with you."
"I am not laughing."
"Then you should be. This is -- we are -- in a garden, Fitzwilliam. On the ground. There is a bench three feet away."
He laughed. Helplessly, burying his face in her neck, his body shaking with it, and she wrapped her arms around him and laughed with him, and the laughter dissolved into something else, something deeper, and when they moved together again, it was with a joy that transcended technique.
The climax, when it came, was not the simultaneous, perfectly orchestrated event of romantic novels.
She reached her peak first, and the intensity of it surprised her, a cascade of sensation that started where their bodies joined and radiated outward until her vision blurred and her fingers dug into his back and she said his name in a voice that was barely sound.
He followed moments later, his whole body tensing, his face pressed against her throat, and the sound he made was her name, broken and breathless and sacred.
They lay tangled together on his coat in the Pemberley garden, the grass cold against exposed skin, the moon watching from its perch in the infinite sky. His head rested on her chest. Her fingers traced idle patterns in his hair. Their breathing slowed, synchronized, became a single rhythm.
"Fitzwilliam," she said.
He lifted his head. His eyes were soft in a way she had never seen, all the edges dissolved, all the barriers gone, and the man looking at her was not the master of Pemberley or the proud gentleman from the assembly or the marble statue of propriety that the world believed him to be.
He was simply a man in love, undone, grateful beyond words.
"Elizabeth."
"I believe I just thoroughly compromised you."
"I believe we compromised each other. As usual."
She smiled. He smiled. Not the almost-smile or the near-smile or the learning-to-smile. A full, unreserved, incandescent smile that transformed his entire face, and she looked at it and thought: there you are. I have been waiting to see you.
He pulled her closer, wrapping his coat around them both against the cold, and they lay in the garden and watched the stars, and Elizabeth rested her head on his chest and listened to his heartbeat -- steady now, calm, the percussion of a man at peace -- and felt the night settle around them like a benediction.
"I was wrong about many things," she said quietly.
"As was I."
"But I was most wrong about this. I thought surrendering meant losing. It does not."
"What does it mean?"
She pressed her lips to his chest, just over his heart, the same gesture from the library at Netherfield, a promise renewed. "It means finding something worth holding onto and refusing to let go."
He tightened his arms around her. Above them, the stars burned cold and distant and eternal, and below them, the grass was damp, and between them, something that had begun as a scandal and grown through argument and letter and longing and fear had become, at last, what it was always meant to be.
Love. Simple, complicated, imperfect, and complete.
She fell asleep in his arms in the garden, and he held her, and did not sleep, because he did not want to miss a single moment of this night: her weight against him, her breath on his skin, her hand resting over his heart, the moonlight in her hair.
He would remember it for the rest of his life. He did.