Chapter Fourteen #2
Time stretched out between them.
“He wasn’t my brother or something,” he said in a choked voice. “If he had been my brother, we couldn’t have gotten married.” Because it was illegal to marry your brother’s wife.
“But do you even want me?” she said. “A woman like me, after all, who has been wanton and free with other men, who was not chaste before she married your cousin—”
“That wasn’t your fault,” he said, cutting that off.
“I’m not talking about Mr. Wickham,” she muttered.
“But that was part of why Richard was able to get you to agree,” said Darcy, and he would have no more argument about it, even though he had felt, since the beginning, that one of the reasons he was attracted to this woman was that she did not follow the rules.
She was free in a way he found utterly alluring.
He was bound and tied to responsibility, but she was untethered and alive and enchanting.
“Yes, but you’d want a wife who was untouched,” she said.
“No,” he said. “But we should not be speaking of—he is dead.”
She was quiet.
“I suppose I thought I wanted that,” he said softly. “In fact, I have been… I am not untouched, I suppose, but I have never done that with a woman.”
She looked at him.
He looked at her and then away. “I’ve had too much to drink.”
“So, then, what have you done?” she said.
“There are other ways to pleasure a man,” he said.
“Like with one’s hand,” she said.
“Let’s leave this.”
“Not that, then.” She leaned closer. “One’s mouth.”
He was blushing, but it was dark. Maybe she couldn’t tell.
She was laughing.
He laughed too.
“It’s funny,” she said, “because I remember thinking how abominably disgusting it was, the whole of it, and then Richard put his mouth on me there, and I…” She settled back on the couch, thoughtful. “I think I could do that, yes, if I was—”
“Stop it.” He was still laughing. “You don’t ask that of a wife.”
“I’m not your wife,” she said.
He shifted abruptly on the couch because he’d just become immediately and violently aroused, out of absolutely nowhere. He coughed.
She set her drink down. “We are trapped together in a room, Fitz. We have to do something.
“No,” he said, shaking his head. “No, absolutely no. I don’t want…
no. I shan’t be like the other men in your life who have used you for their pleasure without giving you anything in return, and besides, there is a reason I have been saving this experience, and it is because I want to have it, for the first time, on my wedding night. ”
“Well,” she said, “to be fair, you are saving the there part of it for your wedding night. You have had wedding nights with a number of strumpet’s mouths.” She giggled.
“Two,” he said tightly.
“Oh,” she said, taking a drink. “Then we’re even, aren’t we? Two for you, two for me.”
“I don’t think Wickham should count. You didn’t wish to do it, and barely anything happened anyway,” he said. “Why are you offering to do this? This is mad.”
“I suppose,” she said.
“You’re drunk,” he said.
“Yes,” she said. “And guilty, I suppose.”
“Guilty about what?”
“Because, as you keep pointing out, Fitz, he is dead.” Her voice cracked. “He is dead, my husband is dead, and I am drunk and laughing, and I don’t feel…” She got up from the couch.
He leaned forward.
It was her turn to go to the window now. He could see her dark form against the window, the shape of her. She was a shadow princess, perhaps, or a dark lithe seductress made only of the wisps of magic. She didn’t seem real. Maybe the moment didn’t seem real.
“How do you feel?” he asked her, his voice low and a little rough. In his trousers he was pulsing and eager.
“Glad,” she muttered, and she downed her drink. She turned to face him, but he couldn’t see her features in the dark. “So, that’s really awful, I think, don’t you? I should be punished for such things. I should… I should debase myself in some way, should do something unpleasant and difficult and—”
“Lizzy.” His voice was guttural.
She walked over, leaning over the couch, and set her empty glass down on the end table. Then she straightened, peering down at him.
“You are not going to suckle me as some way to punish yourself,” he said, and he shouldn’t have said that out loud, should not have spoken of her mouth and his body and—
Damnation.
She tipped forward, losing her balance, and then collapsed down onto the couch, next to him. She giggled again. “Oh, dear, I have had far, far too much to drink.”
“Another reason why nothing is going to happen,” he said. “You do not deserve punishment, Lizzy.”
“No, no, it is you, of course, then, who needs punishment,” she said, still laughing. “Because, as we both know, everything is your fault.”
He groaned. “All right, Lizzy, all right. I do blame myself overmuch, and you are right to tease me for it, but you should not blame yourself.”
“No?” Suddenly, her hands were on him. She was pushing his jacket out of the way. She was trying to get at his trousers.
He could have stopped her easily enough. He was stronger than she was, and it would have been absolutely nothing to bat her small, graceful, feminine fingers away from the falls of his trousers. But he didn’t move at all.
“Have you ever thought about blaming me, Fitz?” she said, and she wasn’t laughing anymore. Her voice had grown low and almost urgent. It was the voice of some siren, he thought.
“No,” he breathed, but this was a lie, because he had blamed her, hadn’t he?
He remembered being in that shack and thinking about how she had taken him apart when he proposed, cut him to his quick, and he had wondered how such a self-possessed woman got taken in by Wickham in that way.
He had wondered why she hadn’t fought Wickham off.
He knew these sorts of things were beneath him, though.
Her fingers nimbly worked at his buttons. “Have you thought to blame me for not accepting your proposal in the first place?”
He only made a noise in the back of his throat, because she was undoing his trousers.
“I acted entirely against my own self-interest, and it was only because I wanted to make you see what it was like for someone to refuse you. It was my prejudice, thinking you needed to be taught a lesson. Was that fair of me, Fitz? Perhaps you could blame me for that.”
His breath was noisy. She was still working at his buttons.
“They do put ever so many buttons on mens’ trousers, don’t they?” she said, finishing one line of them and going on to the other side. “What about when you got me to agree to marry you out in the woods? Then I took it back. Did you ever think of blaming me for that?”
“Lizzy, you… must stop that,” he wheezed.
She paused, meeting his gaze. “Because you don’t like it, Fitz, or because you think it’s wrong to do this to me?”
His lips parted as he tried to answer.
She undid another button. “No one has ever wanted me the way you have wanted me, Fitz, you know? Wanted me in a way wherein there is nothing even in it for him, where it is all just a sacrifice for my benefit. You get nothing out of it. And this is the only righteous part of you that I find arresting, in the end, this is the part that moves me, and I wish I had noticed it in the beginning, but I didn’t, and I was foolish and I blame myself. ”
He let out a ragged breath and lifted his hand to cup her cheek. “All right,” he said softly. “All right, take the blame, then, Lizzy.”
Her gaze darted up to meet his.
He ran his thumb over her cheekbone, and his voice was barely a whisper. “You’re frightfully foolish not to have wanted me, yes. Anyone can see that you should have.”
She smirked. “You arrogant wretch. You have wanted to say this for months.”
He nodded at his crotch. “You have more buttons to undo.”
She threw back her head and laughed, but she went right at the buttons, and then she tugged the fabric of his trousers out of the way and then she made a very surprised noise.
He shut his eyes and let his head fall back against the back of the couch. “I know. But you don’t have to—”
“Why is yours that big?” she said. She was touching him now, though, exploring him, her fingers fluttering over him.
He laughed helplessly. He had heard this before, but he was never sure why, not exactly, because it wasn’t as if he hadn’t seen other men without their clothes, and his prick might be thicker than other pricks but it wasn’t longer.
Women, though, seemed to be appreciative.
He’d had a strumpet be disappointed when he wouldn’t use it on her, once.
She had pronounced it perfectly shaped, but he’d been paying the woman, and he didn’t actually believe her.
She would have said anything for more of his coin.
“I can’t even fit that in my—anything,” she said. “I certainly can’t put it in my mouth.”
“I never… you don’t have to…” He groaned. “Your hand is lovely there. I am very drunk. I don’t…”
She wrapped her hand around the base of him.
He grunted in approval.
“I can hardly wrap my fingers round you,” she breathed. “I am sorry, Fitz, we can’t get married after all. I have no idea what to do with this.”
“All right,” he said.
“No, I—” She let go of him, and she scooted up. He opened his eyes and her face was looming over his as she continued to speak. “You are always so serious, are you not? I didn’t mean that.”
“No? Going to marry me, then?”
“Yes, of course I am,” she said, grinning down at him, rather impishly, he thought. “But first, you said I could take the blame, and I need that, so if you please?”
“You don’t need to take anything,” he said.
She bit down on her lower lip, and something surged in him, or maybe it was the fact he was drunk or maybe it was that she still seemed like some dark thing made of shadows and magic or maybe it was the air on his bare, aching member, he didn’t know.
He spoke again, his voice deep and insistent. “Nothing except the tip of me. That’s what you must take, Lizzy. You can fit that in your mouth.”
She let out a breath, a whoosh of very noisy air and she shuddered, and he felt it against his body, and he might have made an answering shudder, but then her face was in his lap.
He made some strange garbled noise, and he—not to his credit—thrust his hips upward, at her face, which was—
She seized him around the base again with her hand, gasping and she did it.
They both moaned.
Her mouth was hot and very wet and indescribably erotic, more erotic than he thought he could bear, maybe because it was her, or maybe because something was very wrong with him, very unrighteous, and the words that started tumbling out of his mouth were the opposite of righteous, to be sure, were the very worst and most awful things he could have ever spoken.
“You see?” he whispered, and he was reaching down, brushing her hair away from her face, looking down there because he wanted to see it, wanted to see her mouth on him, God help him. “I fit just fine.”
She moaned again.
“You can take more,” he said. “Just a little more.” He was the worst man in the history of England, and he hated himself, except it felt good and she was doing it, and— “That’s just right,” he breathed. “That’s perfect. Very good, Lizzy. So good.”
She descended further on him, even further, and his eyes rolled up in his head, and it was absolute perfection—
And then then she pulled away, choking a bit, and he murmured, “That’s enough, then.”
“No,” she said, and went back at him, taking him back into her mouth again.
“Lizzy, this is…” He grunted, because she was moving against him now, up and down, just over the tip of him, but it whited out everything except the pleasure of it, and he could hardly think. “This is beneath you.”
“Is it.” She spat him out. “Or is this exactly the sort of woman I am. What did Wickham call me? You remember? A very eager little hussy?”
“Stop that,” he gasped but his prick jerked when she said it, and she descended onto him again, and silenced herself, and it felt…
oh, Lord, it felt very good. “That’s not why I want you, you know.
It’s not because of that, because you seem the sort of woman who’d do things, adventurous things, things that get her skirts dirty and make her face flushed and that are unchaperoned and not strictly proper and…
and it’s not that I think if I had you, you might teach me how to give in to it all, might show me how…
what did you say to me?” He was panting.
“You once asked me if I did things because they felt good, Lizzy, and I… this…” His breath was even more labored. “This feels quite good.”
“This is filthy,” she said, around him.
“Quite filthy,” he agreed. “Appalling. But you look…” He surveyed her.
Her eyes were shut and her mouth was stretched and she was concentrating on what she was doing, and she looked lewd and rather exactly like some kind of eager hussy, and he said something else, which made his bollocks tighten.
“You look beautiful with the tip of me in your mouth.”
She descended on him again, taking him very deep.
He cried out. “You— you had best— I am too close and you won’t wish it in you.”
But she only seemed to press even deeper and he fought it, tried to fight, anyway, but lost and then it was all racing through him like a team of wild oxen, the pleasure having its way with him in a way he could not stop, as it crested and spurted and—
She swallowed him and then planted a very prim kiss on the tip of him. “There,” she said, and sat up.
He wheezed, trying to get his breath, trying to…
She found his drink from the end table on his side of the couch and drank it.
He suddenly realized that he had never kissed her, never once, that she had somehow done this absolutely mad and improper and filthy and utterly wondrous thing and that he had not kissed her.
He reached for her, intending to remedy this, but she reached up and put a finger against his lips.
“Not now. Not yet.” She took his glass and got off the couch.
He sputtered.
She waved in his direction carelessly. “Put yourself back together.”
“What about you?” he said, looking down at himself. He was softening and glistening and that was because she’d had her mouth on him, and he shuddered again. “What about your pleasure?”
“One thing, just this, Fitz, one thing. A thing just for you, just for your pleasure, not some sacrifice you make for me, not some long-suffering ordeal that you endure to help me. Just one thing. It does not balance anything between us, not exactly, but—”
“It isn’t that way with us at all,” he protested, and now he was doing up the falls of his trousers. “Lizzy, you deserve—”
“No,” she said, shaking her head. “I feel glad, Fitz.” Her voice was thin. “Let us not speak of what I deserve.”