Chapter Eighteen
MR. DARCY WOKE sometime in the early morning. It was before dawn, but the sky was growing lighter. She was curled into him like a kitten. Her warmth against him was a certain kind of perfection.
He propped himself up on one elbow and simply looked at her in the half-light of the room, at her sleeping features, and he was overcome with how entirely he was devoted to her. He supposed he should have realized that having her would do that.
He’d experienced it before.
There had been two other women he’d taken into his bed.
One had been a strumpet, when he was very young, and he’d gotten very sweet on her, to the ridicule of everyone.
All of the other men who’d known had laughed at him about it, but how was a man not to feel that kind of devotion to a woman after she’d shown him her small and soft body, allowed him to stroke and squeeze her, allowed him to penetrate her, accepted him there and let him work himself in her again and again, taken him in that nature?
It had made him feel helpless towards her.
She had not minded, of course. In the way of strumpets, she felt a man’s love was a tool to be used to leverage all manner of things.
Comfort and safety and dresses and jewels.
Well, really, what were the jewels except something that could be traded for comfort and safety?
Perhaps it was all comfort and safety. The world was a dangerous place for women, and whatever she could use to shore herself up, she must use. He understood.
He vowed to keep her safe, to give her whatever she wanted.
But what she wanted, it turned out, was to be a duke’s mistress. That man demanded she be exclusive to him, and in return, he put her up in a town house all on her own, with servants and a great deal more jewels than Darcy could provide, and that was the end of that.
The other woman was a widow. He had been twenty-two at the time, and she had been forty-six.
She had told him at the outset he should not get any idea in his head that she would belong to him or anything of that nature.
She had other men in her bed, she told him, and if he was going to be there, he should be sure he could make peace with it.
He should have run from that woman, truly.
She had rather broken him.
But he had a weakness for women who spoke their minds, who were unafraid as they made their own way in the world.
It was the same thing in him that had been drawn to Elizabeth marching miles in the mud unchaperoned, demanding to see her sick sister.
He did not know what had caused him to be made this way, but he was.
And despite all this widow had said to him to warn him off, he ended up desperately and nearly ruinously in love with her.
God in heaven, he’d been so jealous of every other man she looked at, let alone the ones she touched.
It had driven him out of his head, and still he could not stop himself from going after her.
She had been the one who ended it. I do not think I am good for you, Fitzwilliam, she had said. I do not think I wish to contribute any longer to your misery.
She was the one who had taught him about female pleasure, though.
He was indebted to her for that. He had been very foolish before, thinking that there was something all the way up inside a woman that got stimulated when he put his prick in her.
The strumpet had, of course, pretended that she was quite, quite pleasured when they had congress, but the widow told him she was likely lying to him.
Strumpets have every reason to pretend, she said.
I shall never pretend. You will know if you do not please me. I shall teach you to please me.
Ah, but he had quite enjoyed pleasing her. He liked putting his mouth on women there, he found. There was something delightful about all of it, even the things he supposed other people might find off-putting. He liked the smell, the tartness of the taste, the silkiness of the skin there.
He was thinking of Elizabeth there, thinking of how easily she’d come apart when he had put his mouth on her, and he was thinking about waking her with his mouth between her thighs, wondering if he could get at her without waking her first, wanting her to come to herself as she was being pleasured.
He was growing aroused now, thinking of that, and he wondered if she would allow him to slip inside her after he pleasured her. He should likely wait, really.
He should wait. He should get up and make things ready for their journey to Scotland. They must get married. Everything else could wait. That was the most important thing.
He gently eased himself away from her and carefully got out of the bed.
He had considered other options. He could have the banns read here, of course, marry her in three weeks time.
There was a reason for a rush, but it hardly mattered.
The child would come along far too soon after they were wed for anyone to believe it had been conceived after their wedding day, and so three more weeks hardly mattered.
But he did not wish to wait three weeks, even if he had originally thought this when he had told himself he was going to wait to be with her in this manner.
He should scold himself, he supposed, but he didn’t regret it.
He would have liked it different, but he would have time to do it differently, and there had been something charged about their joining last night, something that had been quite different from any other time he’d been with a woman, something powerful.
He didn’t know what it was, but he suspected it was the way he already loved her.
Or perhaps it was all the context. I killed a man for her, and she rewarded me by lifting her skirts. That sounded practically barbaric. But maybe it was barbaric. Maybe that was what had given it that rugged power that seemed to singe its way through them both during it.
He’d certainly had no finesse, and he’d lasted for the whole of three minutes, and it had still been the best time he’d ever been inside a woman, quite entirely the best, by a large margin.
It was…
He looked back at her on the bed and considered waking her with his mouth between her thighs again.
His cock jerked, approving wholeheartedly of the notion.
He could possibly convince his uncle to get him a special license, but that would have required a great deal of travel.
First to his uncle, and then together to London to visit Archbishop of Canterbury at Lambeth Palace, and then all the way back.
Might as well just go to Scotland, truly.
Furthermore, he could travel to Scotland with her, and if he went to his uncle, he would be obliged to leave her behind again.
He could lick her cunny in the carriage, he told himself.
Did one call one’s wife’s cunny a cunny? What else should he call it, then? Something less vulgar, he supposed.
He had lost his trousers at some point, so he found them, stepped into them, buttoned them up. He stretched, yawned, stretched some more, and then he crossed to the door of the bedchamber and opened it.
Caroline Bingley was standing there.