XXXV Small Talk #2
“He died.” Her voice went quiet on it. “Or so I understood. Some months before I came here.” She set down her glass. “I should not speak ill of him. He is not alive to defend himself, and it is possible that I understood him rather less well than I thought.”
The thumb on the inside of her knee had gone rigid again. She had thought he might say something, the way he had been saying things all evening — clever, wry, pressing her gently for more and teasing in a way he had never permitted himself to before tonight.
He did not. He withdrew his hand from her leg entirely, leaving it cold. Then he picked up his fork again and went back to the supper that had cooled between them.
Something had shifted. She had heard it without being able to put it down to anything.
He had eased back, not in body but in his attention; the easy interest with which he had asked his earlier questions had become a quieter sort of presence, slightly farther from her than it had been three minutes ago.
“He was very tall.”
She said it without knowing why until afterward, when the thought came sharp and absurd and hateful all at once. Not because she had been thinking of Darcy — she had not, not once, not in all these weeks, not in this room, not in this marriage bed.
Darcy was dead. Darcy had not liked her. Darcy would sooner have died a second death than sit mostly naked at a small table in the dark with his hand teasing her inner thigh, asking her about exasperating gentlemen.
Yet something in the stillness beside her, and in the intelligence she had been circling for months without mastering, brushed too near the old outline. She wished, at once and violently, that she had not said it.
He did not answer. His hand did not return to her hand or anywhere else. He continued the supper.
That would not do. He had used touch to divert her, and she was not too proud to do the same.
Her free hand slipped over his thigh… and she learned how little of his attire he had managed to assemble.
Her fingers tickled the sensitive skin inside his leg.
“I find,” she murmured into his ear, “that I have a marked preference for tall.”
He acknowledged that with the courteous brevity of one who had heard her speak. He did not return the volley, and he did not… react to where her hand was.
She set her glass down. “Push your chair back.”
“Elizabeth—”
“Push it back.”
She heard him deciding. Then the clatter of the chair legs on the floor.
She found the arm of his chair in the dark, then his shoulder, and began the awkward business of climbing into his lap without the use of her eyes.
It did not go gracefully. Her knee came down first where she had thought his thigh would be and met the hard edge of the chair arm instead, sharp enough to make her hiss and try again; the second attempt put her elbow in his ribs and her hair across his mouth, and still he did not help her or even protest, which she had expected and was determined not to mind.
She pushed herself up and over, and arranged herself sideways across him with her feet drawn up, one heel coming to rest against a part of him that made him shift under her — at which she laughed low in her throat, pleased to have got any response from him at all, and moved it.
Her hands went to his chest and found only linen, thin and warm over bare skin.
He had put his shirt back on, but that appeared to be all.
“You dressed in a somewhat abbreviated fashion.”
“I retrieved the tray. I did not attend a formal supper.”
The whisper was the restrained, dutiful one. The one he had not used with her in some time. He had not put his arms around her either; one hand had come up to rest against her shoulder blade in the way of a host who had received an unexpected guest, and the other was still on the arm of the chair.
“Are you very sure,” she said, against his throat, “that you have not had too much wine? You have gone a little numb.”
“I can assure you —”
She stopped his assurance with her mouth at his pulse, and her hand sliding down inside the linen of his shirt to the warm skin at his ribs and lower across his stomach and lower still to where the linen ended and a great deal more of him began, and she found him exactly where she had thought she would find him — hard already, entirely disarmed, his body honest in a way the rest of him had been refusing to be — and she closed her hand around what she had found, lightly, with no haste, and learned him by slow degrees, the way she had learned the rest of him that night.
She knew a little now of what her hand could do to him.
She drew it once along his length, root to tip and back, and the breath he had been holding came apart at the back of his throat, and his hips rose into her grip without his leave.
She did it again, slower, closing her fingers when she reached the head of him, already a little wet, and the voiceless moan he made gave her a fair sampling of the depth of his natural timbre.
It was, she decided, the most useful thing she had discovered in three months of marriage.
His hand at her shoulder blade closed and pulled her hard against him, and the careful host was gone in a single instant, and he was hers again.
But she was not done with him. She gathered her knees up under her and rose, awkward in the dark and not caring, and brought one leg across him so that she straddled his lap, the chair narrow and the position absurd and neither of these things slowing her in the least, and she lowered herself until the heat of her, slick and aching and entirely past pretending otherwise, came down against the length of him where he stood hard between them.
She did not take him in. She held herself a breath above, with him pressed hot along her, and rocked once, so that he dragged against exactly where she wanted him, and her own breath went ragged in a way she had not planned for.
“Elizabeth! Oh, God…”
“There you are,” she said into the warm skin of his throat, with some satisfaction, and reached down between them and fit the head of him to her and held him there, just there, at the edge of having him, and gave him nothing more.
His arms came around her properly then, and he gathered her against him in a way that was not restrained in any respect whatsoever, his hands at her hips trying to pull her down onto him.
She let him want it and did not let him have it, and turned her mouth to the place under his ear where she had found, an hour ago, that his discipline had its limit, and set her teeth to it, lightly, and he made a sound he had not meant to make.
“Hm,” she said, without remorse, and took him into her an inch, and stopped.
“Elizabeth… The supper…”
“Has been cold for twenty minutes.” She turned her mouth against his throat. “I have entirely lost interest in it.”
His hands moved on her back — not pulling away, not at all pulling away, the opposite of pulling away. “Elizabeth.”
“You keep saying my name,” she said against his skin, “as though it will have some restraining effect.”
He let out a breath that was almost a laugh. His hand came up into her hair. His shoulders dropped — the small ease of one who has stopped arguing with himself — and his arms gathered her closer and stopped being careful about it.
“It has not,” he agreed, low against her ear, “had any restraining effect at all.”
She smiled against his throat.
Then his hands closed hard at her hips and brought her down onto him in one long, slow descent that took the breath straight out of her.
The whole length she had held herself above sank into her at last, and the sound she had been coaxing out of him all this while was abruptly her own.
The chair was too small, the angle was wrong, her knee was wedged against something with no give in it, and she cared for none of it.
She had got what she was after, and it had got her in return — he filled her so entirely that her satisfaction in her own cleverness deserted her on the spot.
His mouth found her throat. His hands moved her on him, slow and deep, reclaiming by degrees everything she had spent the last quarter-hour taking from him, and she let him, because she had not, after all, only wanted to win.
She had wanted this. She gave up the last of her command without a fight and held on to him while he had her, in the dark, in the absurd small chair, exactly as she had intended and not nearly as in control of it as she had meant to be.
The supper went entirely cold.
He could not work.
The pen was in his hand. The page was in front of him.
The candle was burning low, and the grey pre-dawn was beginning to show through the ventilation slit, and the mural chamber, which had had his concentration every morning for seven months, was not going to have it tonight.
She was sleeping on the floor under him.
He was not, in any portion of himself that mattered, in this room.
He had taken her tonight, even after knowing what she had told him at supper.