XLVII Precautions #2
He decided. He gathered her up off the desk in both arms with the trousers half down his thighs and the boots still on his feet, and he carried her — with considerable awkwardness, the trousers bunching at his knees and the boot-tops bumping at each stride — the four steps to the bed, and he laid her down on it.
She was laughing when he carried her, and when he set her down, she registered the state of him standing over her, and her hand went up over her mouth. “How did you manage that without falling?”
He slid towards her on the bed and pressed a kiss to her stomach. “I was very determined.”
“That has never been a problem before. No… Fitzwilliam Darcy, you tease, you! You were not even wearing your boots these last two months. Were you?”
“I had my banyan slippers,” he said a little defensively. “Rather convenient footwear for a gentleman at his leisure.”
“You mean a gentleman hoping for something more than just supper with his wife.”
“Well, after being caught once unprepared, I decided that tall boots were really not quite the thing for an evening supper. It is not as if I were trying to impress you with the polish on the leather.”
She lost it then, properly, with her hand still over her mouth and her eyes shining at him.
He propped his chin on her stomach and watched, with his trousers bunched at his knees and his boots on his feet and his wife laughing helplessly underneath him in the morning light, and he found that he could not be offended by any of it because he had never seen her laugh like that before — not at him, not at his expense, but with him at his own expense, freely.
She caught his face in her hands and held it for a moment. “Two months of hopeful walking around in banyan slippers, all while protesting that I was the one seducing you!”
“You were. I was only trying to take… precautions. A man could fall and split his crown in the dark, if his trousers fall round his knees this way.”
She laughed again, twisting her fingers through his hair. “You absurd, particular, careful man.”
He could not answer that. She reached for him, and he came down to her, and the laughing went into the kissing again.
The heat of her skin against the length of him in the light was something he had not been prepared for.
He had had her this way in the dark a dozen times and never with his eyes on her face.
He drew back and looked at her, tracing his fingertips from her jaw, down to the hollow of her throat, then circling one breast before dipping lightly to her navel and travelling up again.
She was toying with the hair curling over his ears. “What is it?”
“Nothing. I am looking at you.”
“You may continue. I do not object.”
He bent and kissed her again, slowly this time, with all the time he had ever wanted to take and none of the dark between them.
He kissed her mouth and then the line of her jaw and then the place under her ear he had been wanting all morning, and she made the soft sound he had been wanting to hear in the daylight.
“Elizabeth.” His voice had gone unsteady. “May I —”
He could not finish the sentence. He found he did not know how to ask for it. He had imagined this in the dark on more nights than he could account for and had never said it aloud, and saying it aloud in the morning light to her face was a separate undertaking entirely.
“May you what?”
“I should like…” He stopped. He drew breath and tried again. “I have never seen you. I have never been permitted to look at you. I should like, if you will allow me, to —”
She understood him before he finished. The colour came up her throat in the crawling sort of heat he had been learning all morning, and her eyes went wider, and her hand at his shoulder tightened briefly.
“Ah… That is… I had not expected…”
“You need not. If you would rather not. I only —”
“I —” She stopped. She drew breath. “I am not certain I shall know how to — be looked at.”
“Then I shall not. Forget I asked.”
“I did not say I would not. I said I was not certain.”
She closed her eyes briefly. He saw her decide.
She opened them again and looked at him directly, and her hands went down between them — slowly, deliberately — and she took his hands in hers.
Then she placed his palms at the insides of her knees, with her hands over his, and drew them gently apart for him.
She was open to him in the full light — flushed, soft, the secret of her unhidden at last and shining with the wanting of him — and the sight of her struck him in a way nothing in all the months of the dark ever had.
She was watching him watching her, and her colour had gone the deepest he had seen it all morning.
Her mouth was slightly open, and she was holding her knees apart for him with the same steady refusal-to-be-cowed she had used on him in a dozen Hertfordshire drawing rooms, and he had never loved her so much in his life.
“Elizabeth! You are… my love, so beautiful.”
He saw a trembling at her throat as she swallowed, then a cautious breath, and she slowly eased her hips towards him.
He bent to her. He took his time about it, because he had been given a gift he had not been certain he would ever ask for and was not going to rush it.
He drew the flat of his tongue against her once, slowly, and she made a sound he had never heard from her — sharp, involuntary, undisguised — and her hand left her knee and went into his hair, and he stayed with her.
He went on as he had been going on, slowly.
She made the sound again — almost a keening sort of moan.
Then again, this time closer to a shriek of pleasure.
Each one different from the one before, each one closer to her own undoing, each one a thing he was being permitted to hear in the light, in the open, with the morning sun moving along the floor and his wife’s hand tight in his hair and his name on her breath every second or third gasp.
“Fitzw… will… Oh, good God! —”
He answered her with his mouth. She gasped again, deeper, and her hips rose against him, and her hand in his hair tightened past tightening.
“Fitzwilliam — Fitzwilliam! —”
He looked up.
Her hand was already reaching for his face. She caught his jaw and drew him up to her, and he came up her body and settled over her. She was breathing hard, and her colour was up, and her eyes were bright and wet.
“I want to see you,” she whispered against his mouth.
“I want to see you when it happens. And —” She drew a breath.
Her hand at the back of his neck tightened.
“I want to hear you. You have been so quiet, Fitzwilliam. For months. This time, I want to hear you. I want to know what you sound like when you are as undone as I am.”
He kissed her hard. He could not have answered her any other way.
He drew back enough to look at her properly — her face flushed, her hair across the pillow, her mouth open from his — and he braced himself on his forearm beside her head, he settled himself between her knees, and she lifted her hips to him.
He came into her slowly, watching her face.
She drew in a breath as he did, and her eyes did not close.
He stopped halfway, because she was looking at him, and he wanted to see the rest of her face do what he had only ever heard before.
Her mouth opened, and her eyes went darker, and her hand at his shoulder tightened. He went the rest of the way.
Her head went back against the mattress, and a shuddering groan rocked her. Her nails at his shoulder dug in once. Her other hand came up and held his face.
“Fitz—” Her cry broke on a groan and then a soft oath as he pressed more deeply. “I need —”
“I am here. I have you, Lizzy, my love.”