Shattered
XXIX
It was not tentative. It was not sweet. It was the answer that remained to her because speech had become too weak a weapon.
His hands released her wrists only to come to her waist and drag her against him with a violence that made the whole of her go hot at once.
She had meant to rebuke him with her mouth.
She found herself opening to him instead.
He lifted his head only enough to speak. “I will have you note that you kissed me first.”
“You had grown intolerable, so I closed your mouth.” She caught him by his collar and pulled him down again.
This time, his hand slid from her waist to the small of her back and held her there.
The contact drew such a fierce, involuntary answer from her that she bit his lower lip in retaliation.
He made a low growl in his throat that set her blood running faster.
“There,” she said against his mouth. “You see what comes of provoking me.”
“If this is punishment, I shall argue with you to my dying breath.”
She laughed, but the laugh broke and turned into a gasp because his mouth had gone to her throat.
The movement was small. Its effect was not.
Weeks of looking away, enduring, pretending, sleeping half a yard from him, hearing him breathe in dark rooms, feeling his hand at her waist only long enough to steady her over mud or stone or crowds — all of it came back in one long, unbearable wave.
He found the place below her ear that made her scalp catch fire and her body turn to shivers, and stayed there. Her fingers dug into his shoulders.
“Mr Darcy, you are seducing me on purpose.”
“I am.”
The shamelessness of the answer shocked another giddy, drunken laugh out of her, and then he stole her breath again, because he had moved one hand to the back of her neck and was flicking his tongue along the hollow under her jaw as if he had a right to the pulse there.
She caught a fistful of his shirt and pushed. He struck the bedpost, tilted sideways, and pulled her with him as he fell. They were still arguing, but in fragments now, half-words, muttered contradictions, small furious noises that turned to kissing before any of them made sense.
His waistcoat was in her way, and she tore it off his shoulders. Her gown and petticoat met with similar treatment, and he ripped at least two buttons off in the process. Her hands were at his shoulders, pressing into the muscle and heat of him until he sat up on the edge of the bed.
He looked down at her from there, his gaze swallowing her whole as his fingertips traced the curve of her left breast through her chemise. His chest was heaving, hair disordered, mouth altered past civility, hands teasing her as if daring her to continue. The sight near undid her.
“Well,” he said, breathing hard, “you have brought me to heel. Are you satisfied?”
She moved between his knees. “Not in the least.”
His hands came round her. She had one sharp moment of clarity before the fall — this was the true disaster, not the bad wine or the road they could not take or the papers they could not find, but the simple fact of being taken hold of by him and wanting more of it.
Then his mouth was at the hollow of her throat, then lower, and thinking had very little say left in the matter.
He found the laces of her stays and began yanking them loose as his mouth pushed the chemise off the peak of her breast. The touch of his tongue on her skin drew a convulsive cry from her that humiliated and thrilled her in the same instant.
In the next instant, he was pulling the chemise away entirely, and he raised himself up just enough to stare at her. “I should have sold all your clothes downriver a month ago, if it meant I could have seen you like this.”
“Wretched man!”
“Not at the moment.”
She put a hand over his mouth, but the treacherous hand became a caress before it had finished trying to be censure. He turned and kissed the inside of her wrist, while at the same moment, sliding a hand down her thigh to dispense with the stockings.
After that, the quarrel changed its shape and kept burning. He stripped off his trousers as if they were on fire, pausing only because she reached to explore him with a daring hand.
He lurched under her fingers and sucked in a gasp when she held him still. “Bloody hell, woman! You are impertinent and incorrigible, and not a decent bone in your body.”
“You are rude and uncharitable,” she declared back, and did not take her hand or her eyes away.
“You knew that before you married me,” he said, and fell with his mouth against her collarbone.
“I claim duress.” She pushed him back slightly, the better to stare at him.
The wonder of how he rose and shivered at her touch, without any apparent effort, sparked a hunger in her to learn more of what his body could do.
It could not be as dreadful as her mother had always claimed.
This was… fascinating. Even more fascinating was the way he was beginning to sweat and tremble, with his eyes closed and little whimpered pleas being strangled in his throat.
Once, her fingers dipped under the thin ridge of skin that seemed capable of sliding fore and back, and she ran her fingertip in a circle around the edge.
That was when the last of his control shattered.
He shuddered on her name, in a voice that made it sound far less like language than prayer or surrender.
She would have done it again, for watching him lose control was perhaps the most satisfying experience of her life, but he begged her to stop, even pulling her hand away and wrapping his arms around her waist.
Elizabeth dragged at the neck of his shirt, laughing once because her fingers were not half as sure as his, and then despising herself for laughing when she was already well past prudence.
She got it over his head, then her hands swept up the hair of his chest, the flat planes she had seen from across the room on so many nights.
The bed was too narrow. The blanket twisted round them like a malicious chaperon, and the wine had not left either of them in command of their faculties.
He sat up briefly to untangle the blanket from her legs, then sputtered in laughter when he lost his balance, and she rolled up and shoved him back onto the mattress.
She was laughing again, and he caught the sound against her mouth as if her laugh had become something he could devour.
When he drew back enough to look at her, she saw the last of his self-command fighting its hopeless battle in his face. “We may still stop.”
She had one instant to take the offer.
Instead, she put her hand to his cheek, stroking the short hairs of his jaw. “If you mean to be noble, you are monstrously late.”
He stopped breathing and gazed at her as if he were trying to memorise every detail.
Then he tumbled on her in a rush, kissing her with a kind of gratitude that pierced her body more violently than appetite had done.
Beneath the hunger, there ran something larger and more dangerous, some plain, helpless reverence which no man ought to look at a woman with unless he meant to ruin her peace for life.
She let him press her into the mattress, even pulled him nearer by raking her fingernails down his back and into his hair.
He answered with a shudder and an oath. Wit had gone, anger had turned molten, and all the bold, impertinent talk between them had come down to breath, touch, soft cries, and the hard, stunning wonder of seeing one another laid bare.
His hand slid below her hip, under her thigh, and parted her legs. His weight eased over her, his hand still hooked behind her knee as his eyes held hers. Then he stopped. One more inch, and nothing on earth would be where it had been before.
Elizabeth arched into him. She felt the hot press of him, her own flesh giving way beneath him. One inch… two. Something like a groan of relief or agony rocked his body, and he paused.
There was more; there had to be. He was pulsing against her and within her, the whole of his body trembling and quivering in her arms. “Elizabeth…” he panted.
She was already rocking him deeper, little purrs gurgling in her throat at each stroke of his hands on her thighs and breasts. His body tensed, she could feel the gathering of his muscles as he held himself back…
And then, he let go.
Her body split around him. There was an instant of scorching shock, of his heat cresting into her and shattering a part of her that had never known touch.
There were too many sensations all at once for her to know one from another.
The rasp of his jaw against her throat. The sound of her name on his breath.
The banging of the headboard against the wall as she begged for more of him.
The fierce patience of his hands on her waist, at her breast, between her legs, until patience broke.
The ridges of his hardness striking deep within her, causing pleasure to roll through her centre in ways she could not defend herself against.
The world lost sequence. Fitzwilliam Darcy’s body was between her thighs, his mouth at her breast, his fingers accomplishing something devastating and glorious at the place where their bodies were joined that made her want to keep him there forever.
There was a strange holiness in being looked at and taken and answered as if their bodies had known a truth that their minds had spent weeks refusing.
He had always seemed made of control. She had discovered what lay under it, and felt some buried answering thing in herself break open completely at last.
Pleasure struck harder because it came upon her first as astonishment. She clutched at him, sure that her heart was the next thing to burst, and felt his control go under her hands.
“Elizabeth… oh, God… Elizabeth!”
A savage cry broke in his throat, falling into groans of surrender. She felt the last of his strength fade, then another rush of heat from deep inside her as he collapsed on top of her. His lips found her hair as he whispered another reverent, “Elizabeth.”
Then his arm came hard about her, the blanket dragged half over them, his breath rough at her temple, and sleep took her all at once.
The candle had burned itself out. Darcy woke in thick darkness, his feet cold and his arm numb, and no sense at first of what had roused him except warm breath on his chest and the intolerably sweet weight of her against him.
For one disordered instant, he thought himself still in the middle of it, still slave to her touch and her mouth and the impossible yielding of her body beneath his hands. Then memory came back entire, and happiness hit him so violently he nearly laughed aloud in the dark.
Elizabeth.
She lay with her face half turned into the pillow, hair tumbled over his arm and across the pillow.
One knee bent toward him beneath the blanket, as if she, too, still clung to the aftertaste of pleasure in her sleep.
Even in the dark, he could see enough to be undone by it: the pale line of her shoulder, the soft wreck of the bedclothes, the place where her hand had come to rest over his heart.
He did not move for a long while because joy had rendered him nearly superstitious.
Reverence was too small a word. He felt absurdly rich, absurdly young, absurdly favoured by God and darkness and wine and every rash mistake that had ever driven them to this room.
He had known hunger. He had known restraint.
He had known the daily torment of travelling beside her and touching her only in those harmless licensed ways necessity allowed.
This was none of those. This was Elizabeth sleeping in his arms after having come to him of her own will, and the happiness of it was so complete it made speech look coarse.
He lifted one hand and laid it very lightly at her waist through the rumpled linen of her shift.
She stirred, not waking in any true sense, only drawing one softer breath and coming nearer. Her mouth brushed the skin below his collarbone. Then, with the dreamy impatience of a woman too drowsy to dissemble, she pressed closer still.
He twined two light fingers in the curls at her cheek. “My love,” he whispered.
She made a faint protesting sound, as if speech were the height of idiocy in the middle of the night. Her hand moved over him, slow and unthinking at first, then less so as her fingers brushed the rising hardness under the blanket. When she lifted her face, her eyes were not fully open.
“What hour is it?” she murmured.
“Still night.”
Her face dropped until her mouth rested against his. “Good.”
He tilted his chin into her, letting his mouth fall open, and she melted into him. She kissed him, still half asleep and mellow, and whatever remained of sobriety or prudence in him went down at once.
She was languid with wine and weariness, making every touch seem both hypnotic and shameless.
When he would have checked himself, she came to him of her own accord, warm and pliant and still more than somewhat drunk.
Her leg slid over his as if no argument had ever existed in the world, and she tugged sleepily at his shoulders until he rolled over with her.
He loved her this time with an awe he could not hide and a hunger he could not master.
She hummed and sighed, her hands plying him with gentle need.
Now and then, she seemed on the edge of drifting off even while clinging to him, then he would move his hand or mouth, and she would return at once with a soft startled breath that made him ache even as he took his pleasure in her.
He had thought the first time their true undoing. It was nothing to this. She came to him with none of the bitterness of their quarrel, only heat, trust, and that fatal half-sleeping willingness which felt more intimate than any spoken vow.
When at last they lay still again, she settled along him with a tired little movement that struck deeper into him than all the urgent tumult before it.
This… this was the woman for whom he would lay down his life.
Rather, for whom he had already done so, because the aftermath of this night had closed a door on any other path.
The threads by which he had clung to Pemberley, his family pride, had already begun to fray beyond repair, and he had snipped another of them tonight.
But Elizabeth was his. England would not see an end to it now. His heart swelled on the thought.
Her hand remained spread over his chest. Her hair lay across his shoulder and throat. He turned his face into it and shut his eyes, smiling there in the dark like a fool too happy to count even one penny of the cost.