Far Gone #2
Her head tossed on the pillow, and a cry broke forth, shaken and uneven, and sounding like an agony for the first few seconds, and then piercing upward into a shriek of astonishment and wonder. An instant later, she was snatching at his hand, begging him to stop, please stop, I cannot bear it…
He let her capture his hand, then took hers to his mouth to kiss it.
Her body went slack then, her eyes opened lazily, and she was panting to catch her breath. “You, sir,” she said between pants, “have made quite the fool of me.”
“And it was the most glorious thing I have ever seen. Would you like to even the score?”
She smiled, still heaving, and reached for him.
He came into her slowly. There was no haste left in him to fight — only the sweet, bewildering, inviting heat of her, her legs rising to wrap him, her heels at the backs of his thighs.
Her eyes were open and fixed on his from a hand's breadth away as though she meant to watch the whole of it happen in his face.
Her nails traced fire up his spine and spread flat over the root of his back and lower, and he shuddered and moved in her, slow, deep, and careful.
For a moment, it was perfect, it was everything, his blood ringing with it, her name coming in bursts from his lungs as he sank into her, rose up, sank again.
She was kissing and nipping at his chest, his throat, anything her mouth could reach, and fire licked his body, threatening to consume him long before she could finish him off.
A slow tingle was crawling out from the centre of his universe, the place where his body met hers, growing into a flush and a glow, and —
And the room tilted.
It swung, gently and horribly, and the light scattered at the edges of his vision. His arms, braced on either side of her, shook, and the strength ran out of them like water out of a cracked jug.
He stopped, quaking and trying not to buckle. He was braced over her, shaking, heaving, his head gone light and singing, the fever not wholly out of him yet and choosing this of all moments to remind him of it.
“I — forgive me —” His arms would not hold him. “Elizabeth, I cannot — I am —”
The mortification of it was very nearly worse than the dizziness, that he should have her under him, wanting, her whole body still reaching for more of him, and that his own decimated frame should fail him here, now, of all the places to fail. “I am sorry. Give me… a moment…”
He rolled off her before he fell on her, and lay on his back with his chest heaving and the ceiling turning slow circles above him, cursing his own weakness. It was unfair… monstrously unfair, and wrong, and…
Then her hand was on him.
On his chest, over his banging heart, the way it had lain a hundred times in the fever.
She seemed to be counting his pulse, measuring it, and then she rolled up to press her face against his heartbeat.
He caught her hair, letting his hand tangle there as he tried to stop the room from spinning. “I wish I could… Good God, I wish —”
She pressed a kiss to his chest, and then her hand moved, drifting down until he stood up against her, faltering but willing still.
He closed his eyes and tried to lift his head, but her mouth came to his jaw, his throat, warm and delicious, and she murmured against his skin, “Be still. I will not have you swooning before I have had my fill of you. Let me.”
He thought to protest. Then, he thought better of it.
She came up over him, taking his hands with her and placing them on her hips.
She rolled forward, arching, then settling, finding her place.
He felt her reach for him, felt her take command of him and draw him slowly into herself.
She eased down with a care for his weakness that seemed to serve some secret, wicked pleasure of her own.
When he opened his eyes, she was looking down at him with an expression he had no defence against at all — a leering, delighted, impossibly pleased tilt of her mouth.
“There. You need not do anything but comply. Which you have probably never done in your life, but you might try, just this once.”
He laughed, but the laugh died in his throat and became a growl as she rocked her hips to press him deeper into her. “At… your service… Mrs… Darcy,” he managed.
Her hands moved to his chest and clutched him, digging into the muscles and pushing his torso down.
It undid him, that — not only the sensation of her, though that was very nearly past bearing, seated over him, moving in slow deliberate rolls that sent the fire up through him in waves — but the raw honesty in it.
The intimacy that needed no prelude, no explanation.
She knew his body. She had learned it in the worst way a person could learn another, at the very floor of his life, when he had lain helpless and fouled and shaking.
She had cleaned him and cooled him and held him, and not once let him see her flinch.
He had been so ashamed of it, every mortifying hour of it — that she should have to tend him so, that she should see him reduced to a thing that could not manage its own body.
And now, the very hands that had done those humiliating offices were on him like this, moving him toward pleasure with a sureness no untried bride could ever have had. Vitoria had taught her passion. Burgos had given her the rest of him, body and soul.
She seemed to be glorying in his touch, in her power over him.
The slow certain glide of her, the way he could feel the muscles deep inside her plying him with every movement, her hands spread on his chest, her hair fallen forward around her flushed and grinning face, the small sounds she made as she took her own pleasure from him in her generous, sensual rhythm — it was enough, it was more than enough.
It was gathering in him faster than his spent body had any right to allow.
“Elizabeth!” It was warning and plea and worship all at once. He would have cried out again, but she took his mouth with a kiss that captured the whole of his breath.
He got one hand into her hair and the other arm around her shoulders and pulled her down the last inch.
A wave of mercy and elation took him as her mouth found his — not the violent shattering of Vitoria but something deeper and quieter and more complete, snaking up through his whole weakened, grateful frame and breaking against her.
He held her against his heart and kissed her through it, and felt her smile against his mouth, pleased with herself, pleased with him, having pulled the very life back up out of a man who a week ago could not lift his own head.
He came back to himself slowly, his breath ragged, his arm still locked around her, her weight settled warm along his chest and her face tucked into his throat.
“I believe,” he managed when he could speak, “you may tell Padre Ignacio his diagnosis was in error.”
He felt her laugh against his neck. “I shall let him keep his dignity and say nothing at all.”
“Generous.”
“I am feeling generous.” She lifted her head. Her face was soft and undone and still faintly wicked. “You are not to do that again anytime soon. The exertion. I mean it. I did not nurse you back from the grave to have you swoon in my arms like a maiden.”
“I did not swoon.”
“You very nearly swooned.”
“I paused,” he said, with what dignity he had left, which was none, “to admire the view.”
She laughed and dropped her head back to his chest, and he lay holding her, emptied out and mended and more at peace than he could remember being in the whole of his adult life, and did not let go of her.