Priorities
XXXVIII
She woke with his hand on her breast and his body curled round her back. She had decided that it was no mere chance, this pattern of waking. It seemed to be the way he slept whenever he was well enough to reach for her — as though even senseless, he meant to keep her from getting away in the night.
She smiled and did not open her eyes. The heavy heat of his arm across her, the slow tide of his breathing at her nape, the weight of his hand cupped over her as if he had fallen asleep in the middle of holding her and simply never let go.
A week ago, she had lain awake counting his breaths in terror.
Now, they came deep and even against her hair, sounding as strong and gentle as they ever had.
She lay inside the circle of him and let herself, for once, do nothing but feel how good it was.
She still could not make the words make sense in her mind.
“You did not know I was in love with you?”
It had not come like a declaration wrung out of a man trying to claim her body for his own pleasure, but as though it were a thing long settled. Like he thought she already knew, had persuaded himself she must understand, and found it amusing that she would tease him by pretending not to.
She had not known what to say. Fitzwilliam Darcy… in love with her! In Heaven’s name, why? The moment had passed into other things, and she had let it pass because she had wanted him, and had not dared question the means.
She questioned it now.
When had it begun? They had never spoken of it.
There had been no hour she could point to and say, there, that was where it changed.
Even that first drunken night… the fire must have come from somewhere else first. It must have been the road — the sheer relentless intimacy of it, the hunger and the fear and the checkpoints and the nights half a yard apart.
By the time they had got to Vitoria, that heedless, reckless night had put him into her blood and her into his bones in a way she could never have credited as possible.
Then there came the fever, and the nursing, each of them dragged in turn through the very worst of what a body could be made to suffer, and the other one there for all of it.
Such things broke people and made them over changed, if they survived.
It would be strange if it had not done something.
A man went through such a crucible beside a woman, and of course he came out the other side with his heart tangled in her; it was natural, it was almost mechanical. It hardly counted as choosing.
But to call it love? To use that word, in that easy, confident voice, as though it were a fact about the world and not a fever of its own.
A man of Fitzwilliam Darcy's station could not afford to love her.
He had even said something like that in his delusions, if such ravings could be trusted.
Such an admission was not cruelty; it was simple logic, and she had run figures at her uncle's elbow for two years and knew a ruinous sum when she saw one.
He would never have loved her in England.
She was as sure of that as of anything. In England, whole and solvent and surrounded by every sensible reason, he had looked at her across Hertfordshire and found her wanting, and had been right to, by the lights of his world.
It was only here, only Spain, only the strange, sealed country of their suffering, that had made him forget reason.
And Spain would fade.
That was the thing he could not see, and she could not stop seeing.
Spain would fade, and England would come back, solid and sensible and full of ledgers.
And one day, he would wake in his own bed with Pemberley lost to him, his fortune gone the way of ruin.
He would look across at her and remember, painfully, everything his loyalty to her had cost. The house.
The fortune. The name his father left him, sold off to fund a Spanish crown that would take years to pay, if it ever paid at all.
How long, after that, before the love he swore so easily curdled?
How long before she caught the first flicker of it in his face — not anger, he was too good for anger, but disappointment, the crumbling despair of a man who had given up everything for a comfort he found in a foreign sickroom and lived to regret?
She could bear a great many things. She had discovered, this summer, exactly how many. She did not think she could bear that.
She had wanted last night. She would not pretend otherwise, even to herself — she had wanted to be held and adored, wanted to feel his hands on her and put the fever behind them and be, for one night, simply alive again after so long spent at the edge of death.
She did not regret it. But she had not thought of what it would do to her afterward — how much harder it would make the thing she had promised to do, which was to let him go.
To keep him ruined for her sake was unthinkable.
To keep him at all was unthinkable. And yet here she lay, in the cage of his arm, not wanting, with everything in her, to ever climb out of it.
Behind her, against the small of her back, she felt him harden.
It was unmistakable, and it came with a small change in his breathing, and then his hand tightened on her breast — not the loose clasp of sleep any longer, but a deliberate, slow closing.
He was awake, but he did not speak. He only drew closer and set his mouth to the back of her neck, not quite kissing — tasting, more, dragging his lips slowly over her nape and the top of her spine, relishing the flavour of her skin.
It sent a shiver clean down through her that she could not have stopped if she had tried.
Her heart ached and lifted at once, which seemed to be the only way it knew how to beat around him now. She lay still and let him think she was sleeping, so that he could work at waking her, and smiled into the pillow where he could not see.
“Your heart is going faster,” he murmured against her skin, at last. His voice was rough with sleep and satisfaction. “You are awake. I can feel it.”
She turned her head to look at him over her shoulder. His eyes were heavy-lidded and warm. “Is that what you were feeling?”
“Among other things.” He moved his mouth to the point of her shoulder and kissed along it, slowly, and his hand left her breast to travel down the curve of her ribs, the dip of her waist, over her hip, the swell below it, and up again.
Not urgent, not even seductive exactly, only roving contentment that meant to claim and touch every inch of her while he could.
She let herself go slack in his arms, and pushed the ruin and the resentment and the whole bleak, inevitable future down out of sight and let herself be, for these few minutes, only a woman in a warm bed with a man's mouth on her shoulder.
She was overthinking. She was always overthinking; it was her worst habit, and her mother had said so a thousand times, and for once, perhaps her mother had been right.
Not everything had to be reckoned. Not this morning.
But his arousal was growing against her thigh, insistent, and she felt the direction of things. After a minute, she rolled over to face him and put a hand flat on his chest to hold a small distance between them.
“We had an agreement,” she said. “You are not to keep depleting your strength on shagging.”
He drew back an inch, and his whole face performed offense. “I beg your pardon. First — that a wife of mine should own such a word.”
“I have owned worse. You have heard me.”
“And second,” he continued as if he had not heard, “I would not sully what I intend with so coarse a term. I am making love to my wife. It is a wholly different undertaking from… from the other thing you named, which I shall not repeat.”
She laughed. “You are making excuses, and dressing them very prettily, but the fact remains the same. If you mean to be conscious when we ride out of Burgos, you might practise a little restraint now, while you have the leisure.”
“I could find the strength for both.” He said it against her mouth, having closed the inch again while she was talking, his hand spreading warm over the small of her back to keep her where she was. “A man has only to order his priorities correctly.”
“Oh, is that all?”
“It is a question of discipline.” He kissed her. “I have a great deal of discipline. I am famous for it.”
She was smiling, letting him, feeling herself begin to be tempted, despite every sensible intention, her hand curling against his chest instead of holding him off —
And then, she felt it.
It came all at once, a warmth that was not his and not last night's — a slow, drizzling heat spreading beneath her, and her whole body understood it a half-second before her mind did. She gasped and went rigid, sitting up so fast she caught him under the chin with the top of her head.
“Blast!” He recoiled, a hand to his jaw. “Elizabeth, what —”
“I am sorry, I am sorry!” She was already scrambling, clamping her legs together, swinging them off the bed, and she could feel it now — unmistakable, the warm gathering of it, and when she stood, a thin line of blood ran down the inside of her thigh.
She nearly wept with the shame and the relief and the grief of it all knotted together, past telling apart. “I must… give me a moment, I —”
She got herself across the cold floor to the shelf where her clothes were folded, one hand pressed between her legs as if she could hold it back, the other snatching at a petticoat to shield herself, though there was no shielding it, though he had seen her far more naked than this in far worse ways.
She fumbled for a clout, for anything, her face burning, her back to him.