XLV
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They walked back to the inn through the dark streets, and neither of them said a word.
It was not the silence of the morning they had arrived — not the sick, raw silence of two people who had wounded each other and could not speak across it.
Everything had changed, and neither of them yet had the words, nor the courage, to be the first to say how.
Harcourt's talk had done something in that dining room that could not be undone, and as they walked side by side through the cold salt dark, Elizabeth listened to their two sets of footsteps on the stones and thought of how easily they always fell into step.
His strides half again as long as hers, hers lighter on the pavers, but together, they sounded like one person.
They always had, though it made no sense how.
Darcy's hand found hers in the dark, once, at a crossing, to guide her over the wet stones.
He let go when they had crossed, as though he were not sure he had the right.
She felt the loss of it the whole rest of the way.
She did not reach for him, but she could not make herself admit, any longer, quite what was stopping her.
They came into the sitting room where his bedroom lay on the right, and hers on the left. Elizabeth set down her shawl, and Darcy set down his hat and gloves. She heard by the wood creaking under his boots that he was shifting his weight, but not moving away.
She turned to look at him, and he was already looking at her. She never afterward knew which of them moved first.
In some hazy part of her mind, that point mattered to her, that she could not lay the blame or the credit on either of them, could not say he reached for me or I went to him, because it had not happened in that order, or in any order, because there had been no first and no second, only the two of them turning to look at each other across the room and then, in the same breath, in one motion, not apart any longer.
She was in his arms. Or he was in hers. It came to the same thing. She had her hands fisted in his coat and her face against his throat, and his arms had closed around her so hard that it drove the breath out of her. She did not care, wanted less breath and more of him.
“My Elizabeth!” he growled, his face pressed into her hair as her teeth grazed his jaw. “My love, my own.” His fingers sank into the small of her back, then swept down to the rise of her buttocks to seize them and lift her closer into his grasp.
And then it was his mouth at the rise of her breast above her bodice, his breath leaving hot trails of need shocking through her nerves and wrecking her skin. She reared her head back, letting him devour her. “Fitz… will… Oh, God, please…”
He wanted no further encouragement. One hand came up to brace behind her shoulders, and she let her body spill into his arms, arching over them as he laid her out right there, in the thick carpet at their feet.
His hands were all haste, all need as he yanked up her skirt, snatched impatiently at her petticoat, and pressed her back with a kiss so deep, so desperate that her mouth alone was not enough to satisfy him.
He drank of her lips, suckled her tongue, and stole her air.
She had been trying to reach for the fall of his trousers, but he was already there, already proud and open before her and begging.
Her fingers brushed the hot skin of his hip, and that was all she managed before he took her — one deep, hard thrust that her body welcomed with a wanton eagerness that made her moan when he came to the bottom of himself.
He held there for several seconds, just pulsing within her, his hands shaking as they found her face. He waited for her to look into his eyes, waited with a smile that she could only describe as rakish and entirely, thoroughly contemptible in its ruthless satisfaction. And she loved him for it.
“There, now,” he panted. “Brought to heel at last, the both of us.”
She laughed, rocking her hips beneath him to let him feel her, to try to take a little more of him and watch his eyes glaze over as she did so. “Wretched man,” she whispered.
“Never. Not so long as I have you.”
“Then take me.”
He did. There, on the carpet, with her new gown rumpled and his new coat bunching in their way, he made a wreckage of them both.
He cursed the boots that tangled his thrusts, she tore at the cravat that kept her from plunging her face into his chest, but the heat and the burning and the savage, consuming intoxication of it took them beyond themselves, beyond the room and the expensive carpet and the gentle fire crackling in the grate.
His voice was already fracturing, already giving way to whimpers and pleas, and once, a cry pitched higher and beyond what she had ever known his voice to carry. “Elizabeth! I… oh, God, you feel so good…”
He had quickened beyond reason or restraint, a punishing pace that should have frightened her but only made her glory in what strength he had found, the need she had aroused in him, the fire she could already feel growing in her own centre.
And before she could even tell him she was his, that he might have her and keep her and mark her forever, he had shuddered on one final cry that took the last of his breath.
He collapsed on her, his coat a hot, crumpled ruin about his shoulders, his boots catching at the silk of her stockings, and his body still seated deep inside hers. She rocked slightly, trying to capture and keep him there, but he was already falling, pulling away from her wanting.
It was still enough. Enough to fall back into his arms, to admit at last that she had never wanted to lose him, never wanted to hurt him, and only needed the excuse, the reason to point to and declare that she was not only being selfish in holding on to the man who had become her life’s blood, beyond any hope of redemption.
He stirred, and in a moment, he had fallen from her, then risen to his knees to offer his hand.
Elizabeth had one brief, unseemly moment of mirth — the groomed and respectable gentleman from his hair to his waistcoat, but below that, he was naked and disarmed and entirely undignified — half soft now, and growing gentler by the second.
She let him pull her to a sitting posture and kept her eyes on him, with a grin and an open admiration wholly unbecoming to any properly raised female.
“Whenever you have that look on your face,” he said as his hand came to her waist and his lips to her brow, “terror strikes my heart.”
“It should. I am thinking of all the uses I have for you and that… rather magnificent appendage of yours, and most of them would shock your hair white.”
“Do tell.” He kissed her lips softly, then stood, pulling her up after him. “I find I am all anticipation.”
“It would be unfair of me to do so just now. I shall have to wait on a man’s frailty before I can make more demands of his virility.”
“For that bit of impertinence,” he said, “you will pay, and pay dearly, Mrs Darcy.”
He pulled her into his arms and… good Heavens, he tossed her over his shoulder like a sack of grain! Elizabeth was startled into a laugh as he straightened, his hands steadying her with a firm grip on each cheek of her backside through her gown.
“I shall teach you to mind your tongue yet,” he said as his boot kicked open the door to Elizabeth’s room. “Or to mind mine, perhaps.”
She was still shrieking with laughter, her head hanging over his back so that she had a rather tempting view of his southern slopes as his trousers sagged further with each step. “I cannot think what you might be talking about, sir, but I have never minded anything a day in my… oh!”
Before she could say another word, he had tossed her onto the mattress and fallen on her middle, kissing her stomach through her gown. “Then lie back and let me educate you, you impudent woman.”
His hands were at her knees, pushing her skirts up again.
What he meant to do, she could only imagine, but she lifted her hips when he pressed, let him raise the fabric up above her navel, and let her head fall back, her fingers twining in the hair pulling from its pins.
Even if all he intended was to stare at her, touch her until he could act again, she would lie there open before him without complaint.
But that was not his intent. He paused for only an instant, his eyes drinking her in — the tousled hair, the flushed cheeks, the inviting way she permitted her breasts to push against her bodice and her knees to fall open — and then his mouth was on her.
Elizabeth nearly shot upright at that first touch. It was only the brush of his lips at the dark curls of her, but the horror of it startled her into modesty once more. “What are you —”
He put one hand on her breast, gently, and pushed her back down. “Rather enjoying the fact that, for once, I am the one to astonish you. It will be a fearful sacrifice on your part, but I am afraid I must demand that you lie back and permit me to have my way with you.”
She lay where he had put her, her heart going so fast that her breathing could hardly keep pace with the blood rushing through her face, in her ears, and — embarrassingly — into the very part of her he was now caressing with his tongue.
For a few seconds, she kept wanting to push her knees together again.
He could not want… surely he could not enjoy…
But an instant later, white light took her vision and ruptured her spine. She arched in shock, and a keening sort of wail ripped from her throat. “Oh, my… Fitzwi… what… are you…”