XLV #2
She never got to finish the question, and he never raised his head to answer.
His mouth was fully open on her now, his breath hot against the wetness of her, his tongue making a swirling, tickling motion on…
on something… on the same something he had touched with his fingers the first night they had made love, the same eager arousal he had tortured in a sickbed in Burgos, and she had never found an answer for.
She kept trying to lift her head from the pillow to look at his face — the sweetly contented expression, the sighing ease of him — but her body kept shattering in waves that spasmed and shook her body into paroxysms she could not command.
And then, he broke her apart. His fingers had been keeping his place, but now, they eased her further open, splitting her under the onslaught of his tongue and breath and lips, so that she felt like he was suckling the very core of her pleasure, reaching through her nerves and into her mind itself and wringing burst after magnificent burst from her.
She had no idea what she said, or what her face might have looked like.
She had no body, no dignity, no words. Only this.
Only heat and him and whatever the fire had ravished and left behind.
Somehow her hands had found their way into his hair, and she was tearing at it like her last anchor to the earth.
Probably hurting him, probably pulling it by the roots, but he only kept on his patient assault until there was nothing left of her.
There was one final sheet of lightning streaking across her vision, and then all else was splintered colours, swirls and panting and cries to God for relief and mercy and whatever else she could think to beg.
And then, his mouth retreated, kissed once more at the top of her, and he crawled up to lie on the pillow beside her.
She was still catching her breath, and would be for some while, but she rolled her face towards him, half-laughing, half-shy, and reached to touch his cheek. “What the devil did you do to me?” she gasped.
“What I have been wanting to do since the first time I ever saw you. Made you scream my name and pray to God I never stopped.”
She laughed fondly, her fingers straying into the hair at his temples. “The first time you ever saw me, you said I was not even handsome enough to tempt you to dance. I think your memory is somewhat tainted, sir.”
“I had changed my mind within ten minutes of saying it.” He brought her hand — her left hand, still bearing that pinchbeck ring — up to his mouth to kiss it. “And I kept trying to change it back for a month, but it was too stubborn to be talked out of you.”
“I do not believe a word of it, you flattering fool,” she said as she leaned forward to kiss his mouth. He tasted musky, salty, and smelled like her. “But I will take it, because it makes it sound like you might have fancied me long before I marched up to you and demanded to marry you.”
He raised up on one elbow. “I did. How did you not know that?”
Elizabeth’s brow creased in bewilderment. “You… you never said…”
“I have said. I thought I said it a dozen times, in a dozen different ways. I wanted you in Hertfordshire, and I ran instead. I thought you were married to Collins, and I made myself sick over it for two years. I was berating myself for still wanting you in Tudela, pacing the river when the raid happened, and I rushed back in a panic to find you not only safe and alive, but wanting me. I fooled myself into thinking I could go along with that sham arrangement you proposed, but by the end of the first day, I knew myself to be lost. I fought it, Elizabeth. I will own that, how unworthy I was to wish you far away from me at times, but there was never a time when I did not want you.”
Her mouth had fallen open in astonishment, and she could only blink. Only breathe, her hand dropped to his chest where she could feel his heart beating. “Then you… what you said in your fever… you were talking about me? That was… it was true, and not some fanciful raving?”
“I have no memory of it, but probably. All I know and remember from those days was you. Always you, there whenever I reached for you, and the only thing I found worth clinging to. I would have died in that bed, if I had not wanted so badly to hang on to you, Elizabeth.”
She did not know where they had come from, but tears were slipping down her cheeks. She reached up to cup his face, to coax him back down to her, and then she pulled herself close, her face fitting into the hollow of his throat. “I can do nothing but ruin you. You know that, and still…”
He kissed the top of her head. “You have been the making of me, Elizabeth. Pemberley can go rot, if it must. My father signed it away five years ago, and if I cannot save it, then no one can claim I did not try. I would have been more ashamed of myself if I permitted a good man to wait on help that never came because an estate and a loan were more important. But more than that — God forgive me for saying it — more than any of it, what I want is my wife. I want my Elizabeth, right here in my arms, holding me together the way you always have.”
She had no answer for that. No cheeky response, or witty way of turning it aside.
She wanted none. She wrapped her arm under his, around his chest, and pillowed her head on that new brocade waistcoat.
She would have to get it off him later. Would have to show him, by kiss and by word and by tender touches, exactly how desperately she needed him, too.
For now, it was enough to just hear his heart, beating for her.