XLVI #2
“— or this.” He reached deeper into the water to caress her navel, then strayed even lower to the full, firm flesh of her thigh.
“I have not the imagination to have invented you. I have given up trying. I only mean to spend a very long life looking at the reality instead, which is better than anything I could dream, and dreaming was all that kept me warm on that road, so you may judge how much I mean by it.”
She reached up out of the water with a dripping hand, caught the back of his head, and pulled him down to kiss him.
There was nothing teasing left in it. Her mouth was soft and open and certain, and the water soaked through the front of his shirt where he leaned against the copper rim and kissed her back.
His soaped hand still moving slowly under the surface along the length of her.
And when his hand slipped lower, and his fingers dipped between her legs beneath the water, she gasped into his mouth, and both her wet arms came up and locked around his neck.
“Out,” she breathed against his mouth. “Take me out of here. Now.”
He got an arm under her knees and one behind her back and stood, and the water sheeted off her and soaked him to the skin and ran in a flood across the floorboards.
He had the luxury of not caring, and he carried her dripping and warm out of the bath, with her arms tight around his neck and her wet mouth at his jaw, toward the fire.
“Should I fetch you a towel?”
“No. There are two beds. We shall merrily ruin one of them, and sleep in the other afterwards.”
“I like how you think, Mrs Darcy.” He carried her to “his” bed, the one he had slept in that first night and never touched again, then spread her across it, letting the coverlet soak up the water from her hair and her skin.
He brought the edges of it around her at once, buffing the water off her shoulders, her stomach, but she pushed his hand away.
“Are you not cold?”
“No. I want you to kiss it off,” she whispered.
“Glory be. You are a seductress, wife of mine. The sort of woman the Scriptures warn poor men against.”
Her fingers reached up to toy with his hair. “I am fairly certain marriage negates the warning.”
“So it does.” He bowed over her, starting at her breasts, and drank of her skin like a bee sipping nectar. She tasted of bitter lavender soap, but he was beyond caring. If soap could poison a man, he would die in a noble cause.
His father had once told him that a gentle wife, a proper sort of woman, would expect to be treated with dignity.
She would permit a husband his due, then would wish to be left alone.
Any pleasure beyond the necessities could be indulged elsewhere, in the arms of women who knew their business and asked nothing but honest wages, while a wife held her place at the hearth, at the end of the table, and bore a man’s children with her respectability unsullied.
Respectability could go hang. He had this.
A woman who shuddered and moaned at his touch just because she wanted him, a woman who made him stand taller just by standing beside him.
A woman who could give him everything, down to the very bottom of herself, and still be more at the end of it and more tomorrow than he could have ever deserved.
He was lying across her now, the water from her thighs seeping through his trousers.
Her hair was a black, sodden snarl across the pillow.
The thing would never be the same again, and there would be a water stain across the downy white coverlet long after they had finished with it.
He would buy and burn them, if necessary, and their ruin only made her seduction of him the more satisfying.
“Get those things off,” she said, pulling at his shirt with her hands while her toes curled and plucked at the trousers at his calf. “I want every inch of you to myself.”
He wanted no more encouragement than that.
He raised up, and the buttons were done away with, the garments cast the way of the carpet or the door or the hearth.
He never bothered to look, would not have even turned round if the shirt had been cast into the grate to smoulder.
She was still a little damp when he eased down into her, and it only made her that much more sumptuous, that much softer when he sought her in the place she always met him.
It was like hot butter slathered over toast, melting and sinking and making two separate things into one delicious whole.
She knew how to make him burn now. Every sweet morning, every long night, and every frantic afternoon of the past several days had made her something of an authority on his body, his breath, his heartbeat.
He had not thought a greater mastery of him possible than that first night in Vitoria, when she, in her innocence, had owned him so completely.
But now, she had perhaps two dozen encounters to her credit, each one teaching her a new way to touch him, draw him out, make his body stand up and sing or lie down in submission.
And she was doing it again now, finding some muscle deep inside herself to ripple — God only knew how she managed it — plying him with a measure of control and sensitivity that…
he was ashamed to confess… he had never before encountered.
But the best part, the part that made him hold on, wait for her, was what happened when she gave in to her own seduction.
When her head tossed helplessly on the pillow, his name coming in broken syllables from her throat, and her body ravaged what she held of him until she had wrung out what she needed and emptied him besides.
He could never hold out entirely until she had done. The best he could hope for was to tip her over the brink and let her drag him down with her, but being able to hold her, to feel her quaking around him as he shattered inside her, was its own sort of marvel.
Her fingernails had left so many marks on his shoulders that he had begun to count them when he dressed, as other men counted their battle wounds and boasted of them.
But her hands were not at his shoulders now.
They were digging into his backside, and her legs had gone up to wrap about his hips as if she could make him strike deeper, pull harder, and stay longer.
The pain was its own sort of aphrodisiac, and he answered her with all he had until she clove to him, his name breaking from her one more time as she convulsed on the last of him.
He crumpled and fell atop her, his face turned against her breast as her hands found his hair, nearly as wet as hers now with sweat. “You are going to need another bath,” he sighed against her skin, kissing the spot just below his mouth where the flesh rose.
Her chest shook briefly under his cheek. “I think you need it more than I do.”
“We could call for more water. Do it all over again. How many times do you think the house maid will put up with filling the bathtub today?”
“Not enough to satisfy you, I wager. There, I feel you already hopeful again, and it has not yet been two minutes.”
Darcy pushed off her because she had been struggling to breathe a little and would not admit it aloud, and turned on his side to pull her into his arms. “I would be content to lie here in this ruin of the blankets until you feel like tolerating my attentions again. And after we are finished, we could move to the other bed and try our luck there.”
“Come, come, we must eat sometime or other.”
“I have plenty here to devour. You have a nicely turned haunch, and this saddle is particularly —”
“Fitzwilliam Darcy, are you comparing me to a roast lamb?”
“You are far more delicious than that. I had not even got to the breast yet.” He cupped her there and kissed the back of her neck.
She closed her eyes, and he could see her cheek dimpling in a smile.
“I do like it when you do that thing with your chin on my neck. It makes me shiver all the way to my toes, but it is better when you have left it unshaved for longer. I do not suppose beards will ever be in fashion in Grosvenor Square?”
“If Mrs Darcy says they are, they are.”
She laughed a little. “Good. I begin to think Mrs Darcy might be a useful name to keep, after all.”