Chapter 8 #2
Her fingers dug into my shoulders.
My lips descended to the sapphire, then to the warm skin around it. The stone was cold against my mouth. She was not.
She shivered.
Behind her, the door to her chamber stood ajar. I could see the foot of a bed and the glow of a fire lit for her.
Three steps.
I raised my head.
Elizabeth was watching me, lips red, breath short. She didn’t lower her eyes. Didn’t try to hide what she felt.
That made the words infinitely harder.
“Not here,” I murmured.
Her fingers stayed in my hair.
“Because of the inn?”
“Because of us.”
Her gaze didn’t leave mine.
I caressed her waist slowly.
“I want our first night to be at Pemberley. In the room where you’ll wake the next morning. And the morning after. I don’t want an inn bed we’ll leave at dawn, never to return. I want a place that will keep us.”
The silence lasted a few seconds.
Then her features softened.
“Home.”
“Yes.”
She touched my cheek with her fingertips.
No disappointment. No doubt.
Only that quiet understanding between us—when she stopped pressing me to speak and I stopped hiding behind silence.
“Then tomorrow,” she said.
Two words.
Not a concession.
A shared promise.
I turned my head and kissed her palm.
“Do you realize,” she continued more quietly, “that you’ve just explained with great dignity why you had two rooms prepared—and you’re still holding me?”
I didn’t loosen my arms.
“Perfectly.”
“That’s what I feared.”
She stayed against me a moment longer before stepping back.
“We should finish this supper.”
“I don’t think I’m capable of it.”
Her smile returned.
“Neither am I.”
?
A maid came to help her undo her hair and dress.
I stayed in the small sitting room, standing before the window, my eyes fixed on the dark courtyard where a groom walked an unharnessed horse. Behind the half-open door, pins fell one by one into a dish. Fabric rustled. Muffled murmurs accompanied every movement.
The concentration required not to listen would have sufficed to command an army.
The maid finally left.
Silence fell again.
“Fitzwilliam?”
I turned.
Elizabeth stood in the doorway of her room.
Her hair fell freely over her shoulders. Her white nightgown, tied with a ribbon at the throat, followed the lines of her body with a simplicity far more disturbing than all the dresses from Bond Street.
The sapphire had left her throat.
One shoulder peeked from the fabric. Three small freckles showed there in the firelight.
My gaze lingered.
Elizabeth saw it.
She didn’t pull up her nightgown.
“You’re three steps from a door you had installed between us,” she said.
“I’m painfully aware of it.”
“And you won’t cross it.”
“No.”
She tilted her head, and for a moment I thought she would laugh at me. She didn’t.
“Then at least come here.”
I crossed the small sitting room.
I stopped before her, on the threshold, without crossing it. Her hand rose to my open collar—where my cravat had defeated me a quarter hour earlier—and her fingers touched the skin there.
My breath caught.
“You’re nervous,” she observed.
“Extremely.”
“That almost reassures me.”
“Almost?”
“I haven’t decided yet.”
I took her face in my hands and kissed her.
This was not the kiss from earlier. This one sought nothing, asked nothing, prepared nothing. It said only what I couldn’t put into words: that I had waited for this woman for months without knowing I was waiting, that I would wait one more night, and that night would be the last.
Elizabeth drew back first.
She pressed her forehead against mine.
“Good night, my husband.”
I closed my eyes.
“Good night, my wife.”
She stepped back. The door closed softly.
I stood before that closed door longer than I would have admitted to anyone.
Then I went to my own room, where the fire burned for nothing, and lay down fully dressed on a bed too large.
The wall between us was no thicker than a hand.
I heard the bedframe give beneath her, a rustling of sheets, then nothing more.
I didn’t sleep.
I spent part of the night listening to the silence on the other side of that wall, telling myself I had been right—with the wavering conviction of a man who has made an honorable decision and regrets it with every hour the courtyard clock strikes.
Three o’clock. Four.
Only one night.
Only one night remained.
?
I was up before dawn.
She found me in the small sitting room, shaved, dressed, watching the day break over the courtyard as if the sight held the slightest interest.
Elizabeth stopped in the doorway of her room.
She wore her traveling dress. Her hair was pinned up. The sapphire had returned to its place at the hollow of her throat.
She studied me for a moment, and her gaze settled on the shadows I hadn’t been able to erase.
“You didn’t sleep,” she said.
“I slept admirably.”
“Fitzwilliam.”
“Two hours. Perhaps.”
“I knew it.”
She crossed the room and stopped before me. Then, without warning, she placed her palm against my rough jaw, where it was still clenched from the sleepless night.
“Neither did I,” she confessed.
I took her hand and turned it to kiss the inside of her wrist, where the skin was thinnest and the pulse closest.
Elizabeth closed her eyes.
“If you continue,” she murmured, “we’ll never reach Derbyshire.”
“The carriage is ready.”
“That’s providential news.”
“Elizabeth.”
She opened her eyes again.
“Tonight,” I said.
For an instant, her throat tightened beneath the sapphire.
“Tonight.”
We descended the narrow staircase without touching, because the innkeeper was watching, and I remembered ordering two rooms in London weeks earlier, certain I was acting as an honorable man.
I had never done anything more difficult.
The road awaited us.
And, at the end of it, our home.