Page 156 of Homeless

She came along the corridor in her wrapper with her hair down, candle in hand, and stopped in the doorway beside him. “Oh, dear. Shall I be nervous? What have you done, Fitzwilliam Darcy?”

He smiled and stood aside.

The rooms were beautiful. He had spent a good deal on them, in the weeks of his mending, more than he would once have thought defensible. He had sent to Manchester for new everything, to be brought and designed and arranged well before Mrs Darcy ever saw the house, and had signed off on the entire expense without a single glance at any single item. Perhaps it was a preposterous exercise, but he had nearly lost the house and he had nearly lost her and he no longer cared to be defensible about spending money to see her warm and surrounded by lovely things. The hangings were green. He had chosen the green himself, the soft willow-green of a certain gown he had bought her in a Spanish port, and he watched her recognise the shade, watched her hand go to her mouth.

“You said you wanted nothing to do with the rooms. You have made yourself very clear on the point. I have not argued. I have only made them ready, in case you should ever change your mind.”

“You are a ruinous husband,” she said, but her voice had gone thick. She was still looking at the willow-green walls, and he knew he had chosen right.

“There is one thing more.” He crossed to the fire, where the thing he had had ordered fresh from the foundry and carried up that very afternoon stood waiting, gleaming in the firelight, filled and steaming faintly against the cold. “I recalled a conversation we once had in Santander. In a copper bath not unlike this one, as it happens, though I flatter myself this one is rather finer, and there is no danger this time of the water going cold before I have got you into it.” He turned to her. “You told me, then, what you would want, when we were home and safe and it was all over. I have forgot none of it. And I thought — since you will not have the rooms, and I cannot make you — that you might at least consent to make use of the bath. Once, at least, before you go back to exiling yourself to my wing.”

She was standing very close to him now, looking up at him with her eyes gone bright and her mouth trying not to smile, and he watched the last of her resistance go out of her.

“That,” she said, “is the most shameless piece of manipulation I have ever been subjected to, and I have done business with the finest in the craft.”

“Is it working?”

“You know perfectly well that it is working.” She reached up and laid her hand against his jaw, against the beard she loved feeling against her skin, and drew his face down. “You always know. It is your most trying quality.” And she kissed him.

He had kissed her a great many times, in a great many states — feverish, terrified, grieving, half-dead, and lately, blessedly, at leisure and in health. But there was something in this one, in the warm, firelit safety of it, in the fact that there was nowhere either of them had to be and nothing left to survive and no reason on earth not to, that made it different from all the rest. When she drew back, it was only to begin, with unhurried hands, to work loose the buttons of his shirt.

The bath was warm, and large enough for two, provided she sat, after a fashion, on his lap. He began with very little prelude to soap her skin and kiss her neck, sweeping the sodden hair out of his path and making sure, very sure, that the cooler flesh over her breasts was never troubled by cold air.

“This is monstrous unfair,” she murmured after a while. She had slid down a little against him, her head on his shoulder, just out of the water, her knees rising above the surface as she drowsed against him. He had been scooping warm water over her neck, watching it run in rivulets just under her chin, and he had by no means considered the arrangement unsatisfactory.

“How do you mean? Should I lie on top of you now? I do not think the bath is long enough, and my legs will hang over the end.”

The water rippled as she chuckled, her eyes closed. “I mean you have a full view and access entire to anything of me you like, while I can only feel your desire growing with nothing whatever I can do about it.”

“Well, you could,” he suggested. “But you might get cold.”

She arched off him and swirled about until she was crawling up his torso and sliding her legs round his waist. “I can manage a little cold, if the inducement is a good one.”

“I can promise it will be,” he said, pulling her a little closer so he could kiss the water off her shoulders.

“Good.” She reached under the water and found him. Her fingers did that wicked thing that never failed to curl his toes, sheathing and retracting and dipping to slide round the tight space between skin and heat to set fire to his nerves. When she had him convulsing properly, begging and trembling and fully mastered, she slid down over him and sank as far as the tub would allow her knees to part.

A long while afterward, after a fair third of the water had flooded the floor and neither of them cared, they got themselves with some trouble and a great deal of splashing to the newly covered bed and past all patience with each other. She wanted no niceties now. No gentle kisses or seduction, not even his mouth on her so she might thrash and cry out his name. That, he found somewhat disappointing, but not altogether crushing, for what she wanted was him. His strength was fully returned now, and she meant to have it, all of it, until the freshly made over bed was rattling against the newly papered wall, and his own exultation ripped from his throat. He dropped, heaving and tingling and still trailing reverent kisses on her forehead.

“Off,” she panted, pushing him away. “I cannot breathe, and you are too hot.”

He laughed as he rolled over to stare at the ceiling. His fingers found his shoulder and he counted, dazedly, the fresh marks she had dug into his skin. He had never in his life been so gloriously and thoroughly used. “Good God, woman. You might think of saving some of me for later.”

She chuckled and turned into him, pressing her lips to his jaw. “You will recover. You always do.”

They lay tangled together in the dark, spent, her head on his chest and his hand in her loose hair, his heart slowing under her cheek, and he thought that a man could search the whole world over and never find anything to want beyond this. He caught her up and carried her to the other bed, the dry one, and they tumbled into it together.

“I have been thinking,” Elizabeth said, as she turned to curl herself into his chest.

“A dangerous habit. I have suffered greatly from it.”

“There you are, thinking yourself clever again. But I have been thinking that I ought to tell you something. I have been putting it off, because I could not decide how, and now it seems the how does not matter very much, so I shall simply say it. I am late, Fitzwilliam.”

His hand went still in her hair.

He had learnt better than to guess at a calender or leap at hope; and there was, besides, a perfectly ordinary explanation. “You have never been regular,” he ventured, “since we married. You have said so yourself. The road, and the fever, and the — everything. Your body has had a great deal asked of it and has never quite kept its own time since. It may be nothing. I would not have you distress yourself over —”

“Fitzwilliam.” She lifted her head, and even in the dark he could see she was laughing at him, the firelight catching her face. “I know that I have not been regular. I am not a fool, and I did not stop your heart just now to tell you my courses are a few days behind their reckoning. I am telling you that I have not had them at all. Since September, Fitzwilliam. I am frankly a little astonished you have not worked it out for yourself, observant as you are about everything, and most particularly that. I suppose you have been rather occupied, and so, in fairness, have I.”