Page 78 of Homeless

He found the laces of her stays and began yanking them loose as his mouth pushed the chemise off the peak of her breast. The touch of his tongue on her skin drew a convulsive cry from her that humiliated and thrilled her in the same instant.

In the next instant, he was pulling the chemise away entirely, and he raised himself up just enough to stare at her. “I should have sold all your clothes downriver a month ago, if it meant I could have seen you like this.”

“Wretched man!”

“Not at the moment.”

She put a hand over his mouth, but the treacherous hand became a caress before it had finished trying to be censure. He turned and kissed the inside of her wrist, while at the same moment, sliding a hand down her thigh to dispense with the stockings.

After that, the quarrel changed its shape and kept burning. He stripped off his trousers as if they were on fire, pausing only because she reached to explore him with a daring hand.

He lurched under her fingers and sucked in a gasp when she held him still. “Bloody hell, woman! You are impertinent and incorrigible, and not a decent bone in your body.”

“You are rude and uncharitable,” she declared back, and did not take her hand or her eyes away.

“You knew that before you married me,” he said, and fell with his mouth against her collarbone.

“I claim duress.” She pushed him back slightly, the better to stare at him. The wonder of how he rose and shivered at her touch, without any apparent effort, sparked a hunger in her to learn more of what his body could do. It could not be as dreadful as her mother had always claimed. This was… fascinating. Even more fascinating was the way he was beginning to sweat and tremble, with his eyes closed and little whimpered pleas being strangled in his throat.

Once, her fingers dipped under the thin ridge of skin that seemed capable of sliding fore and back, and she ran her fingertip in a circle around the edge. That was when the last of his control shattered. He shuddered on her name, in a voice that made it sound far less like language than prayer or surrender.

She would have done it again, for watching him lose control was perhaps the most satisfying experience of her life, but he begged her to stop, even pulling her hand away and wrapping his arms around her waist.

Elizabeth dragged at the neck of his shirt, laughing once because her fingers were not half as sure as his, and then despising herself for laughing when she was already well past prudence. She got it over his head, then her hands swept up the hair of his chest, the flat planes she had seen from across the room on so many nights.

The bed was too narrow. The blanket twisted round them like a malicious chaperon, and the wine had not left either of them in command of their faculties. He sat up briefly to untangle the blanket from her legs, then sputtered in laughter when he lost his balance, and she rolled up and shoved him back onto the mattress. She was laughing again, and he caught the sound against her mouth as if her laugh had become something he could devour.

When he drew back enough to look at her, she saw the last of his self-command fighting its hopeless battle in his face. “We may still stop.”

She had one instant to take the offer.

Instead, she put her hand to his cheek, stroking the short hairs of his jaw. “If you mean to be noble, you are monstrously late.”

He stopped breathing and gazed at her as if he were trying to memorise every detail. Then he tumbled on her in a rush, kissing her with a kind of gratitude that pierced her body more violently than appetite had done. Beneath the hunger, there ran something larger and more dangerous, some plain, helpless reverence which no man ought to look at a woman with unless he meant to ruin her peace for life.

She let him press her into the mattress, even pulled him nearer by raking her fingernails down his back and into his hair. He answered with a shudder and an oath. Wit had gone, anger had turned molten, and all the bold, impertinent talk between them had come down to breath, touch, soft cries, and the hard, stunning wonder of seeing one another laid bare.

His hand slid below her hip, under her thigh, and parted her legs. His weight eased over her, his hand still hooked behind her knee as his eyes held hers. Then he stopped. One more inch, and nothing on earth would be where it had been before.

Elizabeth arched into him. She felt the hot press of him, her own flesh giving way beneath him. One inch… two. Something like a groan of relief or agony rocked his body, and he paused.

There was more; there had to be. He was pulsing against her and within her, the whole of his body trembling and quivering in her arms. “Elizabeth…” he panted.

She was already rocking him deeper, little purrs gurgling in her throat at each stroke of his hands on her thighs and breasts. His body tensed, she could feel the gathering of his muscles as he held himself back…

And then, he let go.

Her body split around him. There was an instant of scorching shock, of his heat cresting into her and shattering a part of her that had never known touch.

There were too many sensations all at once for her to know one from another. The rasp of his jaw against her throat. The sound of her name on his breath. The banging of the headboard against the wall as she begged for more of him. The fierce patience of his hands on her waist, at her breast, between her legs, until patience broke. The ridges of his hardness striking deep within her, causing pleasure to roll through her centre in ways she could not defend herself against.

The world lost sequence. Fitzwilliam Darcy’s body was between her thighs, his mouth at her breast, his fingers accomplishing something devastating and glorious at the place where their bodies were joined that made her want to keep him there forever. There was a strange holiness in being looked at and taken and answered as if their bodies had known a truth that their minds had spent weeks refusing.

He had always seemed made of control. She had discovered what lay under it, and felt some buried answering thing in herself break open completely at last.

Pleasure struck harder because it came upon her first as astonishment. She clutched at him, sure that her heart was the next thing to burst, and felt his control go under her hands.

“Elizabeth… oh, God… Elizabeth!”