Page 79 of Homeless

A savage cry broke in his throat, falling into groans of surrender. She felt the last of his strength fade, then another rush of heat from deep inside her as he collapsed on top of her. His lips found her hair as he whispered another reverent, “Elizabeth.”

Then his arm came hard about her, the blanket dragged half over them, his breath rough at her temple, and sleep took her all at once.

The candle had burned itself out. Darcy woke in thick darkness, his feet cold and his arm numb, and no sense at first of what had roused him except warm breath on his chest and the intolerably sweet weight of her against him.

For one disordered instant, he thought himself still in the middle of it, still slave to her touch and her mouth and the impossible yielding of her body beneath his hands. Then memory came back entire, and happiness hit him so violently he nearly laughed aloud in the dark.

Elizabeth.

She lay with her face half turned into the pillow, hair tumbled over his arm and across the pillow. One knee bent toward him beneath the blanket, as if she, too, still clung to the aftertaste of pleasure in her sleep. Even in the dark, he could see enough to be undone by it: the pale line of her shoulder, the soft wreck of the bedclothes, the place where her hand had come to rest over his heart.

He did not move for a long while because joy had rendered him nearly superstitious. Reverence was too small a word. He felt absurdly rich, absurdly young, absurdly favoured by God and darkness and wine and every rash mistake that had ever driven them to this room. He had known hunger. He had known restraint. He had known the daily torment of travelling beside her and touching her only in those harmless licensed ways necessity allowed.

This was none of those. This was Elizabeth sleeping in his arms after having come to him of her own will, and the happiness of it was so complete it made speech look coarse.

He lifted one hand and laid it very lightly at her waist through the rumpled linen of her shift.

She stirred, not waking in any true sense, only drawing one softer breath and coming nearer. Her mouth brushed the skin below his collarbone. Then, with the dreamy impatience of a woman too drowsy to dissemble, she pressed closer still.

He twined two light fingers in the curls at her cheek. “My love,” he whispered.

She made a faint protesting sound, as if speech were the height of idiocy in the middle of the night. Her hand moved over him, slow and unthinking at first, then less so as her fingers brushed the rising hardness under the blanket. When she lifted her face, her eyes were not fully open.

“What hour is it?” she murmured.

“Still night.”

Her face dropped until her mouth rested against his. “Good.”

He tilted his chin into her, letting his mouth fall open, and she melted into him. She kissed him, still half asleep and mellow, and whatever remained of sobriety or prudence in him went down at once.

She was languid with wine and weariness, making every touch seem both hypnotic and shameless. When he would have checked himself, she came to him of her own accord, warm and pliant and still more than somewhat drunk. Her leg slid over his as if no argument had ever existed in the world, and she tugged sleepily at his shoulders until he rolled over with her.

He loved her this time with an awe he could not hide and a hunger he could not master. She hummed and sighed, her hands plying him with gentle need. Now and then, she seemed on the edge of drifting off even while clinging to him, then he would move his hand or mouth, and she would return at once with a soft startled breath that made him ache even as he took his pleasure in her.

He had thought the first time their true undoing. It was nothing to this. She came to him with none of the bitterness of their quarrel, only heat, trust, and that fatal half-sleeping willingness which felt more intimate than any spoken vow.

When at last they lay still again, she settled along him with a tired little movement that struck deeper into him than all the urgent tumult before it. This… this was the woman for whom he would lay down his life. Rather, for whom he had already done so, because the aftermath of this night had closed a door on any other path. The threads by which he had clung to Pemberley, his family pride, had already begun to fray beyond repair, and he had snipped another of them tonight.

But Elizabeth was his. England would not see an end to it now. His heart swelled on the thought.

Her hand remained spread over his chest. Her hair lay across his shoulder and throat. He turned his face into it and shut his eyes, smiling there in the dark like a fool too happy to count even one penny of the cost.

XXX

The Reckoning

Darcy woke smiling.

The smile pulled at his face before his eyes opened, before any thoughts clarified in his head, before the room returned except as warmth and rumpled linen and the remembered luxury of not being alone in the bed. He lay still, content with darkness gone to moonlight behind his lids and the soft drag of waking while his body was still pleasantly worn out. Shafts of memory lit one by one, until he was reliving all of it, and joy ran through him with such force that he might have thanked God aloud if gratitude had not seemed too small and too public a thing for what the night had been.

His wife had slept in his arms.

More than that. She had come to him first in anger that turned to passion, and then had come to him again with only drowsy desire, which had seemed more honest than the first. He had gone to sleep with the wild conviction that the world had altered at last into something almost merciful.

He moved his hand across the sheet beside him. Cold linen met his palm.

His eyes opened at once.