“Oh, well, Richard quite had this idea about his prowess, you know, his…” She squirmed. “He thought he was going to be so skilled with me in the bedroom, and he thought you…” She shook her head. “But you’re not actually that way, are you, Fitz?”
“What way?” he said.
She squirmed again. “I wish I had not brought this up.”
“No, you can’t do that, Lizzy, because now I’m very curious.” He leaned forward. “Look, whatever happened in that room with us, you should know that I’m sorry—”
“Oh, do not apologize, because you always are acting as if everything is your fault—”
“Well, I want you at least to understand it’s not some sort of activity I expect from you on some kind of regular basis. Indeed, you never have to do that again.”
“You hated it,” she said.
“Hated it? Are youmad?I definitely did nothateit.”
Her cheeks were turning pink. “All right, but you… now you think of me in this way—”
“I want you constantly, all the time, I am mad with it, and how do we wait a year? Why must you mourn him so long?”
Now, she was smiling again. “Oh.” She rubbed her forehead. “Yes, I should have realized that you wouldn’t have minded in the end. You wanted me after Wickham, after all, you wanted me after everything, you don’t…” She shrugged. “It’s hard to trust men, I think, but you’ve always been different.”
“I want to be different,” he said. “But that should mean that I am respectful and that we wait.”
“Right,” she said. “You wish to wait for your wedding night, I seem to remember.”
He coughed. “We’ll never manage that.”
She lifted her gaze in surprise. “Oh, then. You see, this is proving my point.”
“What point? The thing you were saying that you wished you had not started to say?”
“Yes,” she said. “I think he thought you were… well, maybe I thought it, too. Stifled? Prudish? And it’s just like before, when I thought you were an arrogant prig, and I was wrong. You’re justconcerned with rightness, that is all. You want to do things the proper way.”
“I haven’t been doing anything the proper way since you,” he said, his voice dropping pitch. “But that is why I am so desperately in love with you, you see?”
“Is that why?” she said. “I thought we were leaving the whys behind.”
“I was very desperately terrified of doing things wrong,” he said. “But then… you… it doesn’t seem frightening anymore, just exciting.”
“I think you have me wrong. I am not some wanton adventurous woman in the end, you know. I suppose I get myself into these scrapes somehow, but I truly have some capacity to rein myself in. Truly, I do. It is only… well, you are the least frightening person I know, too, in the end. You make me feel safe.”
“I am glad. I would have it no other way.”
“And no matter what, no matter how much or how far or what manner of thing I do, you are still there, still solid, still mine, and I…” She shook her head. “I don’t deserve you, Fitzwilliam.”
“Elizabeth, it is I who do not deserve you,” he said. He suddenly got up from where he was sitting and crossed the sitting room to her and pulled her to her feet.
She was in his arms in a moment, and she melted into him, and he put his mouth on hers.
She tasted like the wind before a summer thunderstorm, full of the promise of release and fury, but sweet and warm and inviting. He kissed her and she gasped against his mouth, and they staggered here and there until they collided with the wall, his back there, and she was practically climbing him.
She pulled away, out of breath. “This, you see. You are not staid. You have this passion in you, so much of it, a dark, deep, well of it, but you only let it out when it’s right to do so.”
“Then it must be right to do so now,” he said, pulling her close again.
“Yes,” she said. “Yes, it must.”
CHAPTER SEVENTEEN
