SHE COULD FEELhim through his trousers, and she felt lit up by the strange promise of him, because he was entirely too large there. She was slightly frightened of the thickness of him, in fact, but she also thought to herself that it must fit, after all, because it wasn’t as if women didn’t birth babies. Besides, some part of her was breathless at the thought of it.
“Not here,” she said to him, looking about at the sitting room. “Come to my bedchamber.”
He kissed her and sighed and she took this as assent.
She pulled free of him to go the door of the room.
He came with her, but he caught her before she could open the door. “Lizzy,” he breathed, and pulled her in against him. He kissed her eyebrow. “Let us think this through.”
She pressed her face into his neck, her mouth into his cravat. “If we think this through, we’re not going to do it.”
“What if I get you with child?”
“Well, don’t,” she said. “You can spill somewhere else, can’t you, and—”
“I cannot marry you yet,” he said.
She sighed, sagging into him. “All right, then. So, we wait? Even though you just said it must be right?”
“It’s right,” he said. “It’s just not prudent.”
She smirked into his cravat.
“Anyway, I owe you,” he said.
“Owe me?” she said.
He guided her to the couch where he had been sitting and he pulled her down with him. He reached down and bunched her skirts up in both of his hands and began to lift them.
“I said I didn’t want it here,” she whispered.
“Yes, and it will only be this,” he said. “My head in your lap, my mouth on you here. Nothing more. I owe you.”
She thought about protesting, but then, she didn’t. She remembered the colonel telling her that Mr. Darcy wouldn’t do this to her.
She felt a stab of guilt again, the guilt of not having mourned the colonel properly, not having waited long enough, and she thought of stopping Mr. Darcy, but then… no. They would wait, then, they would wait to marry, wait to consummate, and that would be her penance, because maybe she enjoyed it too much, having had them both, having been adored by them both in their ways, having been pleasured by them both, having had the chance to evaluate the feel of both of their tongues on her most secret and sensitive of places.
So, she let him taste her, let him tease her, let him pleasure her, there in her sitting room, with the door shut against the servants out there. She let him lift her thigh and pillow his head on the other one and apply his mouth to her, let him take her to heights of sweet and overwhelming pleasures.
When she crested against him, she felt as if some circuit had been completed, as if she had settled here, with this man, and she felt complete and whole.
With Richard, she had craved the security of his commitment to her, but he had offered her nothing but the pleasure, just the pleasure. The pleasure had been good—when is pleasure not good?—but something about it had been empty and fearful in some other way.
There had always been Darcy, though, steady Darcy, with a deep well of this passion in him, waiting to be probed, when it was right, when it was time. She trusted him.
She finally had someone to trust.
CAROLINE DIDN’T KILLher husband because he was plotting a dastardly plan against his family that might have meant the death of everyone from the Duke of Neithern to the Duchess of Neithern and Mr. Houseman. She didn’t entirely approve of his bloodthirsty plan, which he had justified saying that Neithern wasn’t actually the duke and had usurped his rightful spot, but she wasn’t a violent person herself, so she had no intention of hurting anyone, least of all Bishop Sulles.
She had, in fact, full intention of simply standing by and letting her husband do as he would. She was not desirous of stopping him.
Being Mrs. Sulles had its advantages. Her husband was high-ranking clergy, and she found herself enjoying the role of his proper and righteous wife, having everyone look up to her as some paragon of what was virtuous and right. It was a role she felt she had been born for, truly, for she had spent much of her life trying to discover what exactly was the proper way to behave and then embodying it to the best of her ability. Being given leeway to do this, it was everything she had ever hoped for, truly.
Her marriage was not some dreamy existence, of course, but it was tolerable.
The marital activity had gotten, by degrees, more forceful, it was true. This had started after he wanted to see her face when he was at her, which tended to make him more vicious. At first, he only slapped her in places where no one could see, and she told herself it was normal for men to want to swat jigglingareas of women’s bodies, but then, it started creep beyond her buttocks and breasts and thighs and onto her face.
And then it wasn’t just open-faced palms against her jaw or her cheekbone—which hurt badly enough, and made her cry out—well, until she realized that the more noise she made, the more he hit her, and the harder each subsequent hit was, so she stopped—but his fists, pummeling her all over, leaving her bruised and breathless and frightened.
