“It was a lie, Elizabeth. A cowardly, inexcusable lie. And I have regretted it every day since.”
She lay very still. The fire popped. Outside, the wind had gone quiet, as if even the storm were listening.
She turned.
It required rearranging the blankets, shifting in his arms until she lay facing him, and the movement brought them closer than they had been all night. His face was inches from hers. She couldsee the firelight reflected in his dark eyes, could see the tension in every line of his face, his jaw tight, brow drawn.
He looked like a man who had handed her a loaded pistol and was waiting to see where she aimed it.
“You are telling me,” she said, very carefully, “that the most insulting thing anyone has ever said about me was, in fact, the opposite of what you meant.”
“Yes.”
“That you called me barely tolerable because you found me?—”
“Devastating.” The word left him as if pulled by force. “I found you devastating, and I have not recovered since.”
Something moved through her that she could not name. She reinterpreted every cold look, every stiff silence reread. The proud, disagreeable man who had watched her across rooms and said nothing, not because he disdained her, but because he was afraid.
She should have been angry. She should have deployed the wit that had always been her sharpest defense, should have made him pay for weeks of wounded pride with a remark so cutting he would feel it for years.
Instead, she kissed him.
She did not plan it. There was no decision, no weighing of consequences. One moment she was looking at his face and the next her mouth was on his, her hand finding the side of his jaw, and the sound he made — low, broken, desperate — sent a bolt of heat through her body that obliterated every rational thought she possessed.
He froze. For one terrible heartbeat he was motionless beneath her mouth, and she thoughtI have made a catastrophic mistake.
Then his hand came up to cradle the back of her head, and he kissed her back with a ferocity that stole the breath from her lungs.
His mouth was hot and demanding and nothing like she had imagined a kiss would be. There was no gentleness in it, no polite restraint. He kissed her as if she were the answer to a question he had been asking his whole life, his lips parting hers, his tongue finding hers with a sureness that told her he had thought about this — had lain awake in his bed at Netherfield and imagined this — and the knowledge of it made her dizzy.
She gasped against his mouth and he swallowed the sound, one hand tangling in her loose hair while the other slid down her back, pulling her against him with an urgency that she answered without thinking, her body pressing into his, her fingers curling into the fabric of his shirt.
They were still on the floor, still wrapped in blankets, but the blankets were coming undone, shifting and sliding as they moved against each other, and Elizabeth could feel the heat of his body through the wool with a vividness that made her skin burn. She was naked beneath the blankets. She had been naked for hours, lying against him, and now the barrier between his hands and her bare skin was gossamer-thin and getting thinner.
His mouth left hers and found her throat.
The sound she made was not one she recognized, low, pulled from somewhere at the base of her spine. His lips traced the line of her neck, teeth grazing the sensitive skin below herear, and she arched into him with a shamelessness that should have shocked her. It did not shock her. Nothing about this shocked her. Everything about this felt as inevitable as the first movements of an avalanche.
“Elizabeth.” His voice was wrecked, muffled against her collarbone. “Tell me to stop.”
“No.”
His groan vibrated against her skin. His hand found the edge of the blanket where it had slipped from her shoulder, and he paused. Just one breath, one fraction of restraint, then he slid his palm beneath the wool and onto her bare skin.
The shock of contact ran through her like lightning. His hand was hot, his thumb tracing the curve of her rib, just below her breast, and Elizabeth made a sound that was not quite a word and not quite a plea but somewhere devastatingly between.
His hand moved higher. Slowly, as if giving her time to stop him. She did not stop him. She dug her fingers into his hair and pulled his mouth back to hers and kissed him with an urgency that matched his own.
When his palm closed over her breast, she broke the kiss with a gasp. His thumb brushed across the peaked center. She bucked her hips against him, a movement beyond her control. A blush spread from her cheeks to her chest. His breath caught. She felt him press his hard length against her hip, and the knowledge that he wanted her as desperately as she wanted him, that his body was answering hers with the same blind, unthinking need, sent a flood of heat between her thighs that made her vision blur.
His mouth found her breast.
The blanket had fallen away from her shoulders, and the cool air against her heated skin lasted only a moment before his lips replaced it, warm, impossibly warm, his tongue circling and his teeth grazing with a tenderness that was somehow more devastating than roughness would have been. Elizabeth's fingers tightened in his hair. Her back arched. She was making broken, breathless sounds that she would die of embarrassment about later and she could not make herself care because his hand had slid to her hip and his thumb was tracing the hollow of bone there and every nerve in her body was concentrated on whether that hand would move lower.
She wanted it to.
God help her, she wanted it to, wanted it with a ferocity that frightened her, because this was the wanting she had sworn never to feel, the wanting that had trapped her mother, that had burned bright and then burned out, that had left two people stranded in a marriage of ash and contempt.
