She blinked at him. Nodded once, a tiny movement.
He began with the pelisse. His fingers found the fastenings and worked them free with a steadiness he did not feel. The wool was sodden, heavy as chain mail, and it peeled away from her dress beneath with a wet, reluctant sound. He draped it over the back of the second chair and turned it toward the fire.
Her dress next. The laces at the back required him to lean close, to reach around her, and the intimacy of it, his arms bracketingher body, his fingers working the wet cord, made something tighten in his throat that he refused to acknowledge. Not now. Now was survival.
The dress came away and joined the pelisse. Her shift beneath was soaked through, clinging to her skin in a way that revealed the shape of her breasts, the line of her ribs, the flat plane of her stomach. He looked, because he was human and because he could not help it, and then he looked away and clenched his jaw until his teeth ached.
“The shift as well,” he said. “It is wet through.”
She reached for the hem. Her hands would not close. Her fingers were white and waxy, and she made a small sound of frustration.
He pulled it over her head himself.
She was naked in his arms for the second time in twelve hours. The first time, she had been warm and wanting, and her body had curved against his like an answer to a question he had not known he was asking. Now she was ice-pale, her skin rough with gooseflesh, her lips blue, and the only thing he felt was a terror so complete it left no room for anything else.
He wrapped her in every blanket the cottage possessed, the rough wool from the cot, the ones from the storeroom, the one they had lain on together, layering them around her body, tucking them beneath her chin, swaddling her with the fierce efficiency of a man who knew that cloth alone would not be enough.
It would not be enough.
He stripped off his own wet clothing, his greatcoat, coat, waistcoat, and shirt until he was only in his small clothes. Somelast shred of propriety demanded it, though propriety felt absurd when measured against the temperature of her skin. The fire was roaring now, throwing heat in waves.
Darcy sat on the floor before the fire and pulled Elizabeth down into his arms.
She came without protest, without stiffness, without the careful negotiation that had preceded their first night. He arranged the blankets around them both, his back against the side of the chair, her body between his legs, her back against his bare chest, the wool cocoon enclosing them both. He wrapped his arms around her and held on.
Her skin was ice against his heat. The shock of it made him hiss through his teeth, made his muscles tighten with the body's instinctive recoil from cold, but he did not pull away. He pressed closer. Let his warmth pour into her through every point of contact: his chest against her back, his arms around her ribs, his thighs bracketing hers, his chin resting on the crown of her head.
“Breathe,” he told her. “Breathe with me.”
He exaggerated his own breathing and felt her body match his rhythm. The shivering returned, which was good. It meant her body was fighting again, spending energy to generate heat. He held her through the violent tremors that rattled her teeth and made her spine jerk against his chest. And he said nothing, because there was nothing to say that his body was not already saying.
I am here. I am warm. You are safe.
11
THAW
Time passed.Elizabeth could not have said how much.
The shivering eased in stages. First the violence calmed, then the frequency, then the depth, until what remained was a fine tremor that lived in her muscles like an echo. The cold retreated the way it had arrived, by degrees, each one warmer than the last, and in its wake Elizabeth became terribly aware of everything it had been hiding.
His chest against her back. Bare skin. She felt the steady thud of his heartbeat between her shoulder blades, strong and even. His arms were heavy around her ribs, the hair on his forearms rough against her skin.
She was naked in his arms. Again.
But this time was different. Last night she had been aware of her nakedness as a charged absence, the knowledge that nothing lay between them but wool and willpower, the electric potential of whatmighthappen if a hand moved or a blanket slipped. This was rawer. She had been stripped and held and warmed like acreature pulled from ice, and there had been nothing seductive about it, only the blunt pragmatism of survival.
And yet.
Her body, now warmed, did not care about pragmatism. The warmth was him. His skin. His heat. His arms. The last time she had been this warm in his arms, she had been kissing him, arching against him, saying his name in a voice she barely recognized. Her body remembered. The shape of his hand on her breast. The pressure of his mouth on her throat. The hard evidence of his wanting pressed against her in the dark. A treacherous bloom of heat low in her belly that had nothing to do with the fire and everything to do with the man whose chest rose and fell against her spine.
She shifted. Her hip pressed against the inside of his thigh.
His breathing stopped.
She felt the fractional tightening of his arms. And she felt what the movement had done to him, felt the change against her lower back, the same hard pressure she had felt in the dark the night before.
They both went very still.
