“I would have called at Longbourn the following afternoon,” he said. “I would have endured your mother's nerves and your father's irony and Mr. Collins's sermonizing. I would have asked you to walk with me, and you would have refused, and I would have asked again the next day, and the next, until you either agreed or told me plainly to stop.”
“And if I had told you to stop?”
“I would have stopped.” His thumb traced the line of her jaw. “And then I would have found a way. Written to you, perhaps. Badly. I am not good with letters. But I would have tried, because the alternative was spending the rest of my life knowing that I had found the one woman in the world who made everything make sense, and I had let her walk away because I was too proud or too afraid to fight for her.”
Elizabeth looked at him for a long moment. The cut on his cheekbone and the stubble darkening his jaw. He looked nothing like the man who had stood in the Meryton assembly rooms and pronounced her merely tolerable. He looked like a man who had ridden into a storm for her, searched through fog for her, held her while she wept, matched his deepest wound against hers, and was now lying in a freezing cottage in his shirtsleeves telling her, with absolute steadiness, that he would have fought for her.
“You would have been terrible at letters,” she said.
His mouth curved. “Abysmal.”
“Long, ponderous paragraphs about your ardent admiration and your struggles against your better judgement.”
“Very likely.”
“I would have hated every word.” She leaned closer. Her lips brushed his. “And read them a hundred times.”
She kissed him.
She felt the moment he understood. The careful restraint that had held him rigid all night dissolved. His arms came around her and pulled her flush against him, and his mouth opened beneath hers, and the sound he made was low and rough and went through her like a flame touching tinder.
She rolled him onto his back.
It was graceless and sudden and she did not care. She was straddling his hips, her shift rucked up around her thighs, her hands braced on his chest, and the position put his hard length against the aching center of her, and they both went still.
His hands had found her bare thighs. His fingers were gripping hard enough to leave marks, and his chest was heaving, and the look on his face was something she wanted to remember for the rest of her life — stunned, undone, desperate.
“Elizabeth.” Her name came out strangled.
“I want this,” she said. Her voice was steady. Her hands were not. “I want you. Not because we are trapped here. Not because propriety demands it. I am choosing this.”
“You do not have to —”
“Fitzwilliam.” She flattened her palms against his chest and felt the hammer of his heart against her hands. “I have spent twenty years being sensible about wanting things. I have been so careful, so measured, so terrified of making the same mistake my mother made.” She rocked her hips against him. “I am finished being careful.”
She reached down and gathered her shift in both hands and pulled it over her head.
The air hit her bare skin, and she shivered, not from cold but from the way he looked at her. His gaze moved over her body with the focused intensity of a man seeing something he had imagined a thousand times and finding the reality so far beyond the imagining that his mind could not encompass it. Her breasts, her waist, the flare of her hips, the dark curls between her thighswhere she sat astride him. He looked at all of it, and the hunger on his face was so raw, so naked, that she felt it in her own body like a physical touch.
“You are staring, Mr. Darcy.” She heard her own voice, breathless but carrying the teasing edge that she could not seem to abandon even now. Especially now. “One might think you had never seen a woman before.”
“I have never seen you.” His voice was rough. His hands slid from her thighs to her waist, spanning it, his thumbs brushing the undersides of her breasts. “And I suspect that everything before this moment has been a very poor preparation for the reality.”
“Flatterer.”
“Honest man.” He sat up beneath her, and the movement pressed him harder against her, and the friction sent a bolt of sensation through her that made her gasp. His mouth found her throat. Her collarbone. The slope of her breast. “Tell me what you want.”
“I want your shirt off.” She was already pulling at it, and he helped her, dragging the linen over his head and tossing it aside, and then she had her hands on his bare chest and she understood why he had been staring. He was beautiful, warm and alive beneath her palms, the muscles of his shoulders and chest hard from riding, a faint trail of dark hair running down his abdomen to disappear beneath his small clothes. She traced that line with one finger and felt him shudder.
“And these,” she said, hooking her fingers in the waistband.
His laugh was strained. “You are going to kill me.”
“Not before you have been useful to me, I hope.”
He laughed again, the sound startled out of him despite the intensity of the moment, and the sound broke some last barrier of formality, of performance, of trying to be equal to the magnitude of what they were doing.
He lifted his hips, and she helped him with the breeches, and then he was naked beneath her and the evidence of how much he wanted her was impossible to ignore. She looked. He watched her look, and the vulnerability in his expression, the flicker of something almost like uncertainty in a man who was uncertain about nothing, made her heart crack wide open.
