She took his face in both hands and kissed him, and when she pulled back she said, “I want everything. I want all of it. I want to know what it feels like when you stop being so bloody controlled.”
His restraint, already shredded, shattered.
He flipped them. She was on her back and he was above her, the weight of him braced on his forearms, and the sudden shift made her gasp with something that was not quite surprise and not quite need but some fierce compound of both. He kissed her mouth, her jaw, the hollow of her throat where her pulse was hammering. He kissed the space between her breasts, and she arched up into him, her fingers digging into his shoulders.
His mouth found her breast.
The first touch of his tongue against her nipple sent a shock through her that had nothing to do with cold and everything to do with the coiling heat that was building low in her belly, tightening with every pass of his tongue, every scrape of his teeth. She heard herself make a sound she had never madebefore — a low, ragged moan that would have mortified her an hour ago and now seemed like the most honest thing she had ever uttered.
“More,” she said. “Fitzwilliam. More.”
His mouth moved lower. Across her ribs. Her navel. The soft skin below it. His hands were on her hips, holding her still, and she realized where he was going and her breath came sharp and her thighs fell open for him.
His mouth found her.
She cried out. Her hand flew to his hair, gripping hard, and the intimacy of what he was doing was so acute, so overwhelming, that for a moment she could not separate the physical sensation from the emotional one. This was vulnerability in its most literal form. Elizabeth had sworn she would never let a man see the truth of her, lying bare and open beneath the mouth of a man who had matched his wound against hers and found that they fit.
He was not tentative. He was thorough, focused, attentive to every shift of her hips and every catch of her breath, adjusting pressure and rhythm in response to her body's signals with the same fierce concentration he brought to everything he cared about. His tongue traced slow circles against the place where all her nerve endings converged. The pleasure built in waves, slow at first, then faster, then cresting toward something she could feel gathering at the base of her spine like a storm about to break.
This, she thought, and the word rang through her like a bell. This is what I feared. And it is not a trap. It is not the beginning of a slow poison. It is —
She stopped thinking.
The wave broke. She arched off the blankets with a cry that she could not have silenced if she tried, her whole body seizing around the pleasure as it pulsed through her in long, shuddering contractions. His mouth stayed on her, gentling, drawing out every last tremor until she was gasping and boneless and her fingers had loosened their grip in his hair and her eyes were wet with something that was not pain.
He kissed his way back up her body. Her hip. Her ribs. The valley between her breasts. Her throat. Her mouth. She tasted herself on his lips and the intimacy of it was staggering.
“Come here,” she said, and pulled him up to her, and she could feel him hard against her thigh. She kissed him and tasted herself on his mouth and the intimacy of it was staggering, and she thought:I want to know him the way he just knew me. I want to undo him the way he undid me.
She had never touched a man like this. Never taken such liberties. She feared she would make a poor showing, but she would not let fear hold her back again.
Her hand slid down his chest, across the flat plane of his stomach, following that trail of dark hair she had traced earlier, and she felt the moment he understood where she was going because his breath stopped. His whole body went rigid, and his hand caught her wrist.
“You do not have to —”
“I know I do not have to.” She held his gaze. “I want to. Tell me how.”
The sound he made was somewhere between a groan and a prayer.
He released her wrist. She wrapped her fingers around him and felt him jolt at the contact, felt the heat and the hardness of him and the way he pulsed against her palm, and a rush of power went through her that was nothing like the power she wielded with her wit. This was older. More fundamental. The power of a woman who has reduced the most controlled man in England to a single shaking nerve.
“Like this?” she asked, and moved her hand, experimentally, and his hips bucked against her.
“Yes.” The word was barely audible. “God. Yes.”
She watched his face as she learned him. The way his eyes lost focus when she tightened her grip. The way his jaw clenched when she found a rhythm. The way his hands fisted in the blankets and his breathing came in short, harsh gasps, and his control, that famous iron control, came apart thread by thread beneath her fingers.
She kissed his throat. His collarbone. The place where his pulse hammered against his skin. “I want to see you,” she said against his neck. “I want to see what you look like when you stop holding on.”
He said her name as if it were the axis on which the world turned. As if the syllables contained everything he had ever wanted and everything he had ever feared, held in the space of a single word.
“Elizabeth.”
His body arched. She felt him shudder, felt the hot spill of him across her fingers and his stomach, felt the raw, broken sound he made against her throat, and the fierce joy that roared through her was almost as intense as her own release. She had done this.Had held this man in her hand and made him come apart, and the knowledge was intoxicating and sacred and hers.
He lay gasping, his face pressed against her neck, his heart slamming against her ribs. She kept her hand on him, gentle now, feeling the aftershocks pulse through his body, and she pressed her lips to his temple and tasted salt.
“Are you weeping, Mr. Darcy?” she asked.
