“Certainly not.” His voice was wrecked. “I am merely suffering from an excess of dust in this cottage.”
She laughed. The sound surprised her, a real laugh, full and unguarded, ringing off the stone walls and the conservatory glass. He lifted his head, and he was smiling, and his eyes were bright, and the combination of his smile and his wet lashes and the absurd dignity of his denial.
He cleaned them both with his discarded shirt, and then they lay, her head on his chest and his arm around her and the gray light washing over them both. She could feel the entire length of his body against hers, warm and spent and real.
His hand traced slow patterns on her bare back. She felt him stirring against her hip again, and the knowledge sent a curl of heat through her belly that had no business being there so soon after what they had just done.
“There is more,” she said. It was not a question. She could feel the shape of what they had not yet done, the space they had deliberately left unfilled.
“Yes.” His voice was low. His thumb traced the curve of her ribs. “There is more.”
She lifted her head to look at him. His eyes were dark, steady, wanting.
“I want it,” she said. “All of it. I want to know what it feels like to have nothing between us.” She watched his pupils dilate, felt his hand tighten on her hip. “But not here.”
He went very still.
“Not because I am afraid,” she said. “I think we have established that I am finished being afraid.” She traced the cut on his cheekbone with one finger. “I want it in a bed that is ours. On a night when no search party is coming. When we have time, and warmth, and I can take as long as I want learning the rest of you without worrying that my cousin or my father or a tenant is about to hammer on the door and deliver a homily about the sins of the flesh.”
The laugh that broke out of him lit his face.
“That,” he said, “is the most persuasive argument for marriage I have ever heard.”
“I thought it might appeal to your sense of strategy.”
“My sense of strategy.” He pulled her closer, his mouth against her hair. “I was thinking of something rather less strategic and more urgent.”
“Patience, Mr. Darcy. You have waited ten years to feel something. You can wait a few more weeks to feel everything.”
“I am not certain I can, in fact.”
“Then you will simply have to suffer. I understand you are very good at it.”
He kissed her forehead. The bridge of her nose. The corner of her mouth.
“I am going to marry you,” he said. “At the earliest possible opportunity. I intend to procure a special licence and subject you to the shortest engagement in the history of Hertfordshire.”
“My mother will be beside herself.”
“Your mother will be beside herself, regardless. I believe dogs in the next county will be startled by her rejoicing.”
She touched his face. His cheek, where the branch had cut him. His jaw, rough with stubble. The corner of his mouth where his smile sat.
“My father would have liked you,” he said. “Very much.”
It was, she understood, the highest compliment he knew how to give.
They lay, his body heavy against hers in a way that felt like shelter rather than weight. She ran her fingers through his hair and listened to his breathing slow, and outside the conservatory glass the snow continued to fall, soft and unhurried, and the cottage held them the way it had always held the people who needed it, with patience, with warmth, with the quiet understanding that some storms are not meant to be survived alone.
“We should dress,” she said. “Before they find us like this and the scandal becomes truly spectacular.”
He made a sound that suggested dressing was the last thing on his mind.
“Fitzwilliam.”
“Five more minutes.”
“You sound like my sister Lydia refusing to come down to breakfast.”
