“I resent that comparison more than I can express.” But he was smiling against her skin, and his arms tightened around her, and neither of them moved.
14
FOUND AND CLAIMED
They dressed in silence,and the silence was its own kind of intimacy.
Elizabeth gathered her shift from the floor and pulled it over her head, and the wool settled against skin that still carried the memory of his mouth. Her stays were stiff from the hours spent drying in the warmth of the blankets. The fire had burned itself out long ago, the last of the broken chair reduced to fine white ash, and the room was cooling fast. She turned her back to him and held the stays in place, and his fingers found the laces without being asked, threading them through the eyelets with a care that made her throat tighten.
“You are remarkably competent at this,” she said.
“I do not intend to become proficient at removing any other woman's stays,” he said, his voice close to her ear. “Only yours. For the rest of my life. I plan to practice until I am exceptional.”
She looked over her shoulder at him. He was smiling. That smile she had only seen in this cottage, the one that softened thesevere angles of his face and made him look like a man who had been waiting years for someone to make him laugh.
“Exceptional,” she repeated.
“I am a dedicated student, Mrs. Dar— Miss Bennet.”
The near-slip hung between them and the presumption of it should have appalled her. Instead it sent a bolt of heat through her stomach that no dead fire could account for.
She turned to face him, and the laugh died in her throat because he was standing there in his breeches and nothing else, his shirt still on the floor, and the sight of his bare chest in the pale morning light was enough to make her reconsider every principled thing she had said about waiting for a bed of their own.
Mr. Darcy watched her look. He did not reach for his shirt.
“You are doing that on purpose,” she said.
“I have no idea what you mean.”
“Put your shirt on, Mr. Darcy, before I abandon every resolution I made ten minutes ago.”
“Fitzwilliam.”
“What?”
“I thought we had agreed to given names, Elizabeth.”
Elizabeth choked back an exasperated bark of laughter. “Fitzwilliam. Put your shirt on. Now.”
“As my Elizabeth commands.” Mr. Darcy pulled the shirt over his head, and even that was unfair, the way his arms lifted andthe muscles of his stomach contracted, and she turned away with what she hoped was dignity and began wrestling with her gown.
Two days of snow and sweat and the dying heat of a room that now held nothing but ash had reduced it to a wrinkled, stiff thing that bore little resemblance to the walking gown she had put on at Longbourn. She managed the fastenings she could reach and left the rest, draping his coat over her shoulders for warmth. It smelled of him. She did not mind.
He was knotting his cravat when they heard the distant sound of voices, muffled and distant, and the steady crunch of boots on frozen ground. More than one person. More than two.
Elizabeth went to the window. Elizabeth looked through the glass, which fogged with condensation and crusted with ice at the edges. The fog that had blanketed the countryside since yesterday lifted overnight, and the morning beyond was brilliant, with a pale, hard sky and fields blinding white under a winter sun that possessed no warmth but much beauty.
She could make out dark figures moving across the landscape, four or five of them, spread in a rough line, picking their way through drifts that came past their knees. They were searching. She could see it in the pattern of their movement, the way they paused at every wall and hedgerow.
They were sweeping the lower fields in a broad line, working their way across the terrain. They had not yet seen the cottage. In another few minutes they might pass it entirely.
Elizabeth turned from the window. Darcy was watching her, his cravat half-knotted, and she could see that he had heard the voices too.
“My father,” she said. “And Bingley. And Mr. Collins, unfortunately.”
“Then this is the moment.”
“Yes.” She stared at him. “Are you ready for what happens when we walk out that door? There will be no undoing it.”
