“I have been thinking about this,” she said against his neck, “for five days.”
“I have been thinking about this,” he managed, his hand sliding from her hair to her waist to her hip, “for considerably longer than five days.”
His mouth moved to the curve of her jaw. The hollow beneath her ear. The line of her throat, his tongue tracing the tendon from collarbone to pulse point, and she arched into him and felt the hard length of him against her thigh and wanted, with a desperation that obliterated every principled thing she had said in the cottage, to have him right here, right now, in this rocking carriage with the winter fields scrolling past the windows.
Her hand slid down his chest. His stomach. Lower.
He caught her wrist.
“No.”
“No?” She was breathless, her lips swollen, her hair half-undone, her body thrumming with want. “Fitzwilliam, we are married. There is no more waiting. I have done all the waiting I intend to do.”
“I know.” He pressed his forehead against hers, breathing hard. His thumb traced circles on the inside of her wrist, and even that small touch sent sparks racing up her arm. “But not here.”
“I recall making a very similar speech in a cottage. You are stealing my principles.”
“I am borrowing them.” He pulled back enough to look at her, and his eyes were so dark they were nearly black, and the hunger in them was staggering, and the fact that he was choosing restraint in the face of that hunger made her want him more, not less. “I have spent five days in London imagining what our first night would be. I have imagined it in detail. In considerable,extensive, thoroughly planned detail. And none of what I have imagined involves the back seat of a carriage.”
“You have a plan.”
“I have a plan.”
“What does this plan involve?”
He leaned forward and put his mouth against her ear. “Everything you asked me to wait for in the cottage. Everything I have been imagining since the moment you told me you wanted it in a bed that was ours.” She felt the gentle heat of his breath on her skin, and his voice, a deep murmur, resonated within her. “I intend to take my time, Mrs. Darcy. I intend to take all night. And I intend for you to be in a proper bed, with candles, and warmth, and nothing between us, and no reason to rush.”
She closed her eyes. Her pulse was hammering so hard she was certain he could feel it.
“You are a very stubborn man, Mr. Darcy.”
“I am a man with a plan, Mrs. Darcy.”
“And if I find your plan insufficient?”
“Then I shall revise it. I am told I am competent at taking direction.”
She opened her eyes. He was watching her with that expression she had first seen in the cottage, the one that was equal parts want and wonder and the absolute focused attention of a man who has found the thing he has been looking for his entire life.
She kissed him once more. A promise rather than a demand. Then she pulled back and moved to her own side of the carriage.
He stayed on his.
The distance between them was perhaps three feet. It felt like an ocean. It felt like nothing at all.
His hand found hers across the gap. Neither of them spoke.
The countryside gave way to the turnpike, the turnpike to the sprawl of coaching inns and market gardens that marked the edges of London. As they neared the city, the roads became rutted and thick with mud, and the carriage slowed to a crawl behind a coal wagon as they joined the traffic on the main road. The streets grew narrower and louder. Hawkers, carts, the clatter of other carriages, the smell of smoke and horse and wet stone. Elizabeth watched London close around them and felt none of it. She sat in the gathering dark with her husband's hand in hers, and the anticipation building between them like a wave that had not yet broken, and she thought: this. This is what I was saving. This is why I waited. Not because I was afraid, but because I knew it would be worth it.
The carriage turned into a quieter square. Lamplight gleamed on wet cobblestones as the carriage arrived.
Darcy's hand tightened around hers.
“We are here,” he said.
She looked at the warm light spilling from the windows, and she looked at her husband, and she said, “Then take me inside.”
17
