He stood above her. Breathing hard. His eyes moved over her body with an intensity that should have made her self-conscious but instead made her feel powerful. She watched him unfasten his breeches with hands that were not quite steady, watched the fabric fall, watched his body revealed in full.
She had touched him before. Had wrapped her hand around the hard, hot length of him and felt him shudder apart. But she had not seen him fully in good light, and the sight of him now made her breath catch. The muscles of his thighs. The sharp cut of his hips. His arousal, thick and straining, the evidence of how badlyhe wanted her so blatant that her mouth went dry and her body clenched in a way that was half anticipation and half nerves.
Because this was the part she had not done.
His mouth. His hands. His fingers inside her, his tongue on her. All of that she knew, and her body remembered with a ferocity that made her thighs press together. But the rest. The part where he would be inside her, where their bodies would join completely. She wanted it. God, she wanted it. She had told him so in the cottage with a certainty that left no room for doubt.
But wanting and knowing were different things. And Elizabeth Bennet had always been honest enough to name her fears even when she refused to be governed by them.
He must have seen something in her face, because he did not come down over her. He kneeled on the bed beside her and traced a slow line from her shoulder to her hip.
“Tell me what you want,” he said.
“I want everything.” She caught his hand. Pressed it flat against her stomach. “I want what I asked you to wait for in the cottage. But I want you first. Your mouth. The way you did it before.”
His eyes darkened. “You want to release first.”
The bluntness of it shocked her. Not the word, but the way he said it. Without embarrassment. Without apology. As though her pleasure were a fact to be addressed, the way he would address any other requirement of a situation he intended to manage well.
“Yes,” she said. “I want that.”
He bent his head and kissed her stomach. Her hip. The crease where her thigh met her body, and his breath was warm against skin that was already flushed with heat. She let her legs fall open for him and felt no shame in it, because this was her husband and this was their bed and she had spent five days imagining this.
He settled between her thighs. Kissed the inside of one knee. The other. Worked his way up with a slowness that made her fist the sheets and arch her hips toward him.
“Fitzwilliam. If you are going to be thorough, I would ask that you be thorough more quickly.”
“Patience, Mrs. Darcy.” His mouth found the crease of her hip. “We are on item three.”
“Item three of how many?”
“Seventeen.”
“We shall be here for a week.”
“I see no difficulty with that arrangement.”
His tongue found her.
She stopped breathing.
He had learned her in the cottage. Had mapped her responses with the focused attention of a man who applied himself wholly to whatever task commanded his interest. But the cottage had been urgent, desperate, the pleasure competing with cold and fear and the knowledge that someone might come. Here he was unhurried. Here he was meticulous. His tongue stroked her in slow, deliberate passes, flat and warm, finding the swollen bud of her pleasure and circling it until her hips lifted off the bed.
He pinned her down. One arm across her hips, his hand spread wide against her stomach, holding her still while his mouth worked. The restraint of it made the pleasure more intense. She could not move, could not direct him, could only receive what he gave, and what he gave was relentless.
She heard the sounds she was making and did not recognize them. Low, guttural, animal sounds that bore no resemblance to the woman who had sat across from him at supper an hour ago making conversation about coal wagons. His tongue pressed harder. Found a rhythm. Held it. Two fingers slid inside her and curved upward and the dual sensation of his mouth on her pearl and his fingers stroking that secret place within sent the pleasure spiraling beyond anything she had known in the cottage.
“There.” The word came out broken. “Right there. Do not stop.”
He did not stop.
The wave built. She could feel it gathering at the base of her spine, coiling tighter with every stroke of his tongue, and his fingers were moving inside her, stretching her, and some distant part of her mind registered that he was preparing her body for what came next and the tenderness of that made her eyes burn even as the pleasure climbed higher.
She shattered.
The orgasm tore through her in fierce, clenching pulses that bowed her spine off the bed. She cried out. His name. Not Mr. Darcy. Fitzwilliam. The sound of it filled the room, and he stayed with her, his mouth softening but not withdrawing, drawing out every last tremor until she was gasping and boneless and her hand had gone slack in his hair.
He kissed his way up her body. Stomach. Ribs. The valley between her breasts. Her throat. The corner of her jaw. Her mouth, and she tasted herself on his lips and the intimacy of it cracked something open in her chest that she did not try to close.
