“Item four?” she whispered.
“Item four.” He was smiling against her mouth, and she could feel the tension in his body. The iron restraint. The effort it cost him to hold still when every muscle was rigid with wanting.
She reached between them. Found him. He was hard. So hard that the skin was pulled taut and she could feel his pulse when she wrapped her fingers around him. The sound he made against her throat was not a word.
She stroked him. Watched his face lose its composure. His hips pushed into her hand and his jaw clenched and a tremor ran through his arms where they braced above her.
“Elizabeth.” His voice was wrecked. “If you continue, this will be over before it begins.”
“Then tell me what you want.”
His forehead dropped against hers. She could feel his breath, ragged and hot against her face. “I want to be inside you. Want to feel you around me. Need to watch your face when I fill you and I want to hear you say my name and I want to spend the rest of my life knowing what it is to be yours.”
Her heart hammered. “Then take me.”
He shifted above her. She felt the blunt press of him against her entrance and her body went taut. Not with fear. With the bright awareness of standing at the edge of something irreversible and wanting to jump.
He read her face the way he always read her. “If you need me to stop. At any point. For any reason.”
“I know.” She slid her hands up his arms. Gripped his shoulders. “I do not want you to stop. I want you to go slowly until I tell you otherwise.”
He pressed forward. Just the tip. The stretch was immediate. Fuller than his fingers. Wider. She inhaled sharply, and he froze, his arms shaking with the effort of holding still.
“All right?”
“Yes. More.”
He sank deeper. Inch by inch, watching her face, reading every flicker. There was a sting. Brief and sharp, a resistance that gave way, and she sucked in a breath and dug her nails into his shoulders and he stopped again.
“Elizabeth.”
“I am fine.” She shifted her hips, adjusting to the intrusion, and the discomfort faded into something else. Fullness. Pressure. The extraordinary, alien sensation of his body inside hers. “It is... strange. Not painful. Just... more than I expected.”
“More?”
“Fuller.” She moved experimentally. Tilted her hips. The angle changed, and the fullness shifted from strange to something that hinted at pleasure, a deep, diffuse warmth that was nothing like the sharp intensity of his mouth but was its own kind of devastating. “Oh.”
“Oh?”
“Do that again.”
He withdrew and pressed back in, and the slow drag of him inside her lit up nerves she had not known existed. She gasped. He did it again. A slow, careful thrust that went deeper this time, and the sound their bodies made when he seated himself fully was real and obscene and perfect.
“Look at me,” he said.
She opened eyes she had not realized she had closed.
His face was inches from hers. Sweat shined on his forehead and his arms trembled and she could see the cost of his restraint in every line of his body. He was holding back for her and it was destroying him and she loved him for it and wanted to wreck him in equal measure.
“I am going to move now,” he said. “Tell me if it is too much.”
“It is not enough.” She locked her ankles behind his back and pulled him deeper. “Stop being careful, Fitzwilliam. I am not made of glass.”
Something broke in his expression. He withdrew and drove forward and the force of it pushed the breath from her lungs and lit up her body from the inside.
“Again,” she said.
He obeyed.
