The rhythm they found was raw and instinctive, her hips rising to meet his, her nails scoring his back, the bed creaking beneath them. Each stroke drove deeper. Each withdrawal left her reaching for him. The pleasure built differently than it had under his mouth. Slower. More diffuse. Spreading through her whole body rather than concentrating at a single point, radiating fromwhere they joined outward through her belly and her chest and her thighs.
His hand slid between them. Found her. His thumb circled her pearl in time with his thrusts and the dual sensation of him inside her and his touch on the most sensitive part of her body snapped something loose in her chest.
“Fitzwilliam.” She pulled his mouth down to hers. “I love you. I love you and I am not afraid of it any more.”
He drove deeper. She felt the wave building. Felt her body tightening around him. His thumb pressed harder and his hips snapped faster and she could hear him breathing her name against her neck like a prayer.
“Let go,” he said. “I want to feel you.”
The wave broke.
It was different from the first. Deeper. Slower. She felt herself clench around him in fierce, rhythmic pulses and the sound she made was not a cry but a moan, low and sustained, his name drawn out on a breath that seemed to go on forever. She felt it everywhere. In her chest. Her throat. Her eyelids. The place where his body moved inside hers.
He followed her over the edge. She felt the moment it happened. His rhythm shattered. His hips jerked, once, twice, and then he drove deep and held there, and the sound he made against her neck was raw and wrecked and the most honest thing she had ever heard. She felt the hot pulse of him inside her and held him through it, her arms around his shoulders, her face pressed against his hair, and the intimacy of what they had just done settled over her like something sacred.
He was heavy on top of her. She did not want him to move.
“Item four,” she whispered.
He laughed. Breathless and wrecked and beautiful, the vibration of it running through his chest into hers.
“Item four.” He pressed his mouth to her throat. “There are thirteen remaining.”
“Thirteen.”
“I told you. I am thorough.”
“Then I suggest you rest, Mr. Darcy. You have a long night ahead of you.”
They rested in intervals.Brief, tangled interludes of conversation and bare skin that invariably led to one of them touching the other in a way that made conversation impossible.
She learned things about him she had not learned in the cottage. The ticklish spot behind his left knee that made him yelp and swat her hand away. The scar on his shoulder from a childhood fall, which she traced with her tongue until he pulled her up and kissed her senseless. The way his whole body went rigid and his breath stopped entirely when she took him in her mouth for the first time, tentative and curious, and the broken sound he made when she found a rhythm that pleased him was a sound she intended to hear every night for the rest of her life.
He learned her too. Found the place below her ear that made her shiver. The precise pressure on her nipple that tippedsensation from pleasure into something sharper that she craved. He mapped her body in candlelight and then in darkness when the candles guttered out, navigating by touch alone, and the laughter that came with fumbling in the dark was its own kind of intimacy.
They came together again in the small hours. Slower this time. She rode above him, her hands on his chest, learning the angle that made the pleasure bloom brightest, and his hands gripped her hips and his eyes never left her face and when she found the rhythm that sent her spiraling over the edge he sat up and caught her against him and followed her down with his mouth on her breast and his arms crushing her close.
She lost count. Of the hours. Of the times he brought her to the edge and over it. Of the number of items on his list.
“Seventeen?” she whispered in the darkness.
“I may have miscounted,” he whispered back.
She laughed. He kissed the laughter from her mouth. They began again.
Elizabeth layin the wreckage of the bed, sheets twisted around her waist, her husband's arm heavy across her stomach. Pale winter light came between the curtains. The fire had burned to coals. She was warm, though the room was cool, her body humming with a soreness that felt like proof.
She turned her head.
Her husband was asleep. His face was slack against the pillow, his breathing slow, his hair in a state that his valet would find deeply concerning. One arm flung across her stomach. The sheet slipped to his waist, and the dawn light traced the planes of his back, the marks her nails had left on his shoulders.
She reached out and traced the edge of his jaw with one finger. The stubble rasped against her skin. He did not wake, but he shifted, turning toward her touch, and the unconscious movement filled her chest with something so large and so fierce she had to close her eyes against it.
She thought of the cottage. The cold floor and the gray light. She thought of the itchy woolen blankets where she had first felt his hands on her skin and known, with the terrifying certainty of a woman who had spent her whole life running, that she had finally been caught.
She thought of the woman she had been then. Certain that wanting this badly could only lead to ruin.
She thought of the woman she was now. Still defiant. Still sharp-tongued and inclined to argue. But no longer afraid. Not of him. Not of the wanting.
