"Then kiss me. Not because we were caught, or because honor demands it, or because you feel guilty. Kiss me because I am asking you to."
He kissed her.
It was different from the first time. The first kiss had been a collision, unplanned and violent, the explosion of weeks of suppressed tension. This was deliberate. This was a choice. He kissed her slowly, his hands finally settling on her waist, his mouth finding hers with a tenderness that was more devastating than any urgency could have been.
She melted into him. There was no other word for it -- her body softened against his, her hands sliding from his jaw to the back of his neck, fingers threading into his hair, and the sound she made was not a gasp or a moan but a sigh of such profound relief that it sounded like coming home.
He deepened the kiss gradually, his tongue finding hers with a careful exploration that made her knees weaken, and she gripped his hair tighter, pulling him closer, needing more of him, needing all of him. His hands tightened on her waist, then slid to her hips, then to the small of her back, each movement a question she answered by pressing closer.
"We should stop," he murmured against her mouth.
"Probably," she agreed, and kissed him harder.
The fire crackled. The rain roared. Thunder shook the windows. And in the library at Netherfield, in the same room where everything had begun, they stopped pretending that stopping was something either of them wanted to do.
His mouth left hers and traveled the path it had taken that first night: along her jaw, down the column of her throat, finding the hollow where her pulse hammered. She tilted her head back and felt his lips press against the frantic rhythm, felt his tongue taste her skin, and the sensation was so intense thather hands fisted in his shirt and she said his name in a voice she barely recognized.
"Fitzwilliam."
He groaned against her throat. His hands were moving, learning her, tracing the curve of her waist through the fabric of her gown, and she wanted -- God, she wanted -- to feel his hands without the barrier of cloth between them.
She pulled at his cravat. The linen came loose, and she pressed her mouth to the newly exposed skin of his neck, tasting salt and warmth and him, and the sound he made -- a raw, desperate sound that vibrated against her lips -- emboldened her. Her fingers found the buttons of his waistcoat.
"Elizabeth." His voice was strained. His hands caught hers. "Wait."
"I do not want to wait."
"Nor do I. But --" He pressed his forehead against hers, breathing hard. Their joined hands trembled between their chests. "But I need you to understand what this is. For me. This is not -- I am not a man who does this. I have never --" He struggled. She waited, because his struggle was more eloquent than most men's fluency. "You are not a diversion. You are not a moment of weakness. If we continue, it will mean something. It will mean everything. And I need to know that you --"
She kissed him. Softly, slowly, with all the tenderness she had been afraid to feel.
"It means something," she said against his mouth. "It means everything."
His restraint broke. Not violently -- Darcy did not do violence -- but completely, like a wall crumbling inward, andsuddenly his hands were in her hair, pulling pins loose, letting the heavy mass of it fall across her shoulders, and he buried his face in it and breathed her in as though she were air.
She pushed the waistcoat off his shoulders. He let her. Her fingers found the linen of his shirt, the warmth of his skin beneath, and the first touch of her hand against his bare chest made them both freeze for a moment, the intimacy of it a shock even after everything that had come before.
He was warm. So warm. The muscles of his chest were taut beneath her palm, and she could feel his heart slamming against her hand, as fast and desperate as her own. She spread her fingers, feeling the breadth of him, the reality of him, and something shifted in her understanding of what this was: not a surrender, not a defeat, but a claiming. She was claiming him, and he was letting her, and the trust implicit in his stillness -- in the way he stood motionless while her hands explored him, his eyes closed, his breath ragged -- was the most intimate thing she had ever experienced.
"You are trembling," she said.
"Yes."
"Why?"
He opened his eyes. In the firelight, they were almost black. "Because I have wanted this for so long that now that it is happening, I am afraid I will wake up."
She kissed his chest, just over his heart. He made a sound that was almost a sob.
His hands found the laces at the back of her gown. He paused there, his fingers resting against the fabric, asking.
"Yes," she said.
He loosened the laces slowly, carefully, with the focused attention of a man performing something sacred. The bodice loosened. The fabric shifted, slipping from her shoulders, and the cool air of the library kissed her skin for an instant before his mouth was there, pressing warmth into the newly exposed curve of her shoulder, her collarbone, the swell of her breast above her stays.
She arched into him and stopped thinking.
His mouth traced the edge of her stays, and his hands held her waist, and the combination of his breath and his lips and the slight roughness of his jaw against her sensitive skin was a kind of exquisite torment that built and built without release. She was making sounds she could not control -- small, breathless sounds that escaped her between gasps -- and her fingers were twisted in his shirt, pulling it free from his breeches, needing the feel of his bare skin under her hands.
