She kissed him mid-sentence, swallowing the fear and the fury and the terrible vulnerability, and the kiss was nothing like the tender exploration of the library. It was fierce. It was angry. It was two people who had been fighting because fighting was easier than admitting how much they had to lose.
He froze for an instant. Then his hands released her arms and found her waist, her back, her hair, and he was kissing her back with a desperation that stole her breath, his mouth hard against hers, his body pressing hers back against the garden wall. The stone was cold against her back. He was hot against her front. The contrast was dizzying, and she grabbed fistfuls of his coat and pulled him closer, because there was no closer but she needed to try.
"I am sorry," she gasped between kisses. "I am sorry, I did not mean --"
"You meant it. You were right." His mouth found her jaw. Her ear. The spot below her ear that made her spine dissolve. "I am all those things. I am controlling and proud and --"
"And you are afraid for Lydia because you are kind. Because you care. Because you carry everyone else's pain as though it were your own." She pulled his face back to hers. "You impossible man. Do you think I cannot see you? After everything?"
He pressed her harder against the wall. His hips against hers. His hands framing her face. The intimacy of the position was shocking in the cold night garden, more exposed than the library, more reckless, and the danger of it -- the house twenty paces away, any window a potential witness -- made her blood sing.
"Tell me you see me," he said against her mouth. "Not the pride. Not the mask. Me."
"I see you." She ran her hands inside his coat, feeling the heat of his body through his shirt, the rigid tension of his muscles, the way he shuddered when her nails grazed his ribs. "I have been seeing you since the letter. I cannot stop seeing you. You are everywhere. You are in every room I walk into. You are the first thing I think about when I wake and the last thing before I sleep, and it is driving me mad."
He made a sound against her throat that was almost a growl, and his mouth descended to the neckline of her pelisse, pushing the fabric aside, finding the skin of her collarbone, her chest, the swell of her breast, and she arched against the wall and bit her lip to keep from crying out.
His hand slid down her side, over her hip, and found the hem of her skirt. His fingers brushed her ankle throughher stocking and the contact -- so far from the rest of him, so intimate, so deliberate -- made her gasp his name.
"We are in the garden," she managed.
"I know."
"Anyone could see."
"I know." But he did not stop. His hand traced upward along her calf, the thin barrier of stocking and linen the only thing between his skin and hers, and she was trembling, shaking, her breath coming in fragments that were not quite words.
"Fitzwilliam. We must --"
A door opened in the house. Light spilled across the garden. Mrs. Bennet's voice, calling for Hill, pierced the darkness like a lance.
They broke apart. Elizabeth pressed her back against the wall, breathing hard, her pelisse askew, her heart a riot. Darcy stepped back, his hands at his sides, his chest heaving, and in the thin moonlight she could see the flush on his cheeks, the disarray of his hair, the visible effort it took him to compose his expression into something that would not immediately betray them.
"This is becoming a pattern," Elizabeth said. Her voice was not steady. Nothing about her was steady.
"Being interrupted?"
"Starting things we cannot finish."
He looked at her, and the look was a promise and a warning and a plea, all at once. "We will finish," he said. "When we are married. When there are no doors to open and nomothers to call for servants and no walls to press against because we will have a bed and all the time in the world."
"That is not a proposal. That is a threat."
"It is a promise, Elizabeth. The most sincere promise I have ever made."
She reached out and straightened his cravat with fingers that shook. He caught her hand and held it against his chest, where his heart was hammering like something trying to escape.
"I should go inside," she said.
"You should."
"I do not want to."
"I know." He released her hand. "Goodnight."
"Goodnight."
She went inside. He stood in the garden until his breathing steadied and his body stopped arguing with his conscience, and then he walked to his horse and rode back to Netherfield in the dark, and the night air did nothing to cool the fire in his blood.
