"No. I am -- resolved." She turned toward him on the bench. "Fitzwilliam, I need to tell you something, and I need you to hear it without your gentleman's honor interrupting."
"That is a concerning preamble."
"I do not want to wait."
The words sat between them. The moonlight did not flinch.
"Elizabeth --"
"I love you. I have told you this. You love me. You have demonstrated this in ways that would require a separate letter to enumerate. We are engaged to be married. We will be married in six weeks, at which point we will stand in a church and promise ourselves to each other in the eyes of God, and then we will come home and close a door, and everything that has been building between us since that library will be -- permitted."
"Yes."
"I do not want to wait six weeks."
His breath left him. She heard it go, a sharp exhale that crystallized in the cold air between them.
"I want you," she said. "Not in six weeks. Not on our wedding night. Now. Tonight. In this garden, under this sky, with no one watching and no one knowing and nothing between us but the decision to be together. I want you, Fitzwilliam. I have wanted you since the library, and the wanting has grown untilit occupies every room in my body, and I am done pretending otherwise."
He was very still. She could see the war in his face: honor against desire, propriety against need, the gentleman against the man.
"If we do this," he said, and his voice was rough, "there is no undoing it."
"I know."
"The world would call you -- if anyone knew --"
"The world already thinks I trapped you in a library. Let them think what they will. I am not asking the world. I am asking you."
"Elizabeth." He reached for her face, his hands cradling her jaw, tilting her face up to the moonlight. His thumbs traced her cheekbones. She could feel the tremor in his fingers, the same tremor she had felt in the library at Netherfield, the tremor of a man holding himself back by force of will. "Are you certain?"
"I have never been more certain of anything in my life."
He kissed her.
It began softly, his mouth gentle on hers, and she leaned into the tenderness of it, her hands finding his chest, his shirt-covered warmth in the cold night air. Then his hands slid from her face to her hair, pulling the loose braid apart, and she felt his fingers in the heavy mass of it, and the gentleness deepened into something else: something deliberate, something hungry, something that had been banked for weeks and was now, finally, being allowed to burn.
She pulled at his shirt, freeing it from his breeches, and slid her hands underneath. The skin of his stomach was warm and taut, the muscles tensing involuntarily under her touch, and when her fingers climbed his ribs he groaned into her mouth and pulled her closer, lifting her from the bench onto his lap in a single fluid movement that she had not expected and that made her gasp.
She was straddling him. On a stone bench. In the Pemberley garden. The absurdity of it competed with the intensity for a moment, and she laughed against his lips, a breathless, incredulous sound.
"What?" he murmured.
"This is not how I imagined this happening."
"You imagined this?"
"Do not be smug."
"I am not smug. I am -- gratified." His mouth found her neck, tracing the path he had memorized that first night, and she tilted her head back and let the sensation cascade through her. His hands were at the ties of her wrapper, undoing them with a patience that bordered on cruelty, the fabric parting to reveal the thin cotton of her nightgown beneath.
She shivered. Not from cold. His hands spanned her waist through the cotton, and she could feel every finger, every press of his palm, and the contact was both too much and not enough.
"You are shaking," he said.
"I am cold."
"Liar." He kissed her jaw. "You lie very badly, Elizabeth. It is one of your most endearing qualities."
