"I have many endearing qualities. You have listed them in writing."
"I will list them again. In person. At length." His hands slid to her hips, then to her thighs, finding the hem of her nightgown. The fabric bunched as his fingers traveled upward, and the first touch of his hand on her bare thigh made them both freeze, the intimacy of skin on skin after so many layers a shock that radiated outward.
"Wait," she said. Not to stop. To slow. "I want to remember this."
He stilled. His hands remained where they were, warm on her skin, and he looked up at her with an expression that she would carry with her for the rest of her life: reverence. Not the kind reserved for saints or paintings, but the reverence of a man who understood, in his body and his bones, that what was happening between them was sacred.
"I will remember every moment," he said. "I have been remembering you since the day we met."
She kissed him. Slowly. Mapping his mouth with hers. Her fingers unfastened the buttons of his shirt, one by one, and she spread her hands across his bare chest and felt his heart hammering beneath her palm, that familiar percussion, that proof of life and wanting and him.
He lifted her. Stood, her legs wrapping around his waist, and carried her the three steps from the bench to the soft grass beyond the gravel path. His coat was somewhere -- he had brought one, she realized, even in his haste, and he spread it on the ground with one hand while holding her with the other, and the practicality of the gesture, the care of it, made something in her chest bloom.
He laid her down on the coat and knelt over her, and the moonlight turned his skin to marble and his eyes to dark pools, and she reached for him and pulled him down.
They undressed each other slowly. Not with the fumbling urgency she had expected but with a deliberate care that turned each piece of clothing into a conversation. Her nightgown, lifted over her head, her arms raised, his hands steadying the fabric so it did not catch on her hair. His shirt, pulled off and discarded, the lean muscles of his chest silvered by the moon. Her stays, unlaced with fingers that had learned the language of laces across multiple encounters and now spoke it fluently. Each revelation was met with stillness, with looking, with the intake of breath that meant I see you and the exhale that meant you are beautiful.
She had expected to feel exposed. She felt free.
"You are extraordinary," he said, and his voice cracked on the word, and she understood that this was as new for him as it was for her: not the act itself, perhaps, but this, the being laid bare before someone who mattered.
"You are trembling again," she whispered.
"I am terrified."
"Of what?"
"Of wanting this too much. Of not being -- of hurting you."
She touched his face. Her fingers traced his jaw, his lips, the furrow between his brows. "I trust you," she said, and meant it with every fiber of her being, and his eyes closed as though she had given him absolution.
He kissed her throat, her collarbone, the curve of her breast, and she arched into the contact, her hands fisting in the coat beneath her. His mouth traveled lower, learning the geography of her body with the methodical attention he brought to everything, and she discovered that the sounds she made were not the sounds she expected -- not elegant or composed but raw, involuntary, sounds that came from a place beneath language.
"Fitzwilliam --"
"I know."
"Please --"
"I know."
He entered her slowly, watching her face, his weight braced on his forearms, his whole body taut with the effort of restraint. There was a moment of pain -- sharp, unexpected, her body protesting the intrusion -- and she gasped, and he froze.
"Elizabeth?"
"Do not stop." She gripped his shoulders. "Do not you dare stop."
He did not stop. He moved, slowly, giving her time to adjust, and the pain receded like a tide, replaced by a fullness that was strange and overwhelming and then, gradually, exquisite. She began to move with him, finding a rhythm that was theirs, that belonged to no one else, and the sensation built in waves, each one carrying them further from the shore.
She laughed once, breathlessly, because his elbow slipped on the coat and he nearly crushed her, and the look of mortified concern on his face was so perfectly Darcy that the laughter was inevitable.
"Are you laughing at me?" he asked, incredulous, braced above her with grass in his hair and moonlight on his skin.
"I am laughing with you."
"I am not laughing."
"Then you should be. This is -- we are -- in a garden, Fitzwilliam. On the ground. There is a bench three feet away."
