The Unraveling of Mr Darcy
Page 18
“I thought I made you afflicted with some awful physical ailment,” she suddenly remembered, drawing her brows together.
He laughed. “No, no. Nothing about what you make me feel is awful. You unmake me, it is true, and I fought it at first, but there is no fighting you, Elizabeth. You are a force, and you have overtaken me.”
“As have you,” she said. “You have overtaken me.” She bit down on her lip and looked him over. He was only in his nightshirt. “You have no idea the sleepless nights that little patch of hair on your chest has caused me.”
He was surprised. “Truly?” He touched his chest, and then more of him was visible, more of his skin, more of the muscles moving beneath his skin. “I had not thought that would be… appealing.”
She looked down at her palms, her voice a whisper. “Perhaps there is something strange about me for finding it so?”
“No,” he said, and then he was touching her, and his fingers scalded her, waking her body in ways she had never known possible, and all he had done was to draw his fingers over her shoulder and neck. “You are quite perfect. You are… so beautiful.” His voice had gone husky.
“So are you,” she whispered. Bravely, she reached up to touch him too. His shoulder. His neck.
He sucked in breath sharply.
They kissed.
She felt it in her toes, in the hairs on the back of her neck. She felt as if her entire body was on high alert.
He slowly broke the kiss, groaning. “Oh, Elizabeth… what you do to me…”
“What?” she whispered. “What do I do to you?”
“Shall I show you?”
“Yes, all right,” she breathed.
He took her hand and guided it from her shoulder, down over his firm chest and stomach, and then lower still, and she flushed and felt hot all all over, and then… Oh. She could feel him through his nightshirt. He was… hot and thick and hard, and yet somehow so silken. She ran her fingers over him, and she loved the way he felt.
He emitted some kind of strangled sound, halfway between a growl and a plea.
It sent shocks through her.
He touched her face, brushing her hair away, letting his fingers slide down the length of her hair. “I have dreamed of you thus, spreading your hair over your creamy skin.”
She gasped. She supposed he’d never seen her with her hair down. She usually wore it braided to bed, but Jane had convinced her otherwise. She was glad of it now. She licked her lips again.
His face dipped down.
Her eyes slammed shut.
Then he was kissing her, and it was like the day in the woods, the first kiss, the world going away and everything turning to heat and fire, as if everything around them was burning to the ground.
She clung to him, kissing him back, her body tense and ready for something that she couldn’t yet fathom.
His lips left hers.
She opened her eyes to find him looking at her. She tried to speak. Couldn’t. Tried again. “I don’t… I don’t know what to do.” Her voice came out low and scratchy.
He smiled, resting one hand on her cheek. “Are you frightened?”
“No,” she murmured. “Not exactly.”
He kissed her forehead. “Well,” he said in a quiet voice, “we must take off our clothes.”
“Yes, I know that,” she said. She sighed. “It isn’t fair, you know. It isn’t fair, your knowing everything and my knowing nothing.”
“No,” he said. “It isn’t fair. But I promise that inequity will be remedied. Most thoroughly if I have anything to say about it.” And he reached back behind his head with one hand and pulled his nightshirt over his head.
Oh.
He was naked. Completely and totally…
She felt a pleasant ache, tightness coiling in within her. His body was magnificent. She had never seen something so pleasing. The swells and angles of him glinted in the firelight. His wide shoulders, the ripples of his chest and stomach. And lower…
She tipped her head to one side in interest. This was what she had touched. It was hard and thick and long, a little bit curved so that it pointed toward the ceiling. She reached for it again.
Oh. How could something be so soft and yet so hard? It was velvet. It was iron. It was alive, pulsing heat into her palm, and when she moved around him—
He groaned.
She gasped, enjoying the thought of affecting him.
His hands were inside her shift, grazing her waist, her hips.
She sighed. That felt… Oh, that was good. So good.
He tugged at her shift, but had trouble. Shyly, she helped him to remove it, and then they were both bared to the other.
His mouth found hers, and she was lost to his mouth and his hands, stroking him as she was bursting everywhere. Now his hands were on her breasts, and she was moaning, and now they were brushing her thighs, and she was whimpering, and now he had found the center of her and she was…
She couldn’t breathe.
She couldn’t speak.
She couldn’t stay upright. She was slipping—
And he caught her, lying her back on the bed, covering her body with his own. His mouth on hers, his hands between her legs, all of his bare skin against her bare skin, nothing between them at all.
She bucked against his caresses, her mouth open in a silent scream to the pleasure, to the sheer perfection of it. And they were lost there, for how long she couldn’t say, but it was deepening goodness, deepening and swirling and overwhelming. Her eyes squeezed shut—there was nothing in the world but his touch and his lips. And she was gasping and whimpering and then…
It washed over her again and again, assailing her body, taking her under as if she was being tugged down by a tidal wave, drowning in exquisite goodness.
She cried out, burying her face in his shoulder.
And then he was sinking into her—his body inside hers.
All the while, shocks trembled down her legs, and her body was clenching and releasing, clutching at him as he entered her.
She was gasping and he was groaning, and she felt even more lost. She had to hold onto him for dear life in case she tumbled out into the ether.
“I didn’t know it would be so lovely,” she breathed.
“Oh, Elizabeth,” he rasped. “We’ve only just begun.”
And now, they were finally joined, nothing between them, skin on skin, breathing together, their hearts beating in unison as their bodies moved together. It was all building again, that brutal sweetness within her, and she thought she might explode from the joy of it.
And then…
She did.
* * *
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