The grotesque bear rug, the thin aching sound of the violin from the ballroom, footsteps coming down the hallway,the way his collar hugged his neck, an ache in her left foot from when she’d been stepped on by Mr. Collins at the beginning of the night, his lips. An awareness that he despised her, and that there was something about him, something she admired against her own will, that there was something grand about him that she’d never seen in any other man, including Mr. Wickham.
She’d stared at his lips, and then he kissed her.
Simply taking.
Instead of slapping him, she’d let him deepen the kiss… or maybe she had deepened it. His mouth had tasted like strong brandy, iced sherbet, and something that was his own taste, indescribable but tingling and heady.
And then her mother and Lady Lucas had opened the door — quietly enough that in their absorption they had not jumped away from each other, or even realized for a dozen racing heartbeats that they were no longer alone.
Her mother’s screech of joy made them leap apart, “Lizzy! My clever, clever girl! My girl! Ten thousand a year! That is as good as a lord! Bingley is nothing to him!”
And when she looked back at Darcy’s face as he backed away from her, his usually still face had been changed into one full of disgust and loathing.
Lingering on that memory, like a living nightmare, Elizabeth slowly slipped into sleep against Darcy’s chest.
Chapter Three
Darcy slowly woke up. He felt unusually cold, and his first realization was that for some reason he’d slept without any clothes. As a rule, he always preferred to wear some form of sleeping gown in bed.
The cold December light was peeking through an open curtain.
Why was the curtain open — and when had his heavy red damask curtain been replaced by a cheery yellow floral print?
With a start Darcy realized that he had fallen asleep in his wife’s bedroom and not his own.
He sat up pulling a sheet around himself. And looked around, wanting to see Elizabeth.
Hearing him move, Elizabeth’s gaze shot to him from the side of the room, where she’d half opened the ornamented door that hid the water closet.
She was lovely.
Elizabeth had wrapped a light blue wool dressing gown around herself. It clung to the feminine curves of her body, and he could see that she wore nothing underneath the robe. Her dark hair fell down, and there was something startled in her eyes.
As they stared at each other, her face turned a deep vivid red, and she then broke their gaze and looked down.
Darcy swallowed nervously.
He wanted to take her again.
“I, uh, need…” She made a tiny curtsey that caused the dressing gown to flap up and expose the naked line of her legs. Then with a rush she hurried into the water closet.
Darcy stared at the door. He then relaxed back onto thebed, looking at the elaborate scene painted onto the ceiling in a French style. He was not sure if he’d ever actually looked at it, having had little reason to go into his mother’s London bedroom when she was alive, and even less since she had died.
The taste of Elizabeth still lingered on his mouth.
He felt again how he’d pressed her against the bed, and how her dark eyes and dimly lit face looked up at him. The moment he entered her. That feeling of rightness, of perfection, that this was what the world meant, somehow that the reason for his existence was explained by this sensation when he had fully enteredhis wife. That complete sense of peace.
He could hear Elizabeth moving around inside the water closet. This was an unexpected intimacy, in some odd way being aware of a woman being at her toilet was as much a part of their becoming one as the physical joining they had experienced the previous night.
He had been a fool to wait so long to marry.
Darcy had always been determined that he would marry a woman who united all of the virtues that were expected of the Mrs. Darcy of Pemberley with something more, something that was special and that appealed to him in particular.
While Elizabeth had few of those expected virtues, she definitely appealed to him in particular. So lovely. He thought of her how she’d stood there a minute ago, slender and lovely in her dressing gown.
Elizabeth groaned in frustration, there was a mechanical clacking, and then the familiar sound of water flowing from the cistern and into the basin of the water closet that had been purchased from Joseph Bramah when his mother had the bedrooms rebuilt a year before she died.
Darcy grabbed his own robe and wrapped it around himself.
