Page 30 of Shipwrecked with Mr Darcy

“I am assigning roles based on skill. You are stronger; I have better penmanship. The arrangement is entirely logical.”

He stood and carried stones. She directed their placement with a specificity that would have been maddening in any other context. Here, it was merely characteristic, and he found he no longer minded.

They finished the signal by late afternoon. The pale stone letters stood against the grey sand, each roughly ten feet tall, visible to any vessel passing within a mile.

They climbed the hill to the tower and ate fish and figs by the fire. Elizabeth sat with her arms around her knees, facing the flames. Darcy sat across from her, watching the firelight move across her features, reflecting on their complementary foolishness and their new, honest ground.

She caught him watching, but she did not tell him to look away.

Chapter Thirteen

The problem was his forearms.

Elizabeth had not previously given forearms much thought. They were the part of the body between the elbow and the wrist, generally concealed by shirtsleeves and coat cuffs, and in twenty years of knowing men she had formed no particular opinion about them. They were forearms. They were there.

Darcy's forearms, bared by rolled shirtsleeves and browned by two weeks of sun, were forcing her to revise this position.

He was repairing the cistern, an old stone basin at the tower's base with cracks that allowed rainwater to seep out. He mixed a paste of mud and crushed shells, packing it into the gaps with his hands, using his forearms for the work. Elizabeth sat six feet away, sorting figs into categories—ripe, overripe, and unsalvageable—and was watching his forearms rather than the repair.

She stopped and looked at the figs. One that had been classified as ripe had begun leaking juice onto the stone during her distraction. She dealt with it. She did not look at his forearms again for nearly four minutes. It was a respectable interval, though technically a lie; she had looked twice in her peripheral vision. She refused to examine the technicality.

This had been happening for three days.

It had started with his hands. She had watched him gut a fish with his usual methodical precision and noticed his hands. They were no longer the hands of a gentleman. They were cut, calloused, brown, and competent. Competence, she was discovering, was attractive in ways that drawing-room accomplishments had never been. The discovery was inconvenient, persistent, and refused to confine itself to his hands.

She noticed his back when he hauled water, his shoulders when he climbed, the line of his jaw when he concentrated, and the way he stood at the top of the tower scanning the horizon, his weight on one leg, his hand shading his eyes. He stood in a posture of vigilance, yet he looked exactly as though he belonged there.

She did not want to notice these things. She noticed them the way she noticed the weather: involuntarily, constantly, with increasing specificity.

The island had stripped every buffer between them. In England, clothes did the work of concealment: coats, cravats, and waistcoats. The elaborate layers turned the male body into an abstraction, a tailored outline suggesting a form without revealing it. Here, Darcy wore only a shirt and trousers. The shirt had lost its last button on the fourth day and hung open at the collar. The trousers were torn at one knee. The body underneath was specific and real, present in a way no ballroom had ever permitted her to observe.

She was observing. She wished she would stop. She did not stop.

They slept about four feet apart, or rather three and a half after she moved her pallet that night. She hadn't shifted it again, as that small change was enough to recognize without needing to talk about it. The silence surrounding this was increasing.

She listened to his breathing, noticing its steady and rhythmic pattern indicative of light sleep. She had learned to distinguish between the deeper inhale when he was truly asleep and the shallower breath when he was awake, pretending to be asleep. Each night, she knew exactly which it was. This understanding felt personal in a way that traditional notions of propriety didn't expect, because propriety usually focuses on physical touch and proximity, ignoring how sound can reveal intimate details.

He turned his back when she changed. She had noticed this on the third day, when the salt-stiffened remnants of her dress needed airing. She had wrapped herself in sailcloth while it dried. Darcy had faced the wall with a rigid deliberateness that communicated the effort the turning cost him. He was not indifferent. His rigidity and the careful, disciplined angle of his shoulders made his awareness entirely obvious.

She had noticed the effort. She wished she had not.

The swimming began as a necessity.

Salt built up on their skin, hair, and clothing folds. After two weeks, it became intolerable. The spring was too narrow and cold for a bath; instead, they relied on the warm, private sea, which was always there. They had to wash. It was a clear, practical need.

Elizabeth went first. She waded into the cove in her chemise; her dress was too heavy and likely to drag her under. The water closed around her calves, her thighs, and her waist. The Mediterranean in summer was warm in a way English seas never approached. The water was silky and blue-green. She ducked under, and the salt rinsed from her hair and skin. The relief was so complete that she stayed in the shallows for twenty minutes, floating on her back with her eyes closed.

When she came out, Darcy was not looking. He was at the fire, attending to something that required his full attention. His concentration was turned away from the waterline with a total, deliberate focus.

She dressed. She wrung water from her hair. She told him the cove was clear.

He went in.

She attended to the fire. She had every intention of not looking. Her intention lasted until she heard the splash of him entering the water, and then her gaze moved of its own volition — not her own volition, her gaze's volition, which was apparently an independent quarter with its own designs — and she saw him.

He was waist-deep, his back to her, and his shirt was gone. His body in the water was the body she had been assembling in fragments for three days. It was now whole and continuous, brown from the sun and lean from two weeks of inadequate food. The scar from the shipwreck formed a dark line along his ribs. Water ran down his spine. His shoulders moved as he cupped water and poured it over his head. The movement was simple and unselfconscious. She watched him, and the watching was neither peripheral nor pretended.

He turned towards the open cove, wading deeper. She saw his profile, the line of his chest, the flat plane of his stomach, and the way the water rose around his hips. He dove, surfacing ten yards out, shaking water from his hair. Even at that distance, she could see the efficient way his body cut the surface.