Page 35 of Shipwrecked with Mr Darcy

“About my authority.”

“I know.”

“About the fear.”

She was quiet. Her eyes, which had been bright with argument, shifted. The anger left, and what remained was open in a way she had not allowed him to see before.

“Yes,” she said. “About the fear.”

He kissed her.

The kiss was hard and sudden. Two weeks of proximity, three days of watching, one rainstorm, and an argument about a roof. Her insight had broken his composure, and he had closed the distance before he intended to.

She made a sound against his lips — a short, hard exhale. Her hands found the front of his shirt. The ruined linen bunched in her fists, and she held on.

His hands framed her face, her jaw in his palms, his fingers tangling in the salt-stiffened mass of her hair. He kissed her with desperate intensity — the taste of her mouth, the heat of her breath, the pressure of her body against his.

She kissed him back with the same urgent ferocity.

They broke apart, breathing heavily. Her forehead rested against his; her hands were still in his shirt, and his hands were still on her face. He could feel her pulse in her jaw, fast and hard under his fingers, answering the frantic rhythm of his own.

“Well,” she said.

“Well,” he said.

“That was not about the roof.”

“No.”

Her mouth curved into the smile he had observed since their time on the ship—the one that began at the corners and worked inward. She smiled against his mouth. The kiss that followed was entirely different from the first.

It was slower. His hands slid from her face into her hair, cradling her head. Her hands released his shirt and moved to his shoulders, then to his neck. Her fingers found the nape of his neck, and the light touch sent a line of heat down his spine, making his hands tighten in her hair.

She made another sound, quieter and deeper in her throat. His self-control was irreversibly shattered.

He kissed the corner of her mouth, her jaw, and the line below her ear where she smelled of salt and rosemary. His lips moved against her pulse, fast under his mouth, and her hands were in his hair.

She pulled back just far enough to look at him. Her face was flushed, her eyes dark, and her hands remained on his shoulders. Her breathing was unsteady.

“Hertfordshire,” she said.

He blinked. The word arrived from a different conversation, one he had not been having, and his mind, still several steps behind his body, took a moment to locate it.

“You will ask me when I knew,” she said. “I did not know in Hertfordshire. I did not know at Hunsford. I did not know on the ship. I knew when you laughed on the beach after the shipwreck. Your face changed, and I saw a man I had not met before. I wanted to know that man, and the wanting has not stopped. I do not think it ever will.”

He looked at her face in the firelight.

“Hertfordshire,” he said.

“What?”

“You will ask when I knew. I am telling you now. Hertfordshire. At an assembly, on an evening when I had too much pride and not enough sense. A woman I did not deserve stood across a room. I could not look away from her, and I have not been able to look away since.”

“You told Mr Bingley I was merely tolerable.”

“I was lying.”

“You were lying at an assembly in Hertfordshire.”