Page 39 of Shipwrecked with Mr Darcy

“Do you?”

“No.” She considered. “I feel as though I have been walking through a room in the dark and someone has lit a candle. I feel awake. I did not know I was not awake before.”

His hand moved in a slow circle on her stomach. “I did not expect that you would,” he said.

“Would what?”

“Feel guilty.”

“Why not?”

“Because you have never let convention dictate your feelings. You have always done what you believed was right. You feel what you feel, and convention be damned.”

She laughed quietly, looking up at the ceiling. “Convention be damned. Is that the official position of Mr Darcy of Pemberley?”

“It is the official position of Fitzwilliam Darcy of this island, which is a different man, and a better one, and the one I intend to remain.”

She rolled towards him, placing her hand flat over his rapidly beating heart. Her face was close to his, her eyes holding his gaze in the low firelight.

“You have not,” she said. “Finished.”

“No.”

“That seems unkind.”

“It is not unkind. It is a choice. I wanted this evening to be yours.”

She was quiet. Her hand pressed against his chest, then relaxed. The simple contact contained something he could not name, but the feeling itself was sufficient.

“Tomorrow,” she said.

“Tomorrow.”

“I will not forget.”

“Nor will I.”

She put her head on his chest, and he wrapped his arm around her. The fire crackled low. Her breathing slowed against his ribs as she settled towards sleep. He held her, looking up at the stone ceiling. He felt, with a clarity that surprised him, wholly happy.

He was a man on an island holding a woman who had chosen him. That choice was the source of his happiness. The source was simple, yet that very simplicity was the greatest thing he had ever known.

Chapter Seventeen

Elizabeth did not forget.

The day was warm and long, charged with the tension of two people who knew what the evening held. They spent the daylight hours pretending otherwise, though the pretence fooled neither of them. When she passed him a fig at breakfast, his hand brushed hers. The touch was far from accidental. Her body vividly recalled the feeling of his fingers the night before.

She was as practical about her desire as she was about everything else. She had felt it, examined it, and concluded that it was genuine, reciprocated, and permanent. This conclusion freed her from any obligation to agonise over it. The outcome was always going to be this: Darcy's hands, Darcy's mouth, and a decision she made with her eyes wide open.

The decision was not complicated. She wanted him. She had wanted him since the rainstorm—possibly since the raft, and probably since the beach after the shipwreck, when he had laughed and she had seen a man she wished to know. The feeling had grown from mere curiosity into the particular physical need that his fingers had answered the night before. But the answering had not satisfied the need; it had sharpened it. She now knew what his hands could do. The knowledge made her desire keener, and far more urgent.

She had made her choice. The phrasing in her own mind was indelicate, yet wholly accurate. She did not attempt to soften it, for softening was a habit of the world she had left behind. On this island, she was learning to think plainly about plain facts. She wanted this man, and she was going to have him. The act would compromise her in every way that mattered in England, and in no way that mattered here.

They swam in the afternoon.

The cove was warm, the water clear to the sand below. They swam together as they had since the pretence of taking turns had collapsed. Elizabeth wore her chemise, and Darcy his trousers. The wet garments clung to them, concealing very little. Today, the lack of concealment carried a new weight. They both knew exactly what lay beneath the fabric, and that knowledge wholly changed the quality of their observation.

She watched him surface from a dive, water streaming from his hair and shoulders. Her gaze was neither covert nor apologetic. He watched her float on her back, her chemise transparent in the water, the shape of her body clearly visible through the wet linen. His gaze was direct and unreserved. They circled each other in the shallows, close but not touching. The clear, warm water was by no means a sufficient barrier. Their circling was the day's long prelude condensed into movement.