Page 45 of Shipwrecked with Mr Darcy

She kissed his chest. She kissed the flat plane of his stomach, where the skin was warmer than on his arms and shoulders. She traced his scar with her mouth, moving gently over the tender tissue. His breath hitched under her lips.

She did not move lower. Instead she pressed her mouth to his jaw, and his arm came around her, drawing her up towards him. She went willingly.

He kissed her with a thoroughness that left nothing provisional about it. Both hands moved over her—her back, the curve of her waist, the length of her spine—unhurried and methodical, as he was in all things. She threaded her fingers into his hair and kissed him back with equal thoroughness and no restraint whatsoever.

They lay together in the ember-light. She discovered the particular sensitivity behind his ear that made his breath catch. He discovered that she made a quiet, involuntary sound when his mouth found the curve of her throat. These were small findings, carefully noted on both sides.

“Fitzwilliam,” she said against his mouth.

“Mm.”

“You are not attending to the Italian novel.”

“No.” He kissed the corner of her jaw. “I am not.”

“The man has apparently stopped proposing. I thought you ought to know.”

“I have already proposed,” he said, his mouth moving to her collarbone. “The matter is settled.”

She laughed quietly against his shoulder. It was, she thought, a thoroughly satisfactory answer.

His hand slid from her waist to her thigh, his fingers finding her with the focused attention she had learned was his hallmark in all things. He was thorough and unhurried. He touched her in the dark, keeping his eyes fixed on her face. She let him watch her.

She came quietly — a slow wave that built through her hips and broke gently. She curled towards his hand, resting her forehead against his chest as she whispered his name.

They lay in silence. His mouth rested against her hair, and her hand lay flat over his beating heart.

“Fitzwilliam.”

“Yes.”

“I said yes.”

“I know.”

“To the marriage. I said yes. I want you to remember that I said it here, in this tower, on this island, before we knew if we would ever leave. I said yes when yes meant this life, not the other one. I want that to be the yes you remember.”

He pulled her closer, wrapping his arms securely around her. His body was warm, solid, and wholly hers.

“I will remember,” he said.

The fire died to embers, and the stars turned through the gap in the roof. She fell asleep against his chest. The last thing she heard was his steady heartbeat. It was the same sound she had listened to for weeks across four feet of flagstone, but it was now heard directly, without distance, and without pretence.

It was the sound of a man who was hers, and the life she had chosen.

Chapter Twenty

Darcy had always considered himself a truthful man. He now recognised this as the particular vanity of a man who lied chiefly to himself, and was therefore never caught.

He had lied to Bingley. It was not a direct lie, nor was it the crude falsehood that Wickham employed. It was the more refined dishonesty of a man who selected which truths to present, and called the selection judgement. He had told Bingley that Jane Bennet's feelings were not engaged. He had spoken with the confidence of a man who had observed Miss Bennet's composure in a ballroom and concluded that the heart beneath it was similarly composed. He had been wrong. Somewhere beneath his certainty, he had suspected he might be wrong. He had told Bingley anyway. The alternative was admitting that his judgement of a woman's heart might be as fallible as his judgement of his own.

The admission had been building for weeks. It built the way the fig trees produced fruit: slowly, invisibly, until the weight was too much and the fruit fell.

Elizabeth was drying figs. The task had become her province. She managed it with the focused determination of a woman who refused to let any edible thing on the island rot while she had flat rocks and sunlight available. She turned the split halves with her fingertips, checking the undersides for moisture. She discarded the ones that had attracted ants with a quick flick, sending the offending fruit into the scrub. Her fingers were stained purple, and her hair was tied back with a strip of sailcloth. She looked like no woman he had ever seen in a drawing room, and like the only woman he wished to look at.

“I lied to Bingley about your sister.”

The words arrived without permission. He had planned to introduce the subject carefully, to build the context, and to frame the explanation with precision. Instead, the words fell out of him like the figs from the branch, dropped heavily by their own weight. Elizabeth's hands went perfectly still over the drying rocks.