Page 63 of Shipwrecked with Mr Darcy

He pulled her wet chemise over her head. She was bare in the water, the warm current moving against her skin. His hands found her breasts, his thumbs applying a particular, exquisite pressure. He brought a grave, formal attention to her body that set her blood alight.

She freed him from his trousers underwater. The water made her touch slick and frictionless as she stroked him. His hips moved involuntarily against her hand, and he made a quiet, rough sound against her neck.

“Now,” she said.

She lowered herself onto him in the water. The depth was sudden and immediate. She gasped loudly; there were no stone walls to muffle the sound, and no audience but the rocks and the sky.

She moved against him. The water buoyed her, allowing her to rock her hips in a slow, exceedingly deep rhythm. His hands rested firmly on her hips. His mouth pressed against her neck, just below her ear. The depth and the warmth of the water built a rising tension in her belly, tightening her fingers on his shoulders.

“Louder,” he said against her ear. “There is no one to hear.”

She had not expected that from him. His quiet encouragement unlocked the last of her Hertfordshire restraint—the rigid instruction that noise was improper, and pleasure must be wholly silent.

She abandoned the slow rhythm for something fast and desperate. Her cries carried openly over the water, bouncing off the cove's rocks.

He thrust up into her, sending small waves radiating from their bodies. His hips drove upward while she drove downward. The pleasure arrived with a sudden, crashing force that bent her forward against his shoulder. She cried out his name into the open air.

He gripped her hips tightly. His formidable control finally cracked on a devastatingly deep thrust. He groaned against her shoulder, shuddering violently as he spilled his seed into her.

They lay upon the sand afterward. The late sun slowly dried the saltwater from their bare skin. She picked up the shell from where she had carefully placed it. The interior glowed pink and gold in the fading light.

For the first time in weeks, she was not bracing for loss. She noticed the absence of her anxiety by the sudden, wonderful lightness in her chest.

She had been afraid since the pirate ship. She had feared they would die, and then feared they would not be rescued. More recently, she had feared that the deep happiness she had built with Darcy would not survive their return to England. She had managed that terror quietly and productively, burying it beneath a mountain of daily labour.

She was no longer afraid. The fear had finally stopped, replaced by a complete, peaceful certainty.

She was going to marry Fitzwilliam Darcy, and she would live at Pemberley. She would plant a kitchen garden behind the south wing, and they would have children who would run upon the very grounds Darcy had known as a boy.

Jane would visit. She would sit in the Pemberley garden and drink tea. Bingley would return to her; Darcy had promised to tell him the truth in person, and Jane would finally be happy.

Her happiness was no longer fragile. The roots had firmly taken.

“We should light the fire,” she said.

Darcy turned his head on the sand. His face was relaxed in a way she suspected it had not been since long before they met. He looked much younger, stripped of the heavy responsibilities of Pemberley.

“We should,” he agreed.

“Your masterwork awaits,” she teased gently. “The permanent, green-wood signal fire that you spent all morning building, while explicitly forbidden to stand.”

“It is ready to light.”

“Then we should light it.”

Neither of them moved. The sand was wonderfully warm, and the effort of standing felt quite beyond them.

“In a moment,” she said.

“In a moment,” he agreed.

The sun slowly descended. The light shifted from gold to a deep amber, signalling the arrival of evening.

She stood and brushed the sand from her body. It was a process that was never fully successful, but she had long ago ceased to care.

They climbed the hill together. She knew the path wholly by memory now; every rock and root was as familiar to her as the road from Longbourn to Meryton.

The fire pit was exceptionally well-built. It was a tight stone circle, its gaps packed securely with mud and gravel. The green juniper branches were stacked neatly beside it, covered with a flat stone to protect them from the dew. His thorough competence was visible in every stone; he had done the job properly, because it was the only way Fitzwilliam Darcy knew how to work.