Page 100 of Faceless

“Elizabeth — I would not have us —”

“George.” She had the third button now. She moved to the fourth. “If you are about to tell me you are leaving this room tonight, I would rather you did not waste the breath.”

“I —”

She slid her hand inside his shirt against his bare chest, and the whisper that came after it was unsteady and very quiet and entirely capitulated.

“Perhaps… if we are careful.”

“I am not feeling especially ‘careful,’ and I have no idea how you mean to be, but I shall be satisfied so long as you do not leave.”

He sighed and buried his face in her neck.

Mr Darcy of Pemberley would not have been held in a room he had decided to leave. Mr Darcy of Pemberley would not have been led from the door by a wife with her hand against his chest. Mr Darcy of Pemberley had stood with his hands behind his back and refused to even make small talk where he was disinclined. The man with his shirt open under her hands had been on his way out of her room thirty seconds ago and had now told her he loved her and was not going.

His hands came to her waist, and the last of his restraint dissolved, and he led her to the bed — pushed her, rather, kissing her all the way until her knees met the mattress and he eased her backward.

She pushed the shirt from his shoulders and smoothed her hands against his chest, the breadth and lean shape of him familiar now under her fingers, and then she brought her hand up into his hair.

Her hands had been in his hair before. He had thick hair, wavy, longer at the nape than he ought to have permitted himself. What was new tonight was that she made herself ask the question she had not asked. Was this Mr Darcy’s hair? She remembered Mr Darcy’s hair as fine and rich, straight at the temples and wavy over the crown.

The hair under her fingers was longer, less meticulously groomed, but…

It was not wrong. It was not evidence against.

She was about to bring her hand down again, to find the jaw a second time and verify the run of it, when he caught her wrist.

He did not stop her, exactly. He turned the wrist, very gently, and brought the inside of it to his mouth and pressed his lips there, slowly, once, and then again. She lost the thought she had been about to think. He carried her hand against his cheek and held it for the breadth of a heartbeat together, and laid it down on the linen between them, and turned his attention to her.

What followed, she could not, afterward, have given an orderly account of. The muslin at her shoulder gave way under his fingers. His mouth was at the hollow of her throat. The pins in her hair had gone somewhere — onto the floor, into his palm, she did not know — and her own hair came down around them both.

He was not in a hurry. He was not in any kind of hurry. He had all evening before him, and made it plain. He took her face between his hands and put his mouth on hers and stayed there, and when she came up for breath, he was at the line of her jaw, and then the line of her collarbone, and her shift had come open, and he went lower.

His mouth moved down the slope of her breast without haste, and she lost the thread of whatever she had been thinking. When he closed it over the peak and drew, slow, the pull of it went straight through her — a bright line from his mouth to the low ache between her thighs, so that her whole body tightened around the place he was not yet touching.

He took his time there. Each time he drew on her, the line pulled tighter, until she was wet and clenching on nothing and lifting to meet his mouth. He learned what made her arch and did it again, and then turned his head and gave the other breast the same patient attention, and the ache of wanting him built in her until she had a fistful of his hair and was holding on as though he might stop.

Then he went on, down, the trail of him a line of heat she could have followed in the dark with her eyes closed — across the lower curve of her breast, along the centre of her, his mouth open and his breath hot against her ribs, her stomach, the soft place below it. His tongue found the small hollow of her navel and circled it, and her hips came up of their own accord, asking. He pushed the last of the chemise out of his way and set his mouth below it, at the rise of her, and there he slowed even further, breathing her in, in no hurry at all, while she lay open to him and waited and could not bear how long he was willing to take.

She had been working through an investigation. She could not, for the life of her, remember what its terms had been.

Then his mouth came still lower, and his fingers did something shocking and glorious, and…

Good God!

And then she had no clear thoughts at all. The patient attention moved where she had not known a mouth had business going — his tongue against her now, broad and slow, swirling over the one place that drew everything in her to a single point and teasing it until her vision went white. Her breath went past her entirely. The small of her back arched up off the linen, and his hand was under it, gripping the curve of her backside and holding her to his mouth. His other hand had worked two fingers inside her, curving, moving in time with his tongue, and she could not, by then, think at all.

Her body went where her mind could not follow it. Whatever she did, she did not afterward know. The dark came apart around her, slow and long and shattering, her whole body drawing tight and breaking around his fingers and under his tongue in waves she had no part in deciding, continuing past anything she had been prepared to bear. He brought her through it without hurry, gentling his touch when the crisis was upon her, but not retreating. He did not let her come down too quickly.

When she had come back into herself enough to know that she had a body again, his face was against the inside of her thigh, and his hand was on her stomach, and his thumb was moving slowly, in a small soothing arc, against her skin.

She was not in possession of any thought worth thinking.

He came up the length of her, slowly, and gathered her against him, and pulled the blankets over them both, and put his mouth against her temple and kept it there.

She recovered her wits by degrees, but they were fading as rapidly as she could assemble them. She was warm. She was in his arms, the linen got somewhere about her she did not entirely account for, and his hand was smoothing the side of her ribs while his breath sat at her hair.

He had not finished. She knew that without having to think about it. What he had given himself, while he had been giving her the rest, was a slow, disciplined holding of her that had cost him something she could hear in the way he was breathing.