Page 125 of Faceless

“What?”

He shook his head in awe. “You. I had it half right and half completely wrong.”

“What did you have wrong?”

He traced the edge of her chemise with his fingertips, then dipped down inside to brush the rims of her nipples. They tensed and hardened at his touch, and his own body did something unruly.

“Ah…” Her laugh was a little shaky.

His hands slipped inside to cup her fully. “I had imagined them slightly less… just less.”

She laughed then, properly, and his hands slipped away as she reached up and pulled the last two pins out of her hair and shook her head once. Her hair came down around her face the way he had known it would come down a hundred times in the dark, and he could not move, because for the first time in his life, he was looking at a woman in the morning light who had loosed her hair because she meant to have him, and that woman was his wife.

“You are not moving.”

“Because I… if I move, I may…”

“Not yet, you may not.” She reached for the waist of his trousers and pulled him closer, even as she was fumbling with the buttons of his fall. She got one side and the centre cleanly, and he felt a rush of cool air and the shock of the table edge bumping against him as she pulled him the rest of the way to her. The buttons on the other side followed until his trousers fell slack somewhere over his upper thighs.

He put his hands at her waist again under the loosened gown and drew her to him and kissed her properly, bunching the skirt at her hips and holding her buttocks so he could slide it down to the floor. She lifted her arms around his neck and kissed him back.

He drew back at last and put his hands at the bottom of her chemise. His eyes asked the question his hands were prepared to answer. She nodded once.

He drew it off over her head.

His breath was simply not there. She sat on the edge of the desk with her hair down and nothing on her but the morning, and he had been a man of considerable self-command for twenty-seven years and discovered then that he had never been tested.

“If you do not say something soon, I shall begin to take it personally.”

“You are —” He stopped. “Give me a moment.”

“Take longer than that if you wish. The inspection ought not to be hurried.”

He pulled her close and laughed against her shoulder, a single rough sound that was nearly a sob, and bent to her. The freckle high on her left collarbone. The line of her ribs. The hollow of her throat. He set his mouth to each in turn. Her hand came up and rested in his hair, and stayed there.

“You said all of it. Are you going to inspect all of it?”

“Yes.”

“Should I lie back on your pens and ledgers?”

“In a moment.”

He took her breasts in his hands then, both at once, and looked at her as he did it. He had touched them in the dark on more nights than he could account for and never seen them full and soft and flushed like this. She gasped when his thumbs passed over the peaks, and her head went back, and he bent his mouth to her then because he could not any longer not. He took her in his mouth slowly, the way he had been doing it in the dark, and she made the sound again, deeper, and her hand in his hair tightened.

“Fitzwilliam…”

A shudder trembled through him, and he rewarded her by flattening his tongue and suckling gently. She had only ever called him George in any moment like this, and she said Fitzwilliam now in a voice he had not heard from her, and he set himself to earning the use of it.

When at last he straightened and stripped his own shirt off, she propped herself up on one elbow and looked at him.

He had not been looked at before — not like this, not in daylight, not by her, not with the whole of him laid open to a gaze that took its time. She let her eyes move over him without hurry and without the smallest pretence of modesty, from his face down the length of him and back, frank and deliberate and entirely unembarrassed, and the slow travel of it raised the colour in his face and a good deal else besides. He had spent his life keeping himself out of view. To be examined now, in full light, by a woman who had married him sight unseen and seemed to find the seeing very much to her taste, was an unfamiliar kind of undoing, and his body answered it before he could think better of the matter — rising further under her regard, plainly, so that there was no concealing what her looking did to him.

“You do not disappoint in daylight, Mr Darcy.”

“That is very kind.”

“It is not kindness. It is observation.” Her gaze went over him again. “The shoulders are exactly as advertised. The—” Her eye went lower, and stayed there, and warmed. “The rest of it is rather more than I had been prepared for. Have you been concealing this from me on purpose?”