Page 128 of Faceless

“Elizabeth.”

It came out broken — not the whisper he had given her for four months, nor the whisper he had taught himself to maintain since July, but the full voice, ragged at the edges, her name in his open mouth against the skin of her throat where she could hear it properly for the first time. She had gone limp for a few seconds, but now she tightened her legs around his waist and tilted her hips to take him deeper, softer, her body entirely open.

“Elizabeth… my Lizzy!”

Her hand came up and held the back of his neck, and he said it again into her throat, louder. He could not stop saying it.

“Fitzwilliam,” she murmured against his hair. “Darcy. I am yours… make me yours.”

He shattered, and her fingers swept down his back and dug into his flesh, marking him and sharpening every sensation until he could bear it no longer. He collapsed then, his lips pressing reverently at her collarbone, and he was simply on her, against her, in her, with his face at her throat and his breath ragged.

He shifted at last, and she made a whimper of protest, and he laughed against her shoulder and gathered her against him, and they lay there, her hand on his bare chest, the morning light on her face. He could look at her now without permission and without limit. She was his.

“Fitzwilliam?”

“Mm?”

“You are not sleeping on this bed again.”

He chuckled a little. “I did not propose to sleep on it at the present moment. You had other ideas, and as a dutiful husband —”

“My ‘dutiful husband’ had best not cripple himself sleeping on such a mattress. It is genuinely terrible. It is six inches too short for you, almost narrower than your shoulders, and it is lumpy. I do not understand how you have been doing it for four months.”

“I have been managing.”

“You have been enduring. There is a perfectly good bed downstairs.”

He trailed his fingers in a snarl of her hair. “Trust me, I am aware.”

“I shall expect you in it tonight. And I want the chamber lit properly for supper.”

“You shall have both. But what will Mrs MacLeod say?”

“Probably that the laird has finally got round to the business of trying to provide Auchengray with a young master, and that the baroness has a peculiar smile on her face today. But that is just a guess.”

He laughed and pulled her more closely to his side, turning his face to drink in the scent of her. “The rest is beyond my control, but I shall do my best, at least, to keep the baroness smiling.”

She laughed against his shoulder and smoothed her hand over his naked stomach as if it were the most ordinary thing in the world. The only thought he had clearly was that he had been seen, in full, by the only person he had ever wanted to be seen by, and had not been left.

XLVIII

Borrowed Time

She had spent four months listening for him in the dark. She spent the days after the candle looking at him in the light, and what she had been unable to admit to herself while she could not see him, she could admit easily now that she could.

She wanted him more than she had wanted him before.

She had imagined that seeing him would settle some of it — that desire was a thing the imagination supplied where the eye could not, and that having the man in front of her — having Fitzwilliam Darcy, a man she had once sworn never to even dance with — would resolve down into something quieter, more domestic, more proportionate to a wife who had been married since July and had her husband whole.

It had not gone that way. She found her eye on him as it had been on no one in her life. The line of his back at the desk in the morning — Hertfordshire would have read it as stiffness; she now read it as concentration, with the bearing he had taught himself for difficult work — and the work was always going to be difficult, and there was no use complaining of it. She would come into the library and stop in the doorway and find herself for some seconds unable to move forward, because the back of his head over the papers was its own piece of evidence that he was alive and in her house, and the evidence did not yet exhaust itself with repetition.

Oh, and his hands. She had known his hands in the dark for four months. She had not known the shape of them in light — the long fingers, the small scar at the base of the left thumb she had never asked about, the unhurried grace of them on a pen or a book or the back of the dog. She found her eye on his hands a great deal. At supper, cutting bread, at the desk arranging papers, in the library closing a book gently against his thigh before he stood, and her attention on them was a kind of pleasure she had not known she was capable of, and did not see any reason to do without.

She had known he was a man Mrs MacLeod approved of. She had not, until she could see it for herself, taken in the daily grain of it — that he never came into the kitchen without asking and never left it without something said in thanks, that he addressed Mrs MacLeod with the deference owed to a woman who had been keeping this house running since before he came and would be keeping it running long after. She had known he was kind. She had not seen until now what the kindness looked like in the small daily transactions.

She came along the corridor one afternoon and found him with Angus by the window, the two of them looking at something out towards the south wall. Angus was talking, and Darcy was listening, and his bearing said he was being instructed by an expert, and she stood at the corridor’s far end and looked on for a stretch before either of them saw her. She had not, in Hertfordshire, ever seen Fitzwilliam Darcy take instruction from anyone.

He saw her then, and turned, and his face changed — not by much, not in any way Angus would have remarked, but enough that she saw it, and she went on along the corridor to her own business with the small warmth of having been the cause of it tucked into her chest like something she was going to take out and look at later.