Page 86 of Faceless

“But I cannot be alone tonight. Not after this. Not with what Lydia thought was love and what it turned out to be. I need…” She stopped. There was a broken sniff, and one hand left his to dash away something from her face. “I need whatever you can give me. Whatever love you are capable of. Not to be left at the door another night. I need you to stay.”

The whisper broke in his throat. “Elizabeth—”

“Do not tell me it is unwise.” Her voice was fraying. “I know the arguments. Tonight I cannot bear them.”

He twined his fingers through hers. There was one way he could justify this to his own conscience. One way he could absolve himself in the morning, if she kept on in this way. He had nothing with which to resist her if she insisted, but there was one thing he had to know. “Do you think,” he asked, “that you could love me?”

She was quiet. He waited.

“I hardly know you. I know your hands. I know—I think I know the shape of your mind beneath the whisper, and what it costs you to say as little as you do. I know how you argue and what makes you nearly laugh, and what you will not say rather than say it wrong. I know that you arranged a hundred kindnesses no one else would have thought to do, and I cannot account for one of them. I am coming to care for the man those things belong to. I cannot promise more than that because there is more of you than I have been given, and I do not know yet what it holds.”

She turned her hands in his, gripping rather than being held. “But please. Let me hold what I have. It is all I have. I cannot discover tonight that it amounts to nothing. Tell me it is not nothing. Tell me that what you have given me is real.”

He could not speak.

Real? He had nearly emptied his emergency accounts and exposed himself beyond any rational measure, and she wanted him to assure her that his love for her was real? He had been loving her since Hertfordshire, since Rosings, since every dark evening at this table when he had rationed himself to six feet and called it sufficient. He could not give her the history of it without the name. But the fact of it… that much he could give her. That much was true without condition.

“My heart beats moment by moment for you. Whatever else is withheld — that is yours. Everything I can give you is yours.”

XXXIV

Not Today

Her hands found his face — the jaw she had traced before, the cheekbone, the brow — and she drew him towards her. When her mouth found his in the dark, she was asking nothing — she was answering.

He kissed her back with everything he had, the whole of his accumulated restraint going at once, and she pulled him closer still, and he came with her without resistance, no argument left in him. Her fingers moved from his face to his coat, finding the lapels, and the deliberateness in it was unmistakable — not urgency but intention, the difference between falling and choosing.

He rose from beside her chair, and she rose with him. He had her against him entirely, both her arms around him, her face turned up. He kissed her throat, the hinge of her jaw, the corner of her mouth. She made a growling, contented sound low in her throat that undid the last of him.

Her hands moved to his coat. The lapels first, then the row of buttons, taking them one at a time. He stood very still and let her. The coat slid back at the shoulders, and she tossed it—heaven only knew how he would find it later in the dark. She went on to the waistcoat and undid that, too. By the time her fingers found the line of his shirt at his throat, his breath had stopped being orderly.

His own hands had been at her waist, not asking for more. They moved now. Along the line of her bodice, the muslin under his fingertips, the warm skin above. He bent and put his mouth where his hand had been — the line where her bodice met her, the small hollow above the bone. She drew a breath he could feel against his cheek. Then she took his wrists, both of them, and brought them around behind her, and put his fingers on the buttons of her gown.

He stiffened. “Elizabeth… are you sure?”

“Yes.”

The buttons gave one at a time. He had not unfastened a woman’s gown in his life, and he did not need to know how. The system was clear enough. Her gown loosened. She let it slip off her shoulders and stepped out of it with little help from him. She had on a chemise and stockings, and his hands found her again at the waist and pulled her into him, and the difference of so little fabric between them was nearly more than he could bear.

They moved together to the bed in the dark he knew by memory.

She was curious this time — not desperate, not passive, attending with her whole intelligent self to everything her hands could tell her. She had her palms on his shoulders and then his chest, exploring him in the most intimate detail. He held very still under it, forcing his breath in… out… in….

“You are warm,” she said, almost to herself.

“You are cold.” He drew her closer, his hands moving over her back, her sides, learning her the way he had before and finding her different this time — aware and needing in a way she had not been the first time, not yielding but meeting him, her hands still moving, asking things he answered with his own.

She found the scar along his ribs — old, from a fall at Cambridge, nothing too serious — and her fingers traced it. “Tell me.”

“A horse. Years ago. It is nothing.”

She traced it again, slowly, as though memorising it, and the gentle attention of it broke him open in a way the hot urgency had not. She was cataloguing him. In the dark, in the only way available to her, she was learning the face and the form she had never been given in the light, and he lay still and let her, and it undid him, every place her hands moved.

Her hands moved lower, and the slow descent of them undid him well before they arrived. When she found him, her fingers came tentative, uncertain of what they had reached for, and the first soft closure of her hand around him drew out the breath he had been holding against his teeth. The whole of him narrowed to that single point of contact, to the light, exploring pressure of fingers that did not yet know their business and were set on learning it.

She measured him as though committing the shape of him to memory, her grip easing and returning, testing his length and his heat with a curiosity that frayed what was left of his self-command, and the labour of holding still beneath her hand took everything he had. She heard the breath go out of him. Her breathing changed, her hand stilled — and then moved again with more purpose. “Does that—”

“God, yes,” he said, quaking before she could finish.