Page 91 of Faceless

She heard him swallow again. “You were not? Never?”

“Oh, he was not lecherous or an ogre. I would not have you imagine that. He used to speak only when he could be impressive and stare a great deal in general, largely in disapproval. He disapproved most sternly of me. Remember my poor skills at the piano? And I used to go about with mud on my hems, which was a subject of no small degree of ridicule among some. I suspect I handed him weapon after weapon against me. But it hardly matters now, for I shall never see him again.”

His fingers flexed, almost by force, then went soft. “What became of him?”

“He died.” Her voice went quiet on it. “Or so I understood. Some months before I came here.” She set down her glass. “I should not speak ill of him. He is not alive to defend himself, and it is possible that I understood him rather less well than I thought.”

The thumb on the inside of her knee had gone rigid again. She had thought he might say something, the way he had been saying things all evening — clever, wry, pressing her gently for more and teasing in a way he had never permitted himself to before tonight.

He did not. He withdrew his hand from her leg entirely, leaving it cold. Then he picked up his fork again and went back to the supper that had cooled between them.

Something had shifted. She had heard it without being able to put it down to anything. He had eased back, not in body but in his attention; the easy interest with which he had asked his earlier questions had become a quieter sort of presence, slightly farther from her than it had been three minutes ago.

“He was very tall.”

She said it without knowing why until afterward, when the thought came sharp and absurd and hateful all at once. Not because she had been thinking of Darcy — she had not, not once, not in all these weeks, not in this room, not in this marriage bed.

Darcy was dead. Darcy had not liked her. Darcy would sooner have died a second death than sit mostly naked at a small table in the dark with his hand teasing her inner thigh, asking her about exasperating gentlemen.

Yet something in the stillness beside her, and in the intelligence she had been circling for months without mastering, brushed too near the old outline. She wished, at once and violently, that she had not said it.

He did not answer. His hand did not return to her hand or anywhere else. He continued the supper.

That would not do. He had used touch to divert her, and she was not too proud to do the same. Her free hand slipped over his thigh… and she learned how little of his attire he had managed to assemble. Her fingers tickled the sensitive skin inside his leg. “I find,” she murmured into his ear, “that I have a marked preference for tall.”

He acknowledged that with the courteous brevity of one who had heard her speak. He did not return the volley, and he did not… react to where her hand was.

She set her glass down. “Push your chair back.”

“Elizabeth—”

“Push it back.”

She heard him deciding. Then the clatter of the chair legs on the floor.

She found the arm of his chair in the dark, then his shoulder, and began the awkward business of climbing into his lap without the use of her eyes. It did not go gracefully. Her knee came down first where she had thought his thigh would be and met the hard edge of the chair arm instead, sharp enough to make her hiss and try again; the second attempt put her elbow in his ribs and her hair across his mouth, and still he did not help her or even protest, which she had expected and was determined not to mind.

She pushed herself up and over, and arranged herself sideways across him with her feet drawn up, one heel coming to rest against a part of him that made him shift under her — at which she laughed low in her throat, pleased to have got any response from him at all, and moved it. Her hands went to his chest and found only linen, thin and warm over bare skin. He had put his shirt back on, but that appeared to be all. “You dressed in a somewhat abbreviated fashion.”

“I retrieved the tray. I did not attend a formal supper.”

The whisper was the restrained, dutiful one. The one he had not used with her in some time. He had not put his arms around her either; one hand had come up to rest against her shoulder blade in the way of a host who had received an unexpected guest, and the other was still on the arm of the chair.

“Are you very sure,” she said, against his throat, “that you have not had too much wine? You have gone a little numb.”

“I can assure you —”

She stopped his assurance with her mouth at his pulse, and her hand sliding down inside the linen of his shirt to the warm skin at his ribs and lower across his stomach and lower still to where the linen ended and a great deal more of him began, and she found him exactly where she had thought she would find him — hard already, entirely disarmed, his body honest in a way the rest of him had been refusing to be — and she closed her hand around what she had found, lightly, with no haste, and learned him by slow degrees, the way she had learned the rest of him that night.

She knew a little now of what her hand could do to him. She drew it once along his length, root to tip and back, and the breath he had been holding came apart at the back of his throat, and his hips rose into her grip without his leave. She did it again, slower, closing her fingers when she reached the head of him, already a little wet, and the voiceless moan he made gave her a fair sampling of the depth of his natural timbre. It was, she decided, the most useful thing she had discovered in three months of marriage. His hand at her shoulder blade closed and pulled her hard against him, and the careful host was gone in a single instant, and he was hers again.

But she was not done with him. She gathered her knees up under her and rose, awkward in the dark and not caring, and brought one leg across him so that she straddled his lap, the chair narrow and the position absurd and neither of these things slowing her in the least, and she lowered herself until the heat of her, slick and aching and entirely past pretending otherwise, came down against the length of him where he stood hard between them. She did not take him in. She held herself a breath above, with him pressed hot along her, and rocked once, so that he dragged against exactly where she wanted him, and her own breath went ragged in a way she had not planned for.

“Elizabeth! Oh, God…”

“There you are,” she said into the warm skin of his throat, with some satisfaction, and reached down between them and fit the head of him to her and held him there, just there, at the edge of having him, and gave him nothing more.

His arms came around her properly then, and he gathered her against him in a way that was not restrained in any respect whatsoever, his hands at her hips trying to pull her down onto him. She let him want it and did not let him have it, and turned her mouth to the place under his ear where she had found, an hour ago, that his discipline had its limit, and set her teeth to it, lightly, and he made a sound he had not meant to make.