Page 50 of Homeless

He put his hands on both her shoulders and turned her straight again. “This will be easier if you stop moving, Mrs Darcy.”

She twirled and stared up at him. “Stop calling me that. You do it precisely to aggravate me, and we both know it.”

“Of course, I do. It is the only leverage I appear to have. Now, stand still.” He turned her to face away from him again.

She sighed and crossed her arms. His fingers were hot against her neck again, and then pulling at the fabric between her shoulders and tugging at her bodice. If she did not know better, she might have feared that he meant to remove the button entirely, he was yanking at it so.

“Ouch!” she yelped after a particularly vigorous snap.

His hands stopped. “My apologies. I thought that if I…” His fingers made one deft little motion in the fabric, and suddenly, her hair came away and fell loosely over her shoulder.

She turned around, feeling for the snarl that was now freed from the button. “What did you do?”

His face had gone entirely red. “I… I unbuttoned your…” He gestured weakly. “You should attend to that.”

Her hand reached over her shoulder. Indeed, her chemise was loose from the second button. That, she could manage alone, now that she was free to turn her head and reach again, so she did.

Darcy had turned abruptly away, and was already walking toward the basin. “Thank you,” she said to his back. He made no reply, so she took up a place in the far corner and tried to light her tallow flame.

The water she had left him to wash in was what had poured into the basin from the jug, which was to say it was used once and cold — the last of the warmth had gone through her own hair, and she had not thought of it until he drew a sharp breath and bit back a curse. It shamed her a little.

She kept her eyes on the flame, and kept them there with great resolve. But then… well, it could not hurt so very much just to see where he was standing. She stole one look — he was stripped to his shirtsleeves with the cuffs rolled past his forearms — and turned back to the candle.

She heard the sound of linen being pulled, and she stole another glance… and then another, and despised herself for each, but could not leave off. What Miss Bingley would have given to see Mr Darcy of Pemberley, now entirely naked to the waist and scrubbing his own skin with his bare hands and a greasy lump of tallow soap! Fitzwilliam Darcy, stripped of the coat and the cravat and the eight hundred small severities by which he was ordinarily made remote, was a tall, hard-used, unreasonably well-made man, sun-darkened past anything she might have ever seen in Hertfordshire.

There was a mark, high on the one shoulder, a pale old line. Probably a relic of his boyhood. She had no notion how he had come by it and was appalled to find she wished to. Heat climbed her throat and sat in her face, and she was glad of the tallow’s poor light for once, because the question her body had begun to ask was so entirely without sense, so wholly beneath the dignity of a rational creature, that she could scarcely credit her own mind for harbouring it.

Why him? Of all the men God had set upon the earth, this one, whom she did not even like; whom two years past, she had been glad to be quit of? This man, whom she had married from calculation and meant to unmarry by the same; a proud, reserved, exasperating man who carried his disapproval before him like a lantern. That her own traitor body should choose, in a stable in Navarre, on a stomach three-quarters empty, to take a warm and unaccountable interest in the line of his back — it was not to be borne. It was not even to be admitted. She set her jaw and turned her eyes to the flame and informed herself, with great firmness and no effect at all, that she was merely tired, and cold, and that fatigue made fools of better women than she.

He turned from the basin, scrubbing his face dry with the coarse cloth, and caught the turn of her head as she was looking away. She was sure he had seen her, blast him, because he made no move to put his shirt back on. He was going to stand there, drying his chest, until chance or circumstance forced her to look his way again. So, she made sure that she would not.

After another moment, she heard the linen going back over his head, and she let the air out of her lungs. Thank Heaven, the man was dressed again. “You may have the bed,” he said, as though he had observed nothing, which was as near to delicacy as she had ever known him come.

Straw was infinitely better than hard floorboards.

It was better than an old horsehair chair, too, because he could at least stretch out and lie horizontally. He pressed his shoulders back into a nest of the straw, wadding another lump of it under his cheek. Indeed, this would do. Man had been sleeping on straw for centuries. It was hardly his bed at Pemberley, but he was depressed to confess that he had slept on worse, and recently.

Twice, something investigated his boot. He kicked lightly, and whatever the thing was thought better of it and went away.

“You are making a martyrdom of it,” came her voice out of the dark.

He lifted his head. “Out of what?”

“The rats. Five pounds says one wakes you in the middle of the night and you soil yourself.”

He lumped some more straw under his hand and rolled to shift his weight. “Spain has made you crass, madam.”

“Spain has made me many things. It is about to make you a chicken-hearted milksop. Are you sure you wish to try your luck with the straw?”

“I have little choice in the matter. There is hardly another bed.” He lay back again. His hip was prodding into the floorboards — a shift and some shuffling and bunching the straw, and he had a decent cushion again. Darcy drank in a breath and put his head back in the pile. He let his eyes drift closed, and for a few seconds, his mind swirled.

A vision arose of dark ringlets twisted around his fingers… a button on her chemise he had to unfasten… her hips bouncing until her skirts flounced against the fall of his trousers as she tested the step of the ladder…

He gasped and rolled over.

“You could ask if the house has another room,” said her voice from the bed.

He buried his face in the straw. “It does not. Go to sleep.”