Page 44 of Yearning

She got up, bringing her uneaten biscuit along. She crossed the room to him, and she stood in front of his chair.

This chair had two wheels in the front, and two in the back—smaller ones, that would allow him to turn corners because they spun round. The one he used outside had only three wheels—two large ones in the back and one in the front.

She was able to get between the two front wheels, and then between his legs, too, and her belly was right there, just there, and he did what he had done that time they were together on the road only a few weeks before. He put his hand on her.

She moved his hand. “Here,” she breathed.

His breath caught as he felt the movement, the babe there.

“Pretend,” she whispered. “Pretend now that she knows it’s her papa and that she is happy to greet you.”

His nostrils flared. He should tell her not to say things like that. They made his throat tighten in painful ways. But the pain, it also floated, rising higher and higher, as if on the surface of water.

She was touching him, now, her hand on his cheek, and then her fingers on his ear. “If it had been us, you would want a boy, of course.”

“I would not care.” His voice was thick.

She traced around the curve of his ear. Her fingers brushed his earlobe.

He gasped. The babe kicked again. He shut his eyes. “If it had been us, if I had been whole, there would have been such things. I would have gone up to the nursery in Pemberley and hand-selected the best of the toys, repaired what I could myself and sent off the rest. I would have learned to play a song on the piano-forte to welcome the babe. Foreverafter, it would have been the babe’s own song, and when the babe was not a babe but a child, I should have balanced her on my knee and played it whilst holding her.”

“Ah, I can see that,” she whispered back. “I can well picture all that. It would have been something. It would have been quite, quite something.”

His breath came out shaky, noisy.

“We should not have even understood how lucky we were, of course. We should have taken it as our due, as everyone does, when good things happen to them. Only those who have lost understand that it is not guaranteed, that it is so very precious.”

He opened his eyes. “We should have been quite, quite foolish and insufferable, I imagine.”

She was smiling. “Quite.”

He leaned forward and pressed his lips to her belly.

She drew in a breath.

He looked up at her. “That was forward of me.”

She nodded. “So it was.” Her finger moved around the bottom of his earlobe. Their gazes met and locked.

He looked up at her lips, her parted and pink lips, and he remembered that he had only kissed them once and he wondered what it would be like to kiss them again.

She was looking at his lips, toying with his ear lobe, brushing her fingertips right over his jaw, his neck, her touches soft and feathery and maddeningly good.

Her body bent, just a bit.

She was coming down to him.

He sat up straighter, honing in on those pink lips of hers, thinking of the warm, sweet press of them, the way it would all splinter through him in waves of goodness, the way it would make him tingle all over to touch her, the noises she’d made, and the way she smelled—she still smelled the same, and it was definitely of lilacs.

But this would not happen. “Lizzy.” His voice was guttural.

“Fitz,” she said, her tone dreamy.

“We cannot.”

Her gaze flitted to his eyes, then to his mouth, then to where he was still touching her belly. She met his eyes again. “Can we not? I think we can.”

“We will not,” he said, quite firm. “We are not the sorts of people who engage in that kind of behavior. I do not kiss the wives of other men. And you will not be unfaithful to your husband. You are too good for such behavior.” But he did not move his hand from where he was touching her.