Page 73 of Yearning

The ecstasy spilled and ebbed and swirled, and she was lost to it until it let her go.

When it was over, she collapsed on his chest. “I suppose you did not yet?”

He cupped the back of her head against him. “Don’t need to.”

“Yes, you do. Give me a moment and I can move against you again.”

“Can we turn back over?”

“Yes,” she said, “yes, brilliant idea.”

So, they did, detaching, and when he pushed back inside her, he slipped in easily. She was so slick and sensitive now. She threw her hands above her head, and he reached down, with a little wicked smile on his face, and lifted her shift to bare her breasts to him. He stared at them and thrust into her, and she watched his face, watching him looking at her, watched him enjoying her.

She felt his ripple against her, and he made only a small noise, and then he looked down at her and his eyes were shining.

She touched his face. “Fitz,” she murmured. “Oh, Fitz.”

“I only… I thought I couldn’t,” he gasped, as a tear spilled out over his cheek.

She caught it on her thumb.

“I thought I wasn’t a man. I thought I wasn’t me.”

“This is not what makes you a man.”

“No, I know that. I feel that. Right now, I feel that. I…” He kissed her.

They slept entwined, holding each other. He had been missing from her life and her bed and her heart for too long.

She was never letting him go now.

CHAPTER TWENTY-FIVE

MR. DARCY SEEMED to be moved to tears daily.

Admittedly, since the accident, tears seemed to come more easily for him, something he had noticed. But he had chalked that up to being rather depressed about it all, to feeling sorry for himself, and these weren’t those sorts of tears.

These were tears of shock and awe and pleasure. He had not expected to have a life like this, and now that he was having it, he had not expected it to be so wonderful.

The first morning that he woke up with Elizabeth curled up against him in his bed, and he remembered everything that had passed between them the night before, he did not wake her, but gazed at her and cried softly and silently.

He would never forget the way it had felt to have her over him, astride him, with his body snugly secured inside the warm, slippery center of her, as she gyrated there, as her long dark hair fell into her face, and the look on her face, that look of her pleasure overtaking her… it had been the most intense and erotic experience of his life. He had felt humbled by it, also, as if it had been some kind of gift from whence he could not say, but bestowed upon him nonetheless, and he had been stunned and awed and pleased.

Then, over her, actually doing it, rutting into a woman, a thing he’d thought he’d never do again, a thing he had actually ceased thinking of, because what was the point of thinking of it? It did not do to drown in self-pity, after all, and every white-lipped man who looked at him was pitying him enough already. He was awash in pity. He did not need to add to it.

So, he had rarely thought of the act, rarely thought of what he was missing, simply had not allowed himself to think of it. He had sort of cauterized that part of him, as if he had lost not just the tip of his prick but the tip of that entire part of himself.

But then, when it was happening and it was all, well, the same—not the same, because it was her—but… there it was, actually, so easy. He had spent so much time acting as if everything was destroyed within him, and in the end, what was it?

He had a fake leg and a cane. And he could not get an erection easily and he could not spend all the time and he could not get a child on a woman, but he…

He’d had her just fine.

All of this, all of the time and the self-denial and the twists and turns and valleys of despair of it all, and it had been for nothing.

And so he cried.

He stayed at her house. He knew he shouldn’t, knew that it was a scandal, that servants came in on them in the same bed in the mornings and that everyone knew, and he decided the damage was done, and he stayed anyway.