She took his queen on the twenty-second move. He barely noticed.
“Checkmate, Mr Darcy.” She sat back in her ridiculous chair and regarded him with an expression that was trying very hard to be modest and failing spectacularly. “I did warn you.”
He stared at the board. He had lost—comprehensively and embarrassingly. He could not bring himself to care because she was smiling.
“A decisive victory, Miss Bennet. I congratulate you.”
“You were distracted, Mr Darcy.”
“I was.”
She waited for an explanation but he did not give one. He rose from the chair, which required a manoeuvre no less undignified than sitting in it, collected the Aesop from the shelf, and left the nursery.
In the corridor, he stopped. He leaned against the wall and pressed his hand to his chest, where his heart was hammering with a violence that chess did not warrant.
She had smiled.At him.Because of him. And for the span of a single game, she had not been afraid or guarded or surviving. She had been alive.
It was the best half hour of his life. Nothing would come of it, and he was going to have to live with that, but still.
He went downstairs and made it through dinner without embarrassing himself in front of his relatives and most of all Elizabeth, who retired early. Then he made it through the port. Richard had returned, and was giving an account of a skirmish that would have been riveting on any other evening. Tonight, it was merely noise. He made it through Georgiana’s gentle interrogation about whether he was feeling well. Apparently, his colour was high, his answers were short, and he was gripping his glass as though it had personally offended him.
He excused himself at ten and climbed the stairs. He entered his bedchamber, closed the door, leaned against it and breathed.
His valet was waiting. Rawson had laid out his nightshirt and was standing by the washstand.
“Leave me.”
Rawson blinked. “Sir?”
“I said leave me. I shall manage tonight.”
Rawson hesitated for precisely one second, then bowed and withdrew. Darcy was left alone.
He did not move from the door. He pressed the back of his head against the wood and stared at the ceiling. His coat felt too tight and his cravat was strangling him. His skin was hot, prickling beneath the linen. His blood was moving too fast, pushed by a heart that had not settled since the chess game. Since the twenty-second move when she had taken his queen and then sat back in that absurd chair and smiled athim. That precise moment, her teeth had released her lower lip, and the world had narrowed to a single point of pink.
That lip.
He pushed off from the door, shed his coat, and threw it across the chair. His cravat followed, yanked loose and discarded. He unfastened his waistcoat with hands that were not steady and tossed it aside. He rolled his shirtsleeves to his elbows, poured water into the basin, and splashed his face. The water was cold and it did nothing, absolutely nothing, because the heat was not on his skin. It was beneath it, coiled low in his belly, spreading downward with a slow, relentless insistence that he could no longer pretend was anything other than what it was.
He braced his hands on the washstand and bowed his head. Water dripped from his jaw. His reflection stared back at him from the basin, distorted by the ripples, and he did not recognise the man in it. He had always been a man of discipline, of restraint. He had held himself in check for weeks, for years, had locked this wanting behind walls he thought were strong enough to contain it.
The walls were failing.
Her lip.Her teeth pressing into it, holding, the flesh whitening under the pressure and then flushing dark when she released. She had done it while studying the board, oblivious, her mind on the game while his mind burned. What would it feel like beneath his own teeth? To catch that lower lip between them, gently at first, then harder, to feel the give of it, the warmth, the small sharp intake of her breath when the pressure crossed from pleasure into sting.
He would soothe it after. His tongue tracing where his teeth had been, slow, tender, tasting the hurt he had made and healing it in the same motion. She would gasp. She would open her mouth to him, and he would take it, deeply, thoroughly, his hand cradling her jaw, his fingers in her hair, and she would taste of tea and defiance. She would say his name.Fitzwilliam. His Christian name in her mouth, spoken against his lips, breathed into him like a secret she had kept as long as he had kept his.
His hands were shaking on the washstand. His breath came ragged, each exhale a shudder. The ache between his legs was no longer an ache. It was a demand, heavy and insistent, pressing against the fall of his breeches with an urgency that left no room for pretence or propriety or the careful fictions he had constructed to survive her proximity.
He turned from the washstand and sat on the edge of the bed, his elbows on his knees, his head in his hands. He should stop. He should think about drainage, about the Pemberley tenancies, about anything that was not the sound she would make if he kissed the hollow beneath her ear, the soft, broken sound he had imagined so many times it had become more real than memory.
He could not stop.
His hand moved to the fall of his breeches. He unfastened the buttons with fingers that fumbled, clumsy with need. He freed himself, and the relief of it drew a groan from his throat so raw it startled him. He was hard, aching, straining into his own grip, and the contact sent a shudder through his entire body.
He closed his eyes. She was there behind his lids, vivid, immediate, devastating. Elizabeth, her chin raised, her eyes bright with challenge.I am not afraid of you.Elizabeth biting her lip over a chessboard. Elizabeth turning to leave the library, his touch still on her wrist. Elizabeth with her hair unbound, as he had seen her that night in the doorway, dark waves falling past her shoulders. In his mind she did not leave. In his mind she came to him. She put her hands on his chest and felt his heart slamming against his ribs, and she whisperedFitzwilliam. Her mouth was warm, her body pressed against his, her breath was his breath, and he was lost.
His hand moved, tight and urgent. He bit down on his own lip to keep from crying out. The pressure built, a gathering storm low in his spine, each stroke pulling him closer to the edge.Elizabeth. Her mouth. Her pulse beneath his fingers. Her neck in the afternoon light. Her laugh, startled and real, escaping before she could catch it. The way she had saidI am not afraid of youand meant it. He had wanted her so savagely in that moment. He could not breathe, and he could not stop. He did not want to stop.