Page 53 of One Night with Mr. Darcy
“That is what Richard says also. But I cannot help…”
“What?”
“It is only this,you, all of everything that I have wrought with my choices and my idiocy. I would swear I am not this sort of man, you see. I don’t do these sorts of things. The idea that I have a woman with child who I’m doingnothingfor, it’s… I am afailureas a man, Elizabeth.”
She sighed.
“You see? You agree with me.”
“It might have been nice, years ago, if you had swooped in and remembered everything and rescued me,” she said. “I might have liked that very much. But in some ways, I prefer the way it happened, because I was so helpless then. Now, I feel I’ve proved my own resourcefulness and I am more confident in my own abilities to solve my own problems.”
“You have always been resourceful.”
“No, I have not,” she said. “No, when I met you, I was prejudiced and small-minded and I allowed my first impressions of you to color my opinion. I thought it foolish when you said that your good opinion, once lost, is lost forever, but I was exactly the same. If I had not been so set on my opinion ofyou, perhaps I would have… but anyway, what’s done is done.”
“Yes,” he said. “It is done. We can’t go back and change any of that.”
“No,” she said.
Then, for no reason she could fathom, she laid her head on his shoulder.
He let out a huff of air.
She expected him to dislodge her. He didn’t. He put his arm around her instead, and she nestled in against him, a perfect fit.
He sighed, pulling her close.
She peered up at him in the darkness. His features were shadowed, and she could barely make them out, but somehow their gazes met.
“Elizabeth,” he breathed.
“Fitzwilliam,” she said, her voice equally soft.
Then, they were kissing.
The kiss was slow and soft, just the press of his mouth into hers, warm and pliant, and then just the hint of his tongue. But she opened her mouth to him, allowing him access, and soon the kiss became deep and then deeper still, and every time their tongues stroked against each other, it sent thrills of goodness through her whole body.
Somehow, during it, she ended up climbing into his lap. She was straddling him, the skirts of her shift pushed up to bare her knees and calves, their chests pressed so close she could swear she felt his heart beating through his clothes.
His hands roamed over her back, her hips, her waist, urging her closer, smoothing their way over her nightclothes. Everywhere he touched her, it felt like springtime, like he awoke things inside her, like they were beginning to bud, to blossom.
At some point, she moved her hips in such a way, and she felt him.
His male member was very, very stiff.
That went through her in a mixture of sweetness and alarm. She should have pulled away. She should have put a stop to all of it. But she didn’t. She just ignored that she’d felt it, and… and moved her hips against it again. And again. That part of her body, it was sensitive, and driving her pelvis into firm and unyielding things was rather pleasant.
So now, there was a tacit understanding between them. She knew he was aroused, and she was stimulating his arousal.
He groaned into her mouth. His hands migrated to her hips. He seized them and he began to move her against him, his hips rising in time with it.
Stop, said a voice in the back of her head, but not a very loud voice.
But she didn’t stop.
And he didn’t stop either. He found her breasts through her shift, teased her sensitive tips through the fabric, making her body into a tangle of blossoming pleasure as she let out a series of soft and helpless moans.
He kissed her temple. He breathed into her ear, “I want you, Elizabeth.”
