She bit down on her lip, feeling mischievous and permissive as well, and she nodded. She gathered up the skirts of the filmy fabric and tugged it up and over her head.
He sucked in breath through his teeth as she revealed herself to him. Then he stood up, pulling her bare body flush against him, kissed her soundly, and nodded at the bed. “Lie down.”
She did, on top of the covers, hands at her sides, clenching her hands into fists and releasing them as he removed his small clothes and climbed in beside her. He eased his arm under her shoulders, and there was more kissing.
The sensation of her bare skin against his bare skin was something she was unprepared for. It was exquisitely pleasant.
He touched her, too, his fingers finding the sensitive tips of her breasts, spanning her waist, her hips. He brushed his fingers over her upper thighs and then, there, he found the secret center of her and she writhed into the bed as he explored and teased.
When he finally moved over her, their bodies horizontal on the bed, his over hers, she was open and swollen and eager there. He slipped easily all the way deeply inside, and she sheathed him, and she felt—oh, she did not know how to describe how she felt.
It was as if she had been made for him, her body made to encase that part of him. He had been made to enter her, fill her, to… complete her? It seemed foolish, of course. She had not been incomplete before, or she had not thought so, but she felt a sense of completion in their joining, and a sense of finding something that she had not realized she was missing, a sense of being found and connected and tied to him.
It was wholeness, and it was exultant.
After, she did not want to let go of him, and he tucked her in against his body, and she fit in against him just perfectly. They slept in each other’s arms and woke still entwined and warm and connected.
CHAPTER TEN
AT BREAKFAST, SHEwanted to be touching him, still, but it wasn’t proper. They kept finding each other’s gazes, though, and simply staring at each other, both thoroughly distracted from their food or conversation, to the point that Jane and Mr. Bingley were teasing them about it, laughing as they said that they looked like lovestruck fools.
Elizabeth didn’t care if she was foolish. She was in love. She had not entered this marriage in love with her husband, but she was head over heels now, overtaken by it, drowning.
Was it a failing within her that it had been brought about by their physical joining?
She didn’t think so. There had been nothing, well, carnal, about that. It had been something wholly more than that, something spiritual and elevated. She was transported and transformed.
It was only later, when Mr. Darcy was writing a letter in the sitting room and she was sitting on a couch and openly gaping at him, doing nothing at all but admiring the look of her handsome and perfect husband, that she noticed Caroline’s reaction to it all.
Caroline sat on the other side of the room with an open book on her lap, but she was not looking at the book. She was looking at Elizabeth, and then at Mr. Darcy, and then back at Elizabeth. Her expression was drawn, almost stricken.
“Caroline,” said Elizabeth softly. “Let us take a turn around the room, shall we?”
Caroline found her gaze gratefully, setting her book aside. “Yes, that sounds agreeable.”
When they fell into step together, Elizabeth wrapped both of her hands around her friend’s arm, for no reason she could fathom. She only felt she must.
The contact made Caroline’s steps falter.
“Oh, Caroline,” said Elizabeth quietly, quiet enough that no one else in the room would hear them.
“I’m not jealous,” said Caroline forcefully.
Elizabeth’s heart squeezed. “I’m ever so sorry.”
“You have it,” said Caroline. “What we spoke of two nights ago, the, erm, the thing between married couples. How have you suddenly gotten it? What did he do to you, Eliza?” She cringed. “Beth,” she amended lamely.
Elizabeth squeezed her arm. “I was wrong about that. You must call me Eliza, you and only you. It will be your name for me.”
Everything was different now, of course, strange and different and she had not given it thought before, but she was doing so at this moment. She was Mrs. Darcy now. She was someone’s wife. She was part of a couple. She was no longer the singular woman she’d been before, but she would not abandon Caroline even though she could see that whatever their friendship was could not quite compete with whatever she had with her husband now.
No, that can’t be true,she thought.I barely know him. He has incorrect ideas about me.
And yet, it was true, and the thought shook her.
“What did he do to you?” Caroline repeated.
Elizabeth got the urge to snicker, but she stifled it, only smiling too widely. “Lord, Caroline, youknowwhat he did.”
