Page 77 of Homeless

Anger flashed up through her so violently that she was obliged to put her free hand against his shoulder simply to keep from losing balance. The cloth there was warm from him. Hard muscle shifted under her palm.

“You imagine a great deal! After weeks of being forced together, you hardly know me at all.”

Her wrist was captured against his chest now, and she could feel the thumping of his heart at the backs of her fingers. “Do I not? I know how your breathing changes when you are lying. I know how you lean into me in a crowd and deny it the next instant. I know when you are angry and when you are frightened. I know how you watch my mouth when you mean to quarrel harder, not because you are right but because you cannot bear to be wrong. And I know that if I let go of your wrist now, you will not step back.”

Her heart gave one great, hard blow. “You are the most provoking man in Europe.” “Quite possibly.”

“And if I hated you a little less, I might kill you.”

“If you hated me more, you might match my sentiments.”

She shoved at his shoulder. He caught that hand, too. Now he had both. She should have twisted them, pulled free. Instead, she stood before him, breathing wine into the narrow space between them and glaring up into his face as if fury could still do the work distance had failed to manage.

“Let me go.”

“If I thought you meant to leave, I would.”

The pulse in her wrists hammered helplessly under his fingers.

“Well?” His gaze dropped to her mouth once more. “Are you going, or shall I keep arguing with you by whatever means I may?”

She rose on the last of her temper and kissed him.

XXIX

Shattered

It was not tentative. It was not sweet. It was the answer that remained to her because speech had become too weak a weapon. His hands released her wrists only to come to her waist and drag her against him with a violence that made the whole of her go hot at once. She had meant to rebuke him with her mouth. She found herself opening to him instead.

He lifted his head only enough to speak. “I will have you note that you kissed me first.”

“You had grown intolerable, so I closed your mouth.” She caught him by his collar and pulled him down again. This time, his hand slid from her waist to the small of her back and held her there. The contact drew such a fierce, involuntary answer from her that she bit his lower lip in retaliation. He made a low growl in his throat that set her blood running faster.

“There,” she said against his mouth. “You see what comes of provoking me.”

“If this is punishment, I shall argue with you to my dying breath.”

She laughed, but the laugh broke and turned into a gasp because his mouth had gone to her throat. The movement was small. Its effect was not. Weeks of looking away, enduring, pretending, sleeping half a yard from him, hearing him breathe in dark rooms, feeling his hand at her waist only long enough to steady her over mud or stone or crowds — all of it came back in one long, unbearable wave.

He found the place below her ear that made her scalp catch fire and her body turn to shivers, and stayed there. Her fingers dug into his shoulders.

“Mr Darcy, you are seducing me on purpose.”

“I am.”

The shamelessness of the answer shocked another giddy, drunken laugh out of her, and then he stole her breath again, because he had moved one hand to the back of her neck and was flicking his tongue along the hollow under her jaw as if he had a right to the pulse there.

She caught a fistful of his shirt and pushed. He struck the bedpost, tilted sideways, and pulled her with him as he fell. They were still arguing, but in fragments now, half-words, muttered contradictions, small furious noises that turned to kissing before any of them made sense.

His waistcoat was in her way, and she tore it off his shoulders. Her gown and petticoat met with similar treatment, and he ripped at least two buttons off in the process. Her hands were at his shoulders, pressing into the muscle and heat of him until he sat up on the edge of the bed.

He looked down at her from there, his gaze swallowing her whole as his fingertips traced the curve of her left breast through her chemise. His chest was heaving, hair disordered, mouth altered past civility, hands teasing her as if daring her to continue. The sight near undid her.

“Well,” he said, breathing hard, “you have brought me to heel. Are you satisfied?”

She moved between his knees. “Not in the least.”

His hands came round her. She had one sharp moment of clarity before the fall — this was the true disaster, not the bad wine or the road they could not take or the papers they could not find, but the simple fact of being taken hold of by him and wanting more of it. Then his mouth was at the hollow of her throat, then lower, and thinking had very little say left in the matter.