Mr. Darcy Captures a Lady's Heart: A Steamy Pride and Prejudice Variation
Chapter 1
Miss Elizabeth Bennetwas in a country paradise—and her own private hell.
She walked beside the Gardiners along the chosen route for their tour of the Pemberley grounds, observing the vast and natural presentation of the lands from the finest perspectives but seeing none of it. Her thoughts, if the turbulent emotions driving her to distraction could be called thus, were focused on the conversation she had exchanged with Pemberley’s owner moments earlier, the man she had thought she might never see again.
Mr. Darcy.
They had nearly stumbled upon one another near the stables in a manner that made it impossible for either to pretend they had not seen the other. With a curious dread of one caught in the tide, she had greeted him with apologies for trespassing on his privacy even though he was not expected for another day. She could have no reason to remonstrate him. It was his home, after all.
Just like they had before, Mr. Darcy’s actions had disturbed the expected course of her life. This time, perhaps in a bout of retributive justice, they had aimed to humiliate her for wounding their master’s pride.
If his actions had set that course, they had not informed their master of it. Mr. Darcy had inquired after her family, even repeating himself in his effort to provide friendly conversation when he had not expected company and was probably exhausted from his journey. Though it might appear to the most jaded observer that she was parading herself around on his land to torment him, and she did fear Mr. Darcy might think something similar, he was almost if not more tongue-tied than she.
This reaction to her appearance was wholly unique, and Elizabeth could not account for it at all. She had not been rude, but she had not given him any reason to have changed his opinion of her since the delivery of his letter at Rosings Park.
While she had since felt the stirrings of some uneasiness at her own conduct since their arrival at Pemberley—though she was loath to call it regret—she had endeavored to greet him with the civility due his station and their relative circumstances, not with bias. Even had she greeted him with all favor, that did not explain his unguarded reaction. Nothing she had done or said elsewhere could possibly be enough to restore her in his eyes to the esteem in which he had held her before the disastrous proposal, nor had she sought to achieve anything of the sort.
Why had he been so pleasant and so… un-Darcy-like?
She was here.She was here, at his home and within his reach, and he had probably cast himself as a halfwit in his haste to greet her and ruined things. Again.
Was there any man in Derbyshire, in England with all the predisposition and means to succeed in such a venture as marriage as he who could manage to so thoroughly ruin his suit to a lady?
Probably not.
Mr. Darcy called for a change of clothes the second he stepped foot inside the main house, and his tone was abrupt enough to send more than one servant rushing away to tend to his needs. He would not have time to bathe. There was barely time to shed the dusty garment of travel if he was to follow her. She could leave the grounds at any moment. Though he suspected her friendship with the newly married Mrs. Collins was enough to bring Elizabeth back to the county on occasion, despite the suffering it would entail to endure Mr. Collins, he could not count on infrequent visits to distant relations to establish a lasting bond.
No. She could slip into their carriage, roll down the lane into Lambton, and disappear from his life. He had to act now.
His valet, Barnes, was waiting with a fresh shirt, jacket, and trousers. He was dressed in record time and rushed to move at pace with his racing thoughts, using a shortcut across the lawn in the hope that he was not too late.