Chapter 10
Darcy had meant to speak with composure.
He had meant to say only what honour permitted, and say it with such care that Elizabeth might never feel cornered by his regard.
Yet standing with her in the corridor, with candlelight warming the curve of her cheek and the voices of the others fading toward the music room, he discovered that honour, though perfectly clear in its demands, did nothing whatever to cool the body.
She was so beautiful that evening that it nearly angered him.
Not with the studied brilliance Miss Bingley affected, nor with the glittering polish of women trained to conquer London rooms, but with something softer, warmer, and infinitely more dangerous.
Elizabeth’s gown was simple, her ornaments few, her dark curls arranged with no apparent wish to ensnare him, and still every part of him answered as if she had dressed for his undoing alone.
Candlelight moved over her like a slow touch.
It warmed the milky skin of her throat, found the delicate pulse beating beneath her ear, deepened the flush in her cheeks, and lingered upon her lips, parted after a breath she had not quite mastered.
Darcy knew he should not look lower, but he did.
Only for an instant, only long enough to hate himself for being weak, but long enough.
Her breathing had grown uneven, and the muslin rose and fell with it, the soft movement of her breast shaped by candlelight, ribbon, and shadow until propriety seemed less a safeguard than a torment designed expressly for him.
He imagined, with a force that nearly stole the strength from his knees, the heat of her beneath that fragile whiteness, the living warmth he had no right to consider, the breath that might change if his hand were permitted to rest where his gaze had no business wandering.
He dragged his eyes back to her face.
There was no refuge there. Her eyes were wide and dark, uncertain yet not cold; her colour had risen as if she felt the very look he had tried to master, and the slight tremble of her fan betrayed more than any speech could have done.
They were alone enough for every forbidden thought in him to take shape, and not alone enough for one honest touch.
The corridor seemed too narrow, the candlelight too intimate, the air between them too warm; he could smell roses, beeswax, and something faintly sweet that belonged only to her, and the knowledge that he must stand still, must not reach, must not even let his voice reveal the violence of wanting her, made restraint feel almost indecent.
“Miss Bennet,” he said, and his voice was lower than he intended, roughened at the edges by everything he would not do. “There is something I have wished to say to you...”
Her fingers tightened upon her fan. “Yes?”
The little word entered him like permission, though he knew it was no such thing. Darcy drew breath, felt it catch against the tightness in his chest, and forced himself to speak as a gentleman should, not as the man in him longed to speak.
“You must not be uneasy,” he said. “I ask nothing from you. I would not presume upon your civility, nor upon your presence here, nor upon any kindness you have shown my sister.”
Her expression changed, pain moving across it so quickly that he almost stopped.
“But I cannot let you think,” he continued, lower now, “that my regard ended because you judged me rightly at Hunsford. I deserved your reproof. I deserved more than you gave me. Yet you must know that you are still—”
His throat closed. Dear to me was too little; beloved was too much; desired, revered, missed in every hour since Rosings, was impossible.
“You are still very dear to me,” he said at last.
Elizabeth’s lips parted. The colour in her face deepened, not merely in her cheeks now, but lower, slipping along the exposed softness of her throat until Darcy felt the sight of it like a hand laid against his own skin.
For one reckless instant he thought she swayed toward him.
Not much; not enough that any other eye would have called it movement.
But he saw it, felt it, suffered it—the slight yielding of her body in his direction, the small failure of her breath, the tremor that passed through the fan she held between them like a barrier too frail to save either of them.
His hand, hanging at his side, ached with the wish to steady her again.
Not by accident. Not with the startled propriety of the gallery, when fear and reflex had excused what desire now made dangerous.
He wanted to set his hand at her waist slowly, deliberately, with her eyes upon his and her consent in every breath she took.
He wanted to feel whether she would lean into him this time; whether the warmth he remembered had been no dream of his own disordered senses; whether the pulse fluttering so visibly at her throat would leap beneath his mouth if honour, fortune, and the whole watching world did not stand between them.
He did not move.
“Why,” she said, almost breathlessly, and the single word seemed to touch him everywhere, “you cannot think my opinion—”
“Mr. Darcy!”
Miss Bingley’s voice rang from the music-room door, bright, polished, and fatal.
“Are you coming? Miss Darcy is quite ready to begin.”
The spell broke, but not cleanly. It tore.
Elizabeth stepped back as if the distance had been commanded of her, her lashes lowering, her breath still uneven; and Darcy bowed because he must, though every pulse in him resisted the civility.
The space between them, which a moment before had seemed charged enough to burn, opened again into harmless corridor and candlelight, yet his body had not been informed of the change.
His blood still moved as if she stood within reach.
His hand still remembered what it had not been allowed to do.
“Of course,” he said, his voice once more under command, though only barely. “We are coming.”
He offered no arm. He did not trust himself with even that much contact, not when the brush of her glove against his sleeve might undo the discipline he had spent all evening gathering.
Instead he walked beside Elizabeth into the music room, close enough to feel the warmth of her presence, far enough that propriety remained intact, and carrying within him the unfinished sound of her protest like a promise interrupted at the very edge of being spoken.