Chapter 12 #2
Lydia scrunched up her nose. “Even Herb, who should stay covered, shows off his man-boobs.”
Elizabeth opened her mouth to berate Lydia, but her stepmother, who hadn’t even seen Darcy, beat her to it.
“Someday you’ll find out that you can’t judge a man or a woman by what they’ve tattooed on their skin, parked in their garage, or put on or taken off their bodies.
” Barbara, her sunglasses perched at the end of her nose, glared at her daughter.
“Mr. Darcy might not be your dream date, but he is an awfully gracious host to welcome us all here. And Charles is a lucky man to have his friendship.”
Barbara tore her eyes away from Lydia’s glare and looked at Elizabeth. Her sculpted eyebrows arched higher than usual. “And he’s leaving the beach just to drive you back to the city a day early? Very nice.”
Elizabeth shrugged, warmed by her stepmother’s defense of Darcy but wary of her suspicions. “He’s been out of town. He has business there.”
Lydia sniffed and put in her earbuds. “Whatever. I still like Florida better than the Hamptons. There were so many hot guys my age there.” She lifted her phone and loudly asked, “Lizzy, did you see the pictures from our trip?”
“Yes, multiple times. I’m going for a walk.” Elizabeth needed to clear her head, to think of anything but her life, her work, and people who made bad decisions. As she passed Lydia, she could hear pulsating rap music blasting from her earbuds.
Elizabeth thought back to the previous night and her conversation with Darcy about music.
His mother had great taste. She must have been so interesting, so curious about the world.
Why did she go to England? Elizabeth squirmed uncomfortably when she thought of the contrast with her own mother.
Who runs away to Branson? Who leaves their family?
What am I going to do about the book? Did Darcy hear Lydia’s attack on him?
Too many questions were swirling. Her head ached.
Darcy hated pity. He’d received it for most of his life, or at least since he was sixteen and left alone with his father and the gaping, never-spoken-about loss of his mother and sister.
And the guilt. That was his and his alone.
Only the family, the fractured family he was left with, knew the full story of the car accident.
And as frustrating and domineering as his aunts and uncles could be, they never, not once, blamed him or made him feel responsible.
Even if he was. That’s what family was for.
It was certainly why he and Rich attended all of Annabella’s “performances” and suffered through dinners with her mother.
It was why Rich put up with his moods and why Darcy made such an effort to actually like Rich’s girlfriends. They had to stick together.
In the past twenty-four hours, he’d had a front-row seat to how a difficult family could undermine a person’s self-esteem.
Only Jane and the Gardiners appeared to appreciate Elizabeth’s career and academic choices, and it was best that only they knew what was happening to her book.
Elizabeth had no reason to defend herself or make excuses, but her misfortunes would be a lark to the rest of her family.
Darcy hadn’t even met her mother, but the FaceTime conversation he’d witnessed was enough of an experience.
He’d wondered more than once whether Jane and Elizabeth had been adopted.
Although their stepmother seemed pleasant enough, Ted and Sylvia were both distant, self-involved people.
However their marriage had dissolved, it seemed to have left some deep wounds on Elizabeth.
She hid them well, but he knew the signs.
By contrast, the Gardiners were gracious company and wonderfully intelligent conversationalists, and their children were smart and polite.
Maddie was a trained horticulturist and had peppered him with questions—few he could answer—about Pemberley’s gardens and grounds.
They obviously were close to their Bennet nieces and had quite a bit of influence on them.
They were supportive of Elizabeth’s career path, and he was confident they would help her get through this adverse turn of events.
None of which was her fault. It might not be any of his business, but he needed to ensure she knew that she was blameless.
Seeing her cry and feeling as though he needed permission to touch her, to console her, was achingly painful.
He headed out a side door, out of view of the Kowalski-Bennets.
Bennet-Kowalskis? Or whatever their name is.
After overhearing that testy conversation with her father and stepsister, he suspected Elizabeth had gone out walking.
Maddie saw him wandering outside the house and pointed him in the direction of the bluffs.
“Elizabeth is drawn to your lavender fields. I gave her a pair of shears to cut some for the dinner table.”
It took but a minute to find her footprints in the sand. They led him to the field where he’d scattered Coco’s ashes two days earlier.
“Are you all right?” he asked quietly when he reached her.
“Please, I don’t want to talk about it,” she said quickly.
“I respect that.” He nodded, assuming she meant the book. “The privacy veil is drawn shut, okay?”
She smiled at his metaphor. “Veil? How about curtains? Yours are thicker than most, you know.”
“Excuse me?”
“Your privacy curtains,” Elizabeth said, sporting a distracted smile.
“You’re quite good at drawing out other people about their lives and interests and possible legal issues.
But here you are, best man to my future brother-in-law and host to a motley assortment of my family and his, and besides your good taste in music, sharp eye for infractions of the pirate code, and skill with an ice cream scoop, you give very little away. ”
Darcy stood beside her, staring at the water and the white sails skimming along the waves far in the distance.
“I’m not always… I suppose you’re right. I am careful about what I ‘give away’ because I’m not always sure I can trust the recipient.” He cleared his throat, conscious of how stilted he sounded. “I don’t trust many people,” he added hurriedly.
“Good advice,” Elizabeth said ruefully. “I wish I’d followed it professionally.”
“Don’t beat yourself up.”
“But you trusted me. You told me things and I forgot them. And”—she raised her hand defensively as Darcy started to protest—“I can blame it on stupidity, on mixing Vicodin and alcohol, but that’s no excuse for anything I said later.” She hung her head. “I was awful.”
It took him a second or two to absorb that she had actually brought up Netherfield and the night he was supposed to forget.
“No, you weren’t,” he quickly insisted. “You were confusing and funny and endearing and clever. But never awful. Never stupid.”
“Hardly. And I was terribly rude at the Seaport.” She sighed. “I seem to be behaving quite stupidly lately. And this time it will cost me.”
“No, it won’t.”
“You don’t know everything, Fitzwilliam Darcy.”
“That is true.” He sighed, relieved that they were actually having a conversation and frustrated that it was yet again about blame and mistakes.
She slowly turned back to him. “You’re right, Elizabeth.
I often know very little. But I do know that you should not heap blame on yourself and shoulder all the responsibility when bad things happen. Other people are at fault as well.”
She stared up at him blankly. He gazed into her green eyes, eyes made brighter by the sun and the tears that sparkled in the corners, and lost his train of thought.
She is so beautiful. He sighed heavily and reminded himself of the weighty matters Elizabeth was thinking about. Focus on her. Help her fix it.
Darcy reached out a finger and touched her wrist. “I’d wager George Wickham played a central role in creating this bloody mess.”
Elizabeth nodded and closed her eyes. “My boss asked if I knew, if I was aware of George’s involvement in the drugs.”
“Of course you weren’t,” Darcy said sharply. “Your boss should know you better than that.”
She looked up and met his eyes.
“Lizzy! Darcy!” Two small figures were running toward them.
“Wait, before we go back, I just want to…” Elizabeth took a deep breath. “I’m sorry about earlier…what Lydia said. She’s a spoiled, insensitive girl.”
He smiled softly and watched Ava and Alex stumble through the sand toward them. “Don’t give it a thought. She’s sixteen.”
“Come on, you guys!” cried Alex. “We gotta bury the clams! You gotta help!”
Ava grabbed Darcy’s hand and pulled him away.
Elizabeth watched them go and wondered how he did it.
He carried on a conversation about jellyfish stings and starfish and mermaids with a little girl who wasn’t much older than his sister had been when she’d died.
Wasn’t it painful to walk on the sand with her and to be reminded of Georgiana?
Elizabeth realized she had so many questions she’d like to ask him about his enigmatic mother, the father he’d left behind in England, and what Georgie had been like.
And how he had managed to survive what had happened to his family and be so… so fascinatingly normal.
She turned away and stared at the sand, shaking as it all swept over her.
She regretted him. She regretted that she hadn’t gotten to know him like a normal person would have done.
That she was finally getting to know him after she’d stomped on his heart and taken advantage of his hospitality and cried on his sympathetic, but now emotionally detached, shoulder.
Oh, she should have the Nobel Prize in Stupidity, an Oscar in Obtuseness.