Chapter 8 #2
Outside, she looked at her text messages and saw Jane still had not answered her from two weeks ago. Elizabeth sent a quick “How’s it going?” along with a Reel she thought would make her smile. Maybe in another month she would get an answer.
She walked past the garage and saw Darcy pull out the convertible with the top down. She swallowed a curse.
“May I drive you?” he called when he pulled up alongside her.
“No.” Part of her wanted to keep walking and force him to crawl along next to her, but that would be rude. “It’s silly to drive such a short way.”
“I am going in that direction, anyway.”
There was no need to pick a fight, but she wanted to hold on to her anger a little longer. Otherwise, they would talk in the car and he would apologise for his remark about sacrifice and she would accept it, but nothing between them would change.
While she deliberated, he said, “Please allow me to drive you in the curricle, Miss Bennet.”
He grinned, and a reluctant smile slipped out.
She climbed in, remembering driving around Pemberley with Darcy in his nineteenth-century version of a sports car.
She could drive to Lambton with him, but that didn’t mean she had to talk yet.
Sandra would be with them in a few moments, and this wasn’t a discussion she could overhear.
After they left Pemberley, she realised Darcy had turned the wrong way. “Why are we headed to Bakewell? Are we picking up Sandra directly from school?”
“No, I asked Georgiana to meet her bus.”
She scoffed. “That means you had to actually talk to Georgiana.”
Darcy dipped his head in assent, keeping his eyes on the road. “I did, and I do have to have a conversation with her. But not yet,” he added heavily.
“What are you waiting for?” she muttered.
“To talk with you first.”
She might have asked “About what?” but she didn’t care to hear about it. They rode for a while longer before Darcy turned onto Bath Street and parked in the mews behind her old professor’s house. “What are we doing here? It’s an Airbnb now.”
“We are staying for the weekend.”
She gaped at him as they got out of the car. “Georgiana can’t watch Sandra for that long.” In 1826, with a house full of servants, she could certainly mind a sweet seven-year-old who adored her, but not in 2026. “She can scarcely boil water for tea.”
“Frank and Gwen will get Sandra in the morning,” Darcy interrupted calmly, “and tonight Sandra will help Georgiana to order all the takeaway she needs for a day and a half. Roland will check on her tomorrow as well.”
“And why are we here?” she asked sceptically, looking at the building where she had lived for months, caring for her ailing father. Then she lived there with Darcy as he recovered from diphtheria and waited for the stone circle portal to reopen on the equinox.
“Because I didn’t think you’d want to go to Edinburgh or London and be far from Sandra. I wasn’t even certain you would get in the car. And, because this is the last place you and I spent time together with no distractions. I intend to pay you a lot of attention.”
After giving her a piercing look, Darcy took his phone from his pocket and tossed it into the trunk as he pulled out a bag and shut the hood. A hot flush ran over her body. That was sexy.
Her husband whisked her away for a weekend, intending to concentrate on her.
For a moment, she forgot her frustrations and that he hadn’t touched her in a week.
But then reality, with parenthood, and a displaced sister, and his detachment, and all her doubts about being worth Darcy’s sacrifices came rushing back.
“What if Sandra—”
“They have been told to call you. Besides, they know where we are and live eight minutes away.”
That was true, but she still was irritated how Darcy had been avoiding everyone. “You’ve been so busy lately. Do you even remember how to exist without the phone?”
He gave her a wry look at her sarcasm before walking toward the door. “Who is more accustomed to not having instantaneous answers and entertainment? I am better at communicating with pen and paper and being content with my own thoughts than you are.”
That was true, but she wasn’t about to admit it today.
Inside, number two Bank House looked the same as when she rented it from Professor Gardiner fifteen years ago.
It was spare but cosy, and not one thing had been updated.
It still had the “God Save the Queen” pillow in front of the bricked-over fireplace.
“We had a significant opportunity to get to know one another better here,” he murmured, taking in the front room. “What did we do with all that free time, with no Pemberley House to manage, no child to raise?”
Still angry with him, she swallowed an indecent reply about what she wished they had spent those three months doing. Darcy’s outdated sense of honour hadn’t let him so much as kiss the cheek of a woman he couldn’t marry.
“Well, you spent nearly a month recovering from a severe case of diphtheria.” It took weeks for him to get his strength back to climb the stairs easily.
“And learning how to live in a wondrous place.”
That couldn’t be genuine enthusiasm. She thought he meant astonishing and inexplicable rather than marvellous. “It wasn’t all good. You learned horrific things about the modern world after nearly dying.”
He sighed, like her attitude disappointed him. “The antibiotics worked. Sandra’s bout with chicken pox was worse.”
It wasn’t, and she was about to remind him he could have died even with the antibiotics, but he grabbed their bag and brought it upstairs.
Darcy always brushed off how close he had come to dying.
Was it because he wanted to look brave in her eyes or because he was from a time where one was more likely to die from some illness no one nowadays thought twice about?
As she heard him moving around upstairs, she wondered if they would sleep in separate bedrooms like they had when they were last here.
She crossed her arms over her chest. When she last stayed in this house, she fell more in love with Darcy every day—and every day brought her closer to parting with him forever.
She had been eager then for any hint that he loved her back, while he couldn’t bear the heartbreak of showing her any affection when he had to leave her forever.
Elizabeth fell onto one of the couches in the lounge, suddenly exhausted by the distance between them.
She knew what it was like to live thinking she would never see Darcy again, and she knew the despair of thinking he would die.
Her husband brought her here to make things right between them.
Being angry and silent wouldn’t help, and life was too short for grudges.
He came down the stairs and stood in front of her, looking like he had gathered some courage upstairs and was finally ready to speak.
“Elizabeth, I said an unkind thing yesterday, and I am exceedingly sorry. I never wanted you to forgo a single thing for my sake, or make you believe that I wished that you had. I wholeheartedly chose this life and will never again mention what I left behind.”
She stared at him, waiting for him to say more, but he didn’t. He might as well have bowed at the end of it and then wished her good health. She often found his slips into his former manner charming, even sexy, but not this time.
“That was a succinct Regency apology.” She wondered how hard it was in general for a man born in 1784 to admit an error to a woman. “Very austere.”
His shoulders fell, and he paced. “Elizabeth, what do you need from me? I certainly never wanted you to go back to 1811 or expected any sacrifice from you. I said a senseless thing that I regretted the moment I said it.”
“Then why did you say it?” she whispered. It had just driven further into her soul her fear that she wasn’t worth what he gave up.
“Because Georgiana’s return has brought to mind every single thing and every single person I left behind,” he said with pain in his voice. “I was thinking about my sacrifices, not wishing that you had made more.”
“It felt like you wish I did.” She had considered going back in time to him, but she had been too afraid of a world where she would have been chattel if not for a husband like Darcy. A daughter’s life would have been far more treacherous. “We both know I gained more than you did.”
Darcy tilted his head. “What?”
Elizabeth rose and sidled away from the confused expression on his face. “How important was the house?” she threw over her shoulder at him. “Would you have come back for me if you hadn’t set up a plan to reclaim Pemberley?”
“My hope of living again at Pemberley and having a twenty-first-century identity were second to being with you.” She heard the annoyance in his voice and kept her back to him. Sometimes, it was just too hard to believe she alone was worth it.
“If there was no identifying record awaiting me,” he went on, “we would have managed without it. But I wanted to legally marry you. I wanted better for you than an existence full of fear if I had not one document to prove my identity. You remember how nervous you were for anyone to learn I didn’t have a way to prove I belonged here.
I could not even enter a nightclub. Did you want a lifetime of that anxiety? ”
She whirled around and the words burst from her chest. “No, but you can’t deny that you gave up everything.”
He threw open his hands. “And?”
“And I feel guilty!”
Now he looked utterly perplexed. “Why?”
“Because I never mattered to anyone before I met you. I still can’t believe you came back just for me. I got to stay here and have you, Fitzwilliam,” she said, her voice breaking, “and it doesn’t seem fair to me, so how can it feel fair to you?”
She wished they were at home so she had a forty-by-twenty-foot ballroom to pace in rather than this tiny lounge where there was no escaping his devastated look.