Chapter 18
CHAPTER EIGHTEEN
Elizabeth had already written to her father, and was as affectionate in her tenor on what she thought due to him in asking for his consent as much as she was on her tender sentiments for Darcy.
Her announcement in the breakfast room regarding the library was only a ploy for Darcy to seek her out for a moment of privacy.
Expecting him, she was surprised when a quarter of an hour brought Hester instead, dressed in her riding habit.
“Lizzy, I wanted to speak with you before I rode with the others.” For a moment, she needlessly smoothed her long skirt. “I had to ask—apologise, I suppose.”
“Whatever for?”
“I worry that I have left you too often alone.” Hester looked unsure of herself.
“I wanted to give you every chance to spend time with Mr Darcy, but it occurred to me that I—well, I am unused to having a young lady under my charge. Have I pressed too hard to forward a match with Mr Darcy? Would you have been more often with Mrs Bingley, or as much with Mrs Annesley if you were Miss Darcy?”
She smiled and squeezed Hester’s hand. “You have been above reproach as a chaperon.” Elizabeth paused, thinking that perhaps her father might have something to say against that if he knew Darcy had slept in her bed.
Hester was now giving her a concerned look.
“I have no complaints about our friendship, and no one would expect you to follow me all day and always sit at my elbow.”
Hester’s shoulders lowered to their normal place, and she smiled. “Mr Darcy seemed attentive to you yesterday at Dovedale. I would not be surprised if he sought you out here.”
Elizabeth tried to keep her expression bland when she said, “I am certain Mr Darcy will come to the point before I return home, and I will help him on, of course.”
Hester tilted her head. “Home? Are you not going to Scarborough with us in September?”
“I mean . . . I am only more confident that the matter will be resolved as I wish.”
“You assume you will need to go home to prepare to be married?” Hester asked, with an excited little smile.
She nodded, and Hester gave her a thoughtful look.
“I could travel with you, and then return to town. Then you need not travel with one of Mr Darcy’s servants.
I suspect it will be a while before he can follow you. ”
“I would like that above anything else,” Elizabeth cried. “But do you not want to go to Scarborough? You intended to meet friends there before returning to Haddingtonshire.”
“I will still return home—to Scotland, I mean—for Christmas, but they are mostly Lewis’s friends.” Hester grew nervous again, and Elizabeth waited for her to speak. “Colonel Fitzwilliam will not stay long in Derbyshire. He must return to his regiment in London.”
“And if you are in town, your paths would cross?” Hester nodded, and Elizabeth felt happy. “I had noticed you more at ease with him these past two days.”
Hester blushed. “I have thought about what you said, about deciding what I want. I should give him, give us, a chance . . . but I worry what society would say about my marrying again.”
When she said nothing else, Elizabeth asked, “Have you decided you want to marry him?”
“No . . . but I live in dread of his marrying somebody else.”
“How natural!”
They both laughed, and then Hester’s smile faded. “I fear that if I do not choose soon, choose to have him myself, he will give up and take comfort where he can.”
Elizabeth did not believe for a moment that Colonel Fitzwilliam was ready to abandon Hester. “He must be wishing to attach you. It would be too stupid and too shameful of him to be otherwise, and we know he is not a stupid man.”
Hester only laughed, but she did look relieved.
“You have some of the same friends,” Elizabeth said, “so they might be wishing for the connexion too. Does Mr Balfour know about your relationship?”
“I doubt it,” she said whilst pulling a face.
“The colonel and I have kept it a secret. Besides, Lewis is more of a friend than a brother, and we are too near in age, with me being the elder, for him to have ever acted as a guardian to me. He does not understand my fear of being treated unfairly. He is not a woman with a reputation to consider, who is judged more unfairly than a man.”
“He does not appear to share those concerns that you have,” Elizabeth agreed.
Hester shrugged. “It is because I am more betwixt and between than he is. He is a lively man with business that takes him into the world, and he is not immediately seen as one with an Indian parent. One would look and listen to him and think him Scottish through and through.”
“It is how he sees himself?”
Hester nodded. “Whereas I am proudly both Scottish and Indian. Regardless, he does not know about Fitzwilliam and me. I do not think he would be bothered by any romantic entanglement I had, provided it was discreet.”
Hester would be devastated if her brother was the killer.
If money was the motive, Mr Utterson seemed more likely to be the culprit since he would be the poorer man in the end.
It was impossible not to speculate, but they could not act on conjectures.
She and Darcy needed proof to connect one of them to Carew’s death.
They both turned when one of the library doors opened and Darcy entered.
He stopped short at the sight of them both and gave a proper bow.
Elizabeth watched his eager expression slide back into a calmer look of the gracious host. “Ladies. I came to see if Miss Bennet has had a letter from the Bingleys.”
Elizabeth suspected he had come here to kiss her senseless, and admired how quickly he shifted his behaviour for public view. “I had a letter from Jane yesterday. She wrote about the extreme badness of the roads and tempestuous weather along the way.”
Darcy made a thoughtful sound. “The roads are normally choked with dust in summer.”
“She writes that all was ankle-deep in mud, but they are safely arrived now.”
“I am glad to hear it.”
After a stretch of silence where she and Darcy looked on each other intently, Hester gathered the skirt of her riding habit with great purpose.
“I ought to find the others so we can make the most of this dry day.” Hester scarcely kept from smiling, and gave her an emphatic, private look before she left.
The door shut, and Darcy gave a small smile. “Now that the topics of weather and our friends have been addressed . . .”
He said not another word. What his lips concealed, his intent gaze betrayed as he came near, put both hands around her hips to pull her against him, and walked her backward until she hit a bookcase.
The shelves pressed into her back, and Elizabeth stared at Darcy’s lips, feeling his warm breath with every exhale.
He was more confident than he had been last night, and it made her heart beat fast.
Darcy brought his hands to rest against the bookcase on either side of her head, keeping his hips pressed against hers. He brushed his lips across her neck before slowly moving them up. When he flicked his tongue over the sensitive skin behind her ear before biting softly, her body trembled.
“Kiss me,” she said.
He did, more passionately than she anticipated, and when her tongue swept against his, a raw sound escaped his throat. Elizabeth kept her hands at his waist, holding back from unfastening every button on his trousers until she knew how far he wanted to take this encounter.
Meanwhile, Darcy kissed her with a feverish desire that made her grateful the furniture was supporting her.
He rocked his hips against hers whilst tasting every corner of her mouth, nipping at her bottom lip, before moving to her throat, and then to tug her earlobe between his teeth.
All of the tentativeness he had shown last night was now replaced by a confident urgency.
She shuddered in pleasure, and then Darcy took her mouth again, their tongues swirling together until she pulled away long enough to ask, “Sleep with me again tonight?”
He made a sound of approval before kissing her again even harder.
She ran one finger down his chest, enjoying the way he panted against her lips.
She went to unfasten his trouser buttons, but Darcy grasped both of her hands and firmly lifted them both above her head, holding her wrists against the bookcase in one of his hands.
She gave an eager gasp of surprise, and Darcy looked into her eyes.
He must have been encouraged by what he saw because after he kissed her again, his free hand wandered over her breasts with touches and pressures that made her moan.
He stroked his thumb across them, and Elizabeth wished he would press his mouth to them, sucking and biting them as he had last night.
When she gripped the shelf above her to arch her back, pressing herself harder against his hand, he let go of her wrists.
Darcy was breathing heavily. “I was run away with . . .” He blinked a few times and looked from side to side. “We might be interrupted here in the library.”
He was resting his weight comfortably against her, still trapping her happily against the bookcase. She felt the certainty that he wanted her, and it lessened her disappointment at stopping. “Maybe we won’t be.”
He brought his hands to the shelf on either side of her head again and exhaled, giving her a longing look.
“If we were seen, every servant would know by the end of the day,” he said, frustration clear in his tone, “and none of them would respect either of us—you for seducing the master or me for taking advantage of a single woman.”
Elizabeth tucked her hands beneath his coat and linked them around him. “Maybe your family would catch us rather than a servant, and they would keep the secret?”
He pressed a quick kiss to her lips. “Most assuredly. Georgiana would run from the room and never look me in the eye again, let alone speak.”
“And what would your cousin do?”