Chapter Sixteen
LATER, WHEN HER husband awoke, he commented that he had felt her agitation through the bond, and she said it was nothing, and then he found the documents the colonel had brought, and he asked her if the colonel had caused her agitation, and she fiercely denied it.
Mr. Darcy blinked at her.
She threw herself into his arms, though it was before dinner, and though he often liked to do this sort of thing later in the evening, and she thrust her neck against him and begged him to bite her, and he held her against him and groaned and protested and then gave in.
At dinner, she was lightheaded and the wine was going to her head, and he sipped his own wine and tutted at her, saying that she didn’t know what was best for her, that she should not ask her husband for bites when he had not already fed for the night.
She pressed into that for some reason. Maybe it was the wine, or maybe it was the interaction with the colonel bubbling at the edge of her consciousness. “Why do you think it is sometimes a certain way with blood drinking, and not always that way?” she asked.
“I have no notion what you even mean by that,” he said, chuckling into his wine.
“I mean, sometimes it’s romantic, and it’s like you and me or Louisa and Mr. Hurst, but sometimes, it’s the way it is when you take men from the taverns, and it is nothing but drinking for thirst,” she said. “Why is it different?”
“I suppose because sometimes you are attracted to someone, and sometimes you are not,” said Mr. Darcy.
“And who can say why that is, hmm? There are times when a person is attractive, but you do not feel the draw, and there are times when a person isn’t that attractive, but you do. It’s something ephemeral, I suppose.”
“And with me, it was because I am your sirensong,” she said.
“Likely,” said Mr. Darcy. “However, you should know this is different, Elizabeth. I’ve had sirensongs before, and whatever we have, it’s quite intense.”
She drank more wine.
“Ought you go easy on that, my love? I took a good bit of your blood, you know.”
“You felt romantic attraction for your sire,” she said.
“Well, I don’t know if I’d call that romance.” He sat back in his chair, a mischievous little smile on his face. “I felt lust for that man.”
“Lust,” she repeated, nodding. “So, is that what you felt for me, then?”
His gaze met hers, more mischievous. “Oh, I have lusted and do still lust for you, Lizzy, as you well know.”
“So, there’s nothing stopping you from lusting after one of those men from the taverns you drink from.”
He drew back. “I feel vaguely as if you’ve just trapped me, as if I’ve been led to a place so that you can be angry with me. Are you angry with me? Is that what the agitation was today? Or is it something else to do with Colonel Fitzwilliam?”
She drained the rest of her glass of wine and got up from the table. “No, no, never mind.” She quit the dining room entirely, going off into one of the sitting rooms to pace.
He came after her, standing in the doorway to watch her. “You are pacing, my love. Last time you were pacing, you wanted me to take you to bed. Can I solve this problem the same way?”
She continued to pace.
“Do you lust after the colonel?” His voice had a lilt to it, a permissive lilt, and it jolted her.
She stopped and turned to him. “No.” A pause. “Perhaps. In a sort of way. I do not know.”
He closed the distance between them and he touched her face. “Perhaps it’s him, then?”
“What are you talking about?” She furrowed her brow.
“I told you, you would tire of me, and you would wish—”
“I have hardly been your wife for two months,” she said. “I have not had time to tire of you, and it is not that at all. I don’t know why I keep feeling things when I look at him, I truly don’t.”
“I am only saying that it would make sense you’d want a human man. I know he cannot marry where he chooses. He is beholden to finding someone with enough money to keep him, and perhaps he’d be amenable to an arrangement. If he knew his children would inherit because I claimed them as my own—”
“Oh, Lord!” She struggled out of his arms.
“Something to think about, anyway,” he said. “I could speak to him about it if you like.”
“You are handing me off to him?” She was going to start crying. “So easily?”
“Not easily,” he said, and his voice was gruff. “But we both know this arrangement between us is unnatural. This would be better for you, in many ways.”
Her lower lip trembled. “You are always so quick to foist me off on others for my own good, or so you say. You claim to love me, but I don’t know if you can love me if you’re so easily rid of me—”
“My love, I do not in any way wish to be rid of you.” Suddenly, he was right next to her and he had taken her by the shoulders.
His grip was tight as he forced her to look at him.
“What do you wish?” he said in a strained voice.
“For me to go into a jealous rage, to say that I cannot bear it if you find another man attractive, when we all find any number of people attractive at any time? You wish me to say I shall destroy him or that I shall keep you prisoner and never let you see him again? You wish me to truly be a monster, Elizabeth, is that it?”
“Ty, please,” she whispered.
“For I could. I wish to,” he said in a low, shaking voice.
“I never wish to let you go. I think about turning you against your will. I think about locking you in that room and refusing to let you out, denying you the sun. I think about being very, very selfish with you. You don’t know how badly I want you.
You don’t appreciate the way I struggle.
” He let go of her, and he was trembling all over, and his eyes were flashing.
“Ty,” she said again, a whisper.
He turned on his heel and quit the room.
She went after him, after she caught her breath, but he had left to go hunting. She felt him drinking through the bond, felt the way he was angry, barely in control, and she wondered at herself.
Something in what he had said kept surfacing in her thoughts.
we all find any number of people attractive
She kept hearing it again and then turning it over in her mind.
Had she assigned significance to her attraction to the colonel when there was none?
What had she thought, in the end, that she would fall in love and then she would never feel attraction to anyone else ever again?
That was some sort of odd idea, she realized, a fanciful one that might appear in love poems and very overwrought plays, but not the truth of humanity.
Attraction happened. She had not thought there was anything notable about it before she had gotten married, and she likely should not think it notable now.
The colonel was an amiable man with an appealing smirk.
And she was in love with her fiend of a husband who wanted her very badly but was always struggling against his deep desires to drain her of blood.
I should let him turn me, she thought.
And she knew it would be easier for him. It would solve certain problems as well. And she could live forever. If she wished to see London in two hundred years—or two thousand, perhaps?—she could see it.
But it would mean giving things up, and she wasn’t yet sure if she wished to give up her life, give up her humanity, drink blood, never see the sun.
When Mr. Darcy got back, he was in one of his self-recriminating moods. He tried to lock himself away from her, but she wouldn’t let him.
He did not cast her from the room, but he wouldn’t allow her to sit on his lap.
She stood behind him, then, running her fingers over his neck, through his hair. “I am sorry,” she said.
“You have nothing to be sorry for,” he said sternly. “I lost control.”
“I did,” she said. “I wished you to be jealous.”
He sighed heavily. “Lizzy, I am ruinously jealous. I think of him touching you and I lose my mind.”
“I don’t know why I am insecure when it comes to you, Ty,” she said.
“You have proven to me over and over what lengths you will go to for my sake, and I know that you love me in a way that perhaps no one else does, a truly unselfish way. You would sever yourself from me—even though you badly desire me—if you thought you would harm me. You have proved this again and again. But, for some reason, I feel unsure of you, and I don’t know why. ”
“Well, that makes sense, I think,” he said, looking up at her. “I abandoned you. Whatever my reasons, it must have felt like indifference to you.” He bowed his head. “In a way, maybe it was.”
“You are indifferent to me?” This cut her.
“I am not,” he said. “But I well know how time works, Lizzy. I could become indifferent to you. It might take some time. If I cut off all contact with you tomorrow, it might take fifty years or seventy-five until I no longer felt wounded when I thought of you, but it would happen.”
She didn’t like the way that felt to hear. Perhaps it was true, but… She backed away from him.
He hung his head. “It would happen to you, too, and sooner, my love.”
“I would always be wounded,” she said.
“It would lose its sting,” he said. “Come now, you cannot deny this.”
She supposed she couldn’t. She supposed he was right, but even so, it was not something she wished to hear him say.
“I am not helping, I suppose,” he muttered. “You wished me to be jealous to reassure yourself that I am, in fact, in love with you, and that you can, in fact, count upon me, and here I am confirming all your worst fears.”
She went back to him, hands in his hair again. “Yes, quite. Yes, exactly.”
“You can count on me, my Lizzy,” he breathed, shutting his eyes, leaning in to her touch.
She traced the outline of his ear.
He sighed.
“But I suppose I want it both ways,” she said.
“I want my attraction to him to mean nothing at all, just some passing fancy that has no significance, but I want our attraction to each other to be monumentally significant, to be indicative of some life-changing, unshakable bond. You say it would fade with time, so what makes it mean anything?”