Chapter 10
ELIZABETH
He came to her room at midnight.
She was not asleep. She had not been asleep for hours, lying in the large bed in her Rosings chamber with the counterpane pulled up to her chin and the curtains open to the moonlight and her mind turning in the slow, grinding circles that had become its nightly habit.
The day's performance replayed behind her eyes — Lady Catherine's interrogation at dinner, Darcy's intervention, the careful choreography of compliance that had become her daily art.
She heard the door before she saw it move.
Not the connecting door to Charlotte's room — the other one, the door to the corridor, which she had locked.
But locks required keys, and keys in a house like Rosings were not private things.
A nephew who had spent every summer here since boyhood would know where the housekeeper kept her ring.
The door opened. He stood on the threshold in shirtsleeves, the white linen ghostly in the dark corridor behind him.
No coat. No cravat. His hair was disordered, as though he had been running his hands through it — a gesture she had never seen him make in daylight but could imagine him making in the privacy of his own rooms, where the composure that armoured him in public could be set aside.
In one hand he held something small and dark — a jar, she thought, though the light was too poor to be certain.
He set it on her nightstand without explanation, the way one might lay down a card one did not yet intend to play.
"Mr. Darcy." She sat up. Her voice was steady; her heart was not. "This is highly improper."
"Yes." He stepped inside and closed the door. The click of the latch was the loudest sound in the room. "It is."
He did not advance further. He stood with his back to the closed door, his hands at his sides, and looked at her across the moonlit space of the bedchamber with an expression that she could not, in the insufficient light, fully read.
But she could feel it — the intensity of his attention, the charged quality of his presence — the way she had felt it in the drawing room, on the woodland path, across every dinner table they had shared.
Only now there was nothing between them. No table. No convention. No pretence.
"Someone might see you," she said.
"No one will see me. The servants have retired. My aunt sleeps like the dead." A pause. "Forgive the expression."
A sound escaped her — not quite a laugh, too sharp for that, but something that acknowledged the horror and the absurdity at once. He passed a hand over his face, and when his hand dropped, his expression had altered. Less controlled. More human.
"I could not sleep. I find, increasingly, that I cannot sleep in this house. Or any house. Or anywhere, frankly, since the evening I walked into the parsonage and found—"
He stopped.
"Found me," Elizabeth finished.
"Yes." The single word carried more weight than his entire proposal had done. He pushed away from the door and took two steps into the room — measured, deliberate, the walk of a man who is very conscious of every boundary he is crossing.
"You should not be here," she said again. Steadier this time. "We are not married."
"No." He did not step back. "We are not."
"Then you understand why this is —" She searched for the right word. Improper was too small. Dangerous was too honest. "— inadvisable."
"I understand perfectly." His voice was quiet, measured, the voice of a man who has considered all the angles and proceeded anyway. "I did not come here for that, Elizabeth. I came because I could not sleep, and I could not stop thinking, and I owe you something before we leave this house."
"You owe me a great many things. Privacy among them."
A pause. Something flickered behind his eyes — not quite hurt, not quite amusement. "You are right. I will leave if you wish it. But hear me first."
She should say leave now and mean it. But the man standing before her in shirtsleeves and bare feet was not the Mr. Darcy of the drawing room — not the composed, armoured creature who spoke in careful sentences and watched her with calculating precision.
This was someone else. Someone undone. And the curiosity that had always been her weakness would not let her send him away without knowing what had brought him to her door at midnight looking like a man who had lost an argument with himself.
"Say it, then."
"I was already going to propose to you," he said.
"Before Collins. Before any of it. I had been composing the words for a week.
I intended to do it badly — in my aunt's drawing room, probably, with too much pride and too little feeling, because that is the only way I know how to say anything that matters. "
Elizabeth's breath caught. Not a gasp — a smaller thing, a subtle interruption in the rhythm of her breathing that she could not prevent.
"Collins changed the circumstances," Darcy continued, his voice dropping lower, rougher, "but he did not change the intention. What I demanded from you in that parlour — the marriage, the compliance — I would have asked for anyway. Not as a condition of your safety. As a condition of my sanity."
"That is not a distinction most women would find reassuring."
"I am not trying to reassure you. I am trying to tell you the truth, because I suspect it is the last time I will be able to do so without calculation."
He was close now. Close enough that she could see the pulse beating in his throat — rapid, steady, proof that the composure he wore was costing him. Close enough that if she reached out her hand would find his chest. She did not reach out.
"Mr. Darcy." She made her voice hard. Deliberate.
The voice of a woman drawing a line. "We will be married in weeks.
Whatever — whatever this is — it can wait until then.
If I go to my marriage bed having already given you this, I have nothing left to negotiate with.
Do you understand? You hold everything else.
My silence. My compliance. My freedom. This is the one thing that is still mine to give or withhold, and if you take it now — before the vows, before the law gives you the right —"
She stopped. Her throat was tight. She had not planned to say this — had not known, until the words emerged, that this was what she feared.
Not the act itself but the calculation behind it.
The strategic surrender of her last bargaining position to a man who already owned every other piece of the board.
Darcy was very still. She could not read his expression in the moonlight — only the tension in his jaw, the set of his shoulders, the way his hands hung at his sides with deliberate control.
"You think I came here to claim something," he said. His voice was low. Careful. "To take the last piece."
"Did you not?"
A silence. Long enough that she heard the clock somewhere in the house mark the quarter hour.
"No," he said at last. "But I understand why you believe it. I have given you no reason to believe otherwise."
He did not step back. He did not leave. He stood in the moonlight and looked at her with an expression she had never seen on his face before — open, unguarded, stripped of the authority and calculation that armoured him in daylight.
And Elizabeth understood, with a cold clarity that settled in her stomach like a stone, that this was worse than coercion.
This was something else entirely. This was a man standing before her without his weapons and asking her to see him, and the vulnerability of it was a manipulation more effective than any demand could have been.
Because she could resist a command. She could not resist this.
"You are not being fair," she whispered.
"No," he agreed. "I am not."
He raised his hand. Slowly. She watched it come — watched his fingers extend toward her face.
He touched her jaw, his thumb light against her cheekbone where the bruise had been — healed now, the skin smooth again, though she still flinched at the ghost of it.
The contact was barely there — a question, not a claim — and yet she felt it through her entire body.
A pulse of warmth that started where his skin met hers and spread downward, into her chest, her belly, lower.
She did not pull away. She hated herself for not pulling away.
"I could tell you to leave," she said. Her voice was barely audible. "And you would go."
"Yes."
"And that is supposed to make this my choice."
"It is your choice."
"No. It is my choice shaped by your presence.
Your — your proximity. You are here, in my room, at midnight, with —" She gestured at him.
Shirtsleeves. Bare throat. Disordered hair.
The full weight of his want visible in the set of his body.
"You are not giving me a fair choice. You are giving me an impossible one. "
"Then tell me to leave."
She said nothing. The silence stretched between them, and in it she heard her own breathing — too fast, too shallow — and the rapid drum of her own treacherous heart, and the truth she could not speak: that she did not want him to leave.
That she had not wanted him to leave from the moment the door opened.
That the argument about leverage and bargaining was real and rational and entirely correct and also not the reason she was still talking instead of saying the word.
"I hate you for this," she said. It was not true. It was not untrue.
"I know," he said. And kissed her.
It was not gentle. She had not expected it to be.
His hand slid from her jaw to the back of her neck, pulling her forward, and his mouth was hot and insistent and tasted of port wine and she made a sound against his lips — furious, wanting, the sound of a woman whose body has betrayed her mind — and her hands came up to his chest and she did not push him away.