Chapter 5
FIVE
IT WAS NOT THE RADIATOR.
Elizabeth was certain of this before she was fully awake. The radiator had a particular language — a knocking, intermittent and vaguely apologetic, that she had memorised over two weeks and learned to sleep through.
Ironically, Darcy had fixed it before his trip, which she had not asked him to do and had not thanked him for, and the apartment had been quieter since.
However, the sound that woke her was a different sound entirely. A scraping. A soft clatter. Deliberate in the particular way that sounds were deliberate at two in the morning when they had no business being made at all.
She lay still for a moment and listened.
It was coming from downstairs.
Elizabeth sat up. The room was dark and the street outside threw a thin stripe of light across the ceiling and she could hear her own breathing and nothing else for three seconds, and then the sound came again. Definitely the kitchen. Definitely something moving.
She reached for her phone first. Screen brightness down, 911 already pulled up, her thumb resting over the dial button like a question she had not yet decided to ask.
Then she stood, moved to the corner of the room, and her hand found the baseball bat before she had consciously remembered it was there.
James’s bat. Derek Jeter, signed in blue marker on the barrel, acquired at some point during what Charlotte had called his deeply inconvenient Yankees phase.
It had lived in the corner of the room she was sleeping in for as long as Elizabeth could remember.
Charlotte had moved it from the living room, where it had hung like a trophy, to this room because where else did junk belong in an apartment with no basement or spare room?
Elizabeth had considered removing the bat from her room, but decided there was no better place to put it.
She held it now with one hand and felt, briefly, that Charlotte would have found this very funny.
She moved to the door and opened it without sound.
The landing was dark. She stood and listened.
Mia's door was closed, the thin line beneath it dark and still.
Good. She was asleep. Elizabeth pulled Mia's door handle gently, just enough to confirm it was properly shut, and then turned toward the stairs.
She went down slowly, the bat in her right hand, her left holding the phone with her thumb poised over the dial button.
She stopped at the bottom of the stairs.
The kitchen light was on, and there was a smell that was either burning toast or something adjacent to burning toast. Now that she was close enough, she could hear the specific sound of someone who did not know where things were, opening and closing cupboard doors with increasing frustration.
Not a burglar, then. Burglars, in her experience, were quieter about cupboards.
Rats? New York did have a rat problem. Rats did not, however, make toast.
Did a homeless person think no one stayed in the house because the owners had passed? That did not make sense either. They would have seen her and Mia taking walks, or Darcy driving his large electric four-wheel drive.
Unless, because he travelled and the car was not always outside, they had thought otherwise, she decided.
She rounded the kitchen’s doorframe with the bat raised and her thumb on the dial and came face to face with Fitzwilliam Darcy, shirtless, in grey jogger shorts, holding a bread knife and squinting at the toaster with the expression of a man engaged in a deeply personal conflict.
He turned at the sound of her entrance.
They looked at each other.
"You scared the absolute shit out of me," Elizabeth said.
Darcy set the bread knife down on the counter with great care. His eyes moved to the bat. Then back to her face. "I see you found James's bat."
"When did you get here?"
"Around one. I tried not to wake anyone." He looked at the toaster. "I was hungry."
"You were hungry," Elizabeth repeated. She lowered the bat slowly.
Her heart was still going at a speed that was frankly unreasonable for a Tuesday morning.
"At two in the morning? You came back from a work trip, let yourself into the house in the middle of the night, and decided that what the situation required was toast."
"I had not eaten since noon."
"That is not the point."
"What is the point?"
“It is two in the morning. I thought you were a burglar.” She gestured at the makeshift weapon in her hand.
He looked at the bat again with an expression that was not quite a smile but was in the approximate vicinity of one.
“What exactly were you planning to do with that?” he asked.
“Defend myself, obviously.”
“Against a burglar. With a baseball bat.”
“Yes,” she said. “I was absolutely prepared to use it.”
He looked at her for a moment. Something moved across his face that she could not immediately classify and did not particularly want to examine at two in the morning in her nightgown.
She was not examining it.
She was also not examining the fact that he was standing in the kitchen without a shirt, which was information her brain had registered, filed, and was now retrieving with an enthusiasm she found deeply inconvenient.
She had seen this before. Once. Eight years ago, briefly, in the specific context of a month she had spent a considerable amount of energy not thinking about since.
She had apparently not been as successful at forgetting about it as she had believed, because her memory had produced the relevant information with immediate and unwelcome accuracy.
He had not changed. That was the irritating part. Eight years, and he looked exactly the same. His chest was defined, precise, like something engineered rather than accidental, with a small line of hair just below his navel that looked almost deliberate.
Elizabeth blinked twice, as though that might erase the thought.
It did not.
There was also the deeply unfortunate fact that she was standing in a kitchen at two in the morning in a nightgown, holding a baseball bat, while Fitzwilliam Darcy was shirtless in the same room. She could almost hear Jane and Charlotte laughing about the situation.
Elizabeth looked anywhere but at him, adjusting her grip on the bat. “You… might consider wearing a shirt.”
“I was not expecting company at two in the morning.”
“It is not company. It is a shared living arrangement, and common decency suggests—”
“Elizabeth.” His voice was even. Patient, in the particular way that suggested he was choosing patience deliberately. “Can we have a civilised conversation without you being rude to me?”
“I am not being rude. I am making a reasonable observation about shared living standards.”
“‘Common decency?’ For not wearing a shirt in my own kitchen… when I thought I was alone?”
“It is not your kitchen.”
Darcy paused, then corrected himself. “Our kitchen.”
She opened her mouth. Closed it. He was right, and they both knew it, which made it worse.
“Fine,” she said. “Our kitchen. In our kitchen, in the middle of the night, while Mia is asleep upstairs, perhaps the goal could be to make toast without waking the entire apartment. That is a reasonable request.”
“The toaster is louder than the ones I am used to.”
“The toaster you are used to is probably some overpriced thing you bought from an engineering company no one has ever heard of.”
“I have a preference for well-made machines,” Darcy said. “You forget that I studied engineering. I mean… I fixed the radiator. I could look at the toaster.”
Just then, the toaster chimed, and two dark-brown slices of toast popped up.
“Oh, so now it works,” Elizabeth said, mostly to herself.
“I was about to say the same thing,” Darcy replied, turning to the machine. He reached for the toast. “Would you like a slice?”
She was about to say no.
“Fine,” she said instead.
If for no other reason than the lingering adrenaline… or because a part of her could not quite bring herself to look away from his chest.
Not yet.
***
They were standing at the kitchen counter, eating toast in silence, when the sound of bare feet on the stairs announced that the situation was about to become more complicated.
Mia appeared in the doorway in an oversized sleep shirt, her hair in a state that suggested a serious commitment to unconsciousness, squinting against the kitchen light. Her gaze moved from Darcy to Elizabeth, then to the bat still in Elizabeth’s hand.
“Mr. Darcy.” Her expression shifted, not quite surprise. “You’re back.”
“I got in around one,” he said. “I’m sorry if I woke you.”
“You didn’t.” She nodded toward Elizabeth. “She did. I heard her on the stairs, then her voice.” Her words slowed as she focused properly. “Why do you have Dad’s bat?”
“I thought he was an intruder,” Elizabeth said.
Mia looked at Darcy. Then at Elizabeth. Then back at the bat, which Elizabeth realised she was still holding.
“He’s shirtless,” Mia said.
“I can see that,” Elizabeth said, a little too quickly.
“And you’re in your nightgown.”
“I in bed before coming downstairs,” Elizabeth replied. “Being in my nighties isn’t unusual.”
Mia shifted her weight against the doorframe, one brow lifting slightly as she took the scene in again, slower this time.
“A shirtless Mr. Darcy and Aunt Elizabeth in her nightgown at two in the morning.” She tilted her head. “That sounds like something off Wattpad romance.”
“Mia.”
“I’m just noting the situation.”
“There is no situation,” Elizabeth said. “I came downstairs because I heard a noise and thought someone had broken in. If he hadn’t turned around in time, I would have hit him with the bat.”
Mia looked at Darcy. “Is that true?”
Darcy glanced at Elizabeth. “She would have tried.”
Mia nodded slowly. “So, what you’re saying is, at two in the afternoon, the news could have reported that a signed Derek Jeter bat nearly took out one of New York’s most eligible millionaires… because he wanted toast.”
She delivered the last part in a faintly polished, newscaster tone.
Elizabeth pressed her lips. Darcy looked away.
Then, almost at once, all three of them laughed.
“Your father,” Elizabeth said, when she could speak again, “would have found this extremely funny.”
Mia’s smile faltered for just a moment before she looked away, focusing on the edge of the counter.
“Yeah,” she said quietly. “He would have.”
The moment settled between them.
Perhaps, for a lack of diffusing the tension, Darcy broke his slice of toast in half and held one piece out. Mia took it without a word, ate a few bites, then handed the rest back.
“I’m going back to bed,” she said. “Try not to nearly kill each other before morning.”
She pushed off the doorframe and started toward the stairs, then paused.
“Oh, and Mr. Darcy—” she added, glancing back. “There is a shirt on the back of one of the sofas. Just in case Aunt Elizabeth's nerves cannot take it.”
Elizabeth opened her mouth to respond, but Mia was already halfway up the stairs before she could think of a defence.
Her footsteps continued up the stairs as she added, “Before I forget… offering me bread is not the only way to appease me. That’s to you, Mr. Darcy.”
Darcy burst into another laugh as Elizabeth set the bat against the wall and picked up her toast. She did not look at him.
“She’s taking this remarkably well,” Darcy said.
“I know.”
“I just hope she isn’t pretending for our sake.”
Elizabeth did not answer immediately. “I hope not.”
Elizabeth finished her toast. She put her plate in the sink. She picked up the bat again because it needed to go back upstairs and she was not leaving it down here for him to trip over in the dark.
“Goodnight, Darcy,” she said. “Try to make less noise.”
“Goodnight, Elizabeth.”
She went back up the stairs without looking back.