CHAPTER 2 THE HEDGEROW PUPPY
Elizabeth
I had not given a moment’s thought to propriety, not that I ever did, when I darted out of the assembly room. The puppy was so scrawny, matted, and soaked through—with those big, imploring eyes. How could I not seek him?
“Puppy,” I called after him, lifting my skirts for the chase. My dancing slippers were hardly suited for the wet grass and mud, but I had to find the little creature, even if it meant abandoning my dance with the most gorgeously charming man present.
“There you are.” I sank to my knees where the puppy cowered beneath a prickly hedge. “Are you lost? Hungry?”
The puppy, a fancy spaniel seen in expensive drawing rooms, was bedraggled beyond belief, pressed against the roots as if hoping the hedgerows would adopt him.
“I am Elizabeth Bennet,” I introduced myself, reaching beneath the branches. “I won’t harm you, little one. Come now, let’s get you warm and dry.”
The dog pressed its belly lower against the earth and whined—a sound so small and desperate that my chest constricted around it.
“Has someone hurt you?” My hem was already soaked, and my mother was almost certainly gathering her forces for an assault on my character, judgment, and nonexistent matrimonial prospects. “I promise you are safe.”
The dog’s tail gave a single, hopeful wag.
“Excellent. We have reached an understanding.”
A twig snapped behind me, and I twisted around, fully expecting my mother’s outraged figure bearing down upon me.
Instead, it was the gentleman with the perpetual frown. Mr. Bingley’s friend, the one who had avoided introduction long enough for my mother to gather the required intelligence. Mr. Darcy of Pemberley. Ten thousand a year, and unmarried.
He wasn’t scowling just now as he looked at me with concern.
“Allow me to assist you, Miss…?” he said, his voice deep and unexpectedly gentle.
“Elizabeth Bennet,” I replied, taken aback by his willingness to soil his fine clothing. “And you must be Mr. Darcy. I’m afraid we haven’t been properly introduced, though I daresay this is hardly the setting for such formalities.”
Mud covered me up to my elbows, my hair had come loose from its pins, and a hawthorn twig had attached itself to my bodice. It was not, perhaps, the introduction my mother would have choreographed.
A ghost of a smile touched his lips. “Indeed not, Miss Bennet. Now, shall we rescue this poor creature together?”
“He won’t come to me. He is too frightened.”
The spaniel whimpered again, and Mr. Darcy’s attention moved from me to the puppy. He was taller than me and had to bend further.
“Where is it?” he asked.
“Wedged in the roots at the back. I cannot reach.”
He removed his coat and draped it over a nearby branch. His waistcoat followed, revealing shirtsleeves of fine white linen that would absolutely not survive contact with the muddy hedge.
“Sir, your clothes—”
“I have others.” He knelt beside me in the muddy grass, his shoulder nearly brushing mine, and I was suddenly aware of how solid he was, a presence that made my breath catch foolishly in my throat. “If you will hold the branches apart, I believe I can reach him.”
His hands were large, with long fingers, and he was already reaching into the hedge.
“Come now, little one,” he murmured, his voice softening into a gentle coaxing I wouldn’t have thought him capable of. “No one will harm you. You are safe.”
The dog, who had resisted all my considerable charm, regarded Mr. Darcy with those enormous liquid eyes—and crept forward into his waiting hands.
“Good boy,” he whispered. “You remind me of a puppy I once knew.”
The dog wagged the tip of its tail and licked Darcy’s fingers.
Carefully, he drew the spaniel from the prickly hawthorn bush.
He stroked the muddy fur and cradled the dog against his shirtfront—his white shirtfront, which was now acquiring a patina of mud that would render it suitable only for the rubbish heap.
And the dog, this trembling, starving, terrified creature, pressed its face into the hollow of his cravat and went still.
I sank back onto my heels, my hands caked in mud and my knees thoroughly soaked.
My heart, I suspected, was fluttering for reasons entirely unrelated to the chase, a flutter I attributed to exertion rather than the sight of Mr. Darcy’s large hands cradling a creature small enough to fit between them.
His dark head was bent low, his gaze fixed on the puppy’s fur.
“May I hold him?” I opened my arms, but before he could place the puppy, a shriek startled both of us.
“Lizzy!”
My mother’s voice pierced the evening like a badly tuned violin. I closed my eyes briefly, summoning patience.
“Lizzy, where are you? What are you doing in the shrubbery? If you have ruined another gown, I shall… oh, oh my!”
She rounded the hedge, discovering her second daughter, mud-stained and disheveled, kneeling entirely too close to the extremely wealthy gentleman she had been bemoaning all evening as utterly unattainable.
“It’s Mr. Darcy!” She had the singular ability to pivot a shrill admonition into abject fawning within a single breath. “What a pleasure to make your acquaintance.”
“Mrs. Bennet.” Darcy rose, still holding the spaniel, and offered me a hand. As I took it, he bowed with a grace that few gentlemen could manage.
“Oh, you are helping my Lizzy. How kind of you, I say, how very gentlemanly.” My mother could simper like the best of all ladies. “I was just telling Mrs. Long that Mr. Darcy himself has gone to assist my Elizabeth.”
“You were saying precisely nothing of the sort, my dear, as you have only just arrived and have been berating the child since the moment you rounded the hedge.” My father’s voice drifted from the shadows, bone-dry and faintly amused.
“Good evening, sir. I am Mr. Bennet of Longbourn. I see you have met my most troublesome daughter.”
“I have had the privilege, Mr. Bennet, of assisting Miss Bennet with this spaniel.” The dog licked him as he spoke, and I had difficulty tearing my gaze from his hands. “The creature is in poor condition and appears to be neglected.”
“Papa.” I clasped both muddy hands to plead. “He is so sweet, and he is hungry. He came up to me while I was dancing, because he knew I would help him.”
“As has Mr. Darcy,” my mother observed, rubbing her hands with glee. “Mr. Darcy, you must be chilled without your coat.”
I cut off my mother’s simpering. “Papa, the puppy is shivering. Can we bring him home?”
“Mr. Bennet!” My mother’s voice achieved a pitch that threatened the ears of every creature above and beneath the hedgerow. “We cannot simply take in a stray. What will the neighbors think?”
“They will think exactly what they think now—that we Bennets have a particular affinity to hedgerows.”
My mother opened her mouth—either to protest or to advertise Mr. Darcy’s vicinity—and my father took her arm. “Come, Mrs. Bennet. Let us inform our remaining daughters that we are departing, before Kitty adopts a horse and Mary begins lecturing the punch bowl on temperance.”
“I suppose I ought to take the dog.” I held out my arms, my gloves muddy to my elbows. “That remark was as close as my father will come to giving his consent.”
Darcy took one last look at the dog and, very gently, he stepped closer than propriety allowed, settling the warm weight into my embrace. His hands brushed my arms as he adjusted the squirming puppy, and my breath simply would not catch.
“There,” he said. “He is yours, Miss Bennet.”
The dog turned his head and licked Mr. Darcy’s retreating fingers.
“What shall I call you?” I said to the puppy, now licking every part of me he could reach. “I cannot keep calling you ‘the dog who interrupted my dance’ or ‘the paw who ruined my dress.’”
“No,” Mr. Darcy agreed. “He deserves better than that.”
I studied the small face now pressed against my bodice, those enormous eyes already drooping with exhaustion. “Something distinguished, I think. He has clearly experienced hardship, but he carries himself with a certain… dignity.”
“Yes, he looks like a Beau to me,” Darcy said, almost as an afterthought.
“I beg your pardon?”
“Nothing.” He stepped back, his formal reserve returning. “Forgive me.”
“Beau,” I repeated, testing the name. The spaniel’s ears perked at the sound, his tail offering a single, tentative wag. “It suits him.”
Mr. Darcy walked with me to my family carriage, waiting for the footman to open the door. And then, before anyone else could grasp my hand, he gripped it firmly and handed me into the carriage, his fingers flexing as he let go.
“Take care of him, Miss Bennet.” His voice had gone rough at the edges.
“Thank you, Mr. Darcy.” I held his gaze, searching for the crack I had glimpsed—the tenderness, the shadow, the thing he was not saying—but his face had settled into its customary lines, shuttered and correct. “You have been very kind.”
End of Excerpt - to read more, go to: Wickham’s Paw Prints: A Rescue Dog Matchmaking Romance