23. The Butterfly’s Ball #2
Mr. Langley had the second country dance, and his conversation consisted of agreeing with everything Elizabeth said, which was flattering for two minutes and excruciating for eighteen, and Elizabeth thought of Darcy’s assessment—the romantic ambition of a footstool—and had to disguise a snort of laughter as a cough, badly, because the couple beside them glared and Elizabeth’s composure was in ruins.
But she hardly minded, because the joke was Darcy’s and the laughter was his gift, another small kindness left inside her evening like a coin hidden in a cake.
Lord Coke appeared for the cotillion, and suddenly the evening felt different.
He wasn’t ridiculous or forgettable—just solid, courtly, and eligible enough to make Mrs. Bennet, if she were present, faint with joy.
But he was also Darcy’s cousin, and if he was here for the cotillion, did that mean he would claim the supper waltz as well?
“Miss Bennet. How are you faring tonight?” Lord Coke offered his hand.
“I have survived the Arthur and the Langley. My feet are bruised, my patience is tested, and my spirits are higher than they have any right to be.”
“That is the mark of a successful ball—spirits rising in inverse proportion to the condition of one’s feet.
” Lord Coke took his position in the cotillion square with the relaxed ease of a man who approached each dance as a conversation.
“I should warn you, my mother is watching from the third row with an expression that suggests she considers this cotillion the opening salvo of a campaign. I apologize in advance.”
“Your mother’s campaigns are legendary. I am told she once secured a dinner invitation for you at a house where you had not been introduced by arriving with three courses of food and the announcement that you were expected.”
Coke laughed—a genuine, full-bodied sound that turned heads. “She brought the syllabub; they could not refuse. It is Mother’s secret weapon.”
“Your mother and mine would get along famously. Mrs. Bennet once trapped Mr. Bingley into extending a dinner invitation by sending Jane to Netherfield on horseback in the rain, ensuring she caught a cold and had to stay the week.”
“Diabolical. I admire the strategy.”
“I admire the commitment. Jane nearly contracted pneumonia, but she did secure an additional four dinners.”
The cotillion’s figures brought them together and apart with a rhythmic intimacy that the dance demanded, and Elizabeth found herself enjoying Coke’s company with a warmth that went beyond politeness.
He was intelligent without being showy, self-aware without being self-pitying.
He spoke easily of his brother Richard’s letters from the Continent—the Colonel was well, had survived a skirmish near Bayonne, and had written demanding better biscuits because the French ones were insipid.
Elizabeth felt the fond, warm recognition of a man she had liked at Rosings, a man who had been kind when kindness was scarce, who had walked her back to Hunsford in the rain.
“Richard mentioned you in a letter,” Coke said, reading her face with the frank directness she had come to respect. “He said you were the most engaging woman he encountered in Kent, and that he wished his circumstances had permitted him to know you better.”
Elizabeth’s throat tightened briefly. The road not taken. The moon without the sun. “The Colonel was very kind.”
“The Colonel was smitten, but second sons must marry practically, which is the great injustice of the system.” Coke paused, and his voice warmed. “He would want you to enjoy tonight, Miss Bennet. Richard always said that women who laugh should be made to laugh as often as possible.”
When the cotillion ended, Elizabeth tucked Lord Coke’s conversation away like a pressed flower—lovely, but from another season. In another world, he might have mattered. In this one, someone else already did.
Two more sets: Mr. Fairfax, who recited poetry as if he’d painted the Sistine Chapel, left Elizabeth mildly irritated—like a crooked painting.
Lord Selwyn talked only of horses, which was oddly soothing after Fairfax’s dramatics.
When she mentioned naming a kitten after a horse, Selwyn was so delighted he spun the wrong way.
Meanwhile, Darcy danced the third set with Jane—protective, courteous, guiding her through the figures, and Jane smiled serenely, the way Allegra had advised, while Bingley jittered at the sidelines, wringing his hands and spilling punch.
But when Darcy danced with Mary, Elizabeth’s heart jammed in her throat.
Mary was stiff and awkward, but Darcy matched her pace, holding her hands with such gentle care that by the second figure, Mary was smiling—shy, but real.
Elizabeth’s eyes stung, and she had to look away before anyone saw what it did to her composure to watch a proud man treat her plain sister like a duchess.
And then, the supper dance was announced—a waltz.
A flurry of excitement rippled through the room. Fans snapped shut, and countesses shifted on the sofas for a better view. Men moved purposefully through the crowd in search of their fair partners.
Elizabeth’s heart abandoned all pretense of composure, thudding against her ribs like a bird discovering an open cage.
Had Darcy read the initials on the card? Would he heed her choice, or was Lady Matlock’s authority too great? Darcy had always held his family’s name above all other matters. Would he concede to Lord Coke, despite the “F. D.” she had so boldly scrawled?
And then, just when she glimpsed Lord Coke making his way through the crowd, aiming his trajectory at her, Darcy arrived.
The blue coat. The white waistcoat. That impossible height she’d resented in Hertfordshire—still impossible, still infuriating.
His shoulders blocked the candlelight, and the shadow felt like a hand pressed over her heart.
And his eyes—God, those eyes—locked on hers until the whole ballroom faded to gold and noise and nothing.
There was only him. The steady warmth of a man looking at her like she was the only real thing in a room full of decorations.
“Miss Bennet.” Low. Pitched for her ears alone, as though they stood in a private room instead of a public ballroom, and the intimacy of the pitching traveled through her like a note struck on the lowest string of the Broadwood, resonant, vibrating, felt more than heard. “I believe this dance is mine.”
“Yes,” she curtsied, low and deep, “It is.”
Her voice stayed steady, her knees held, but her pulse hammered, and she had to lick her lips.
“As arranged.” His eyes seemed to twinkle as he took her gloved hand.
She swallowed, set her hand on his shoulder, and the music began. Darcy’s arm circled her, pulling her closer than any man ever had. Even the dance master had used a female assistant for the turns.
Darcy’s hand caressing the ivory silk, and the swaying and turning, caught her with dizzying fire.
The sensation traveled through the silk and stays to her skin beneath, warm, heated, and possessive.
And her body responded, spinning and twirling as she tried to keep the count of three, but failing and simply allowing him to lead.
She felt the pressure of his palm: the warmth radiating through the fabric, spreading through her belly like wine drunk too quickly, pooling low and sweet and alarming.
Their bodies pressed together, moving in concert, matching—not in size, he was twice her breadth, but in rhythm, in intention, in the synchronization of two hearts locked in the same tempo.
“You are dancing,” she said. “But not conversing.”
“Then I shall dance and converse. Did you not think it possible to do both?” He spun her around fast and dizzyingly, but she had no fear. He would never allow her to fall.
“You are dancing the waltz with me, Mr. Darcy, and you are looking at me as though I am the only woman in this room.” Her voice caught.
“Aren’t you?” His gaze was luminous on her. “I do not believe I noticed another.”
His mouth rearranged with an amusement visible only to her.
And she stared up at him, completely entranced.
His eyes, so deep, and his mouth—she wondered how his lips would feel, and that chin, stubborn and aristocratic.
The crinkles at his eyes, and then he was grinning and so was she—the wide unguarded grin of being swung around a London ballroom in the arms of the only man who’d had both the gall and the nerves to honor her wishes after so devastating a refusal.
“I am happy, Mr. Darcy,” she admitted. “The waltz is scandalous, but I am glad you are the one to take me through it.”
“I shall oblige you.” He turned her around, pressing her closer so that she felt the beat of his heart.
There was no proper distance, and she did not wish for the minutes to ever tick down. Every inch of this man—the solidity, the warmth, and the restrained strength—all of him was invigorating, and she could not catch her breath.
“Mr. Darcy, I never imagined a dance could—” She stopped because the sentence was hurtling toward a cliff.
That this was the only dance that had mattered tonight—not because it was the waltz, but that he was the only partner whose hand at her waist had set her on fire, and the only man whose approach had made her stomach drop–dismantling in less than three minutes, her carefully constructed fortress of wit.
“This dance,” he prompted, “you were saying?”
“It is the best that I have had tonight,” and the honesty arrived before the wit. “You, Mr. Darcy, are improving.”
“Only for you, Miss Elizabeth, because you require excellence.” His eyes grew dreamy, half-lidded, and his gaze dropped to her lips.
For a breathless moment, she imagined what it would be like, and she didn’t care who watched, or that she was twenty, or that something inside her was burning, and she had no wish to quench it.
“You are providing it. In everything.” It was reckless, and she knew it.
This was a man who had curated her joy and danced with her sister as though Mary were a duchess and who was looking at her now with an expression that she would remember for the rest of her life.
One, she reflected back at him. Of falling, and yes, she was falling.
Fast for the cliff was behind her, the air was everywhere, the ground was nowhere, and the falling was the most terrifying, exhilarating, intoxicating sensation she had ever experienced, and she did not want it to stop.
“Shall I provide more?” The waltz turned them.
The final figures drew them closer, face to face, her hand on his shoulder and his hand at her waist, and the space between them reduced to inches, to warmth, to the scent of him—clean linen and something darker, wood smoke or leather or the indefinable warmth of a man’s skin.
Elizabeth’s face tilted up, and she could see the candlelight in his eyes, the texture of his jaw with the shadow of tomorrow’s beard beneath his skin.
It was intimate, obscenely intimate, the most private thing she had ever noticed about another human being.
Her breath was coming fast and shallow, and the fact that he curated her joy and provided everything for her?—
His gaze, which had been holding hers with an intensity that should have frightened her and did not, shifted.
It dropped.
To her mouth. To her parted lips. To the open, unguarded, surrendered mouth of a woman who was looking at him with everything she had and everything she was.
The drop lasted less than a second, but the second was infinite. She saw the want in it—raw, involuntary, the want of a man who had been restraining himself for months and whose restraint had slipped for one heartbeat—and then he corrected.
His eyes returned to hers, but she could see the cost in the tension of his jaw, in the effort of the retrieval. And she had felt that burning in waves that followed the waltz’s tempo, one-two-three, one-two-three, heat and heat and heat.
Her eyes were wide, lips parted, and as the waltz played and played, the room disappeared.
The ton was gone; everything retreated until there was only his face, his eyes, his hand on her, and the heat of falling with the absolute, devastating, world-ending knowledge that she was in love with Fitzwilliam Darcy and had been for longer than she knew.
It was joy, terror, and she was still falling when the music ended, only it would never end in her heart, and the announcement came, “The supper dance is concluded.”
Darcy stepped back. The distance returned. His hand left her waist. And he bowed.
Her knees shook too much for a curtsy, and the loss of his touch was bewildering. She breathed, trying to reassemble.
“Shall we proceed to the supper room?” He extended his arm.
She took it, and then she smiled, because she had his arm with the heat still burning through her, and the falling was still happening with no end in sight.
This was what the poets wrote about. The ones she had mocked as overwrought and sentimental.
The ones who described love as a kind of madness, an illness, a fall.
They were right. The falling was exactly as they described—terrifying and exhilarating and inevitable—and the ground was exactly as absent as they promised.
And the arm beneath her hand was solid, the man was real, and so, for the first time in her twenty years, Elizabeth Bennet allowed herself to simply fall in love with no regrets.