Chapter 5 #2
She stared at him. The brutality of the argument, its cold, unassailable logic, struck her the way Collins's fist had struck her: surprise first, then pain, then a settling into the new reality of a world in which this was what passed for kindness.
"You believe you're saving me," she said.
"I know I am saving you."
"And the price?"
He was close now. Close enough that she could see the pulse in his throat, the rise and fall of his chest, the way his hands, those large, careful hands that had trembled at the end of a garden path, hung at his sides with a stillness that cost him.
"The price," he said, "is me. You will have me, Elizabeth, as your husband, your protector, and your keeper. You will live in my houses, wear my name, bear my—"
"Children," she finished. The answer silenced him. He had not expected her to complete the sentence. He stood frozen, and when he spoke his voice was quieter and rougher, stripped of its rehearsed authority.
"And in time," he said, "perhaps you will cease to think of it as a price."
The words dropped into the walled garden like stones into a well.
Heat gathered low in her belly. She should have hated what he had said.
Every principle demanded it. Yet his voice on bear my, and the word she had supplied herself, had roused an appetite older and less governable than principle, and she despised herself for answering it.
"You're very certain of what you want," she said, her voice not entirely steady.
"I have been certain since Hertfordshire. Kent merely provided the opportunity."
Her stomach turned. He could speak of that room, of Charlotte with the blood drying on her dress, as though the dead man had done him a service.
"You'd have coerced me regardless." She watched his face for denial and found none.
"I'd have proposed," he said. "The coercion, I concede, was a refinement of circumstance."
She almost laughed. It was the closest he had come to acknowledging the monstrousness of his position, and the dry, self-aware tone in which he delivered it, the faintest trace of dark humour, the first she had heard from him, caught her off guard. She bit the inside of her cheek and looked away.
"Show me the library," she said.
He showed her the library. It was small, well-stocked, and smelled of leather bindings and old paper.
She ran her fingers along the spines and felt something ease inside her chest, not happiness, not peace, but the private relief of a woman who has found, inside her confinement, a corner she can stand.
"You may come here whenever you wish," Darcy said from the doorway. He was watching her as he always watched her, intently, thoroughly, as though she were a text he was trying to translate. "The key is yours."
She turned to face him. He crossed the room and held it out. She took it. "A key I may hold but not use without your knowledge."
He moved closer with a deliberation that made her tilt her chin up, and took the key from where she held it between them.
"A key," he said, his voice low, "you may use without explanation." He closed her fingers around it and lowered her hand between them. "I don't require an account of your hours, Elizabeth. Only of your days."
She slipped the key into the reticule hanging from her wrist.
She should have moved. The shelf was at her back and he was at her front and there was precisely nowhere to go, and she should have ducked under his arm, put the reading table between them, reminded him of the caretaker couple somewhere in this house. She did none of these things.
"You're blocking my path," she said.
"Yes."
His hand came up, not to her face or hair, but to the shelf beside her head.
His body angled over hers without quite touching, caging her more effectively than his arms could have.
Heat crossed the space between them, carrying sandalwood and horse leather.
Her body measured his size and closeness against her will.
"Another lesson in who controls the distance between us," she said. Her voice had gone thin.
His mouth curved. Not a smile, something harder, something that acknowledged the accusation without apology. "And who controls it, Elizabeth? At this moment?"
She could feel her pulse in her throat and wrists.
The library was silent except for their breathing and a distant wood pigeon.
Dust motes turned in the light between the shutters.
She thought: I could duck under his arm.
He would let me. She thought: He would let me and he would not pursue.
She thought: And I would spend tonight in my narrow bed at Longbourn wondering what would have happened if I had not.
She put her hand flat against his chest and pushed.
He held fast. His body was solid under her palm, the musculature of a man who rode daily and held it in check, the heartbeat she could feel hammering against her fingers faster than his expression suggested.
His composure was a performance. She had seen it falter at Rosings; she had never felt the effort of maintaining it beneath her own hand.
"Your heart is racing," she said.
He let the accusation stand. His jaw tightened, the only concession he permitted himself while she catalogued the evidence of his unravelling.
"You're not as composed as you pretend."
"I have never been composed in your presence, Elizabeth. I have merely been still."
She should have removed her hand. Instead, and she would never afterward be able to explain this to herself, never construct a satisfactory narrative of how it happened, she curled her fingers into the fabric of his waistcoat and pulled.
His mouth met hers with a sound half breath and half surrender.
This was not the controlled, deliberate kiss of Rosings.
His hand came off the shelf and into her hair, tilting her head back, while his other arm hauled her against him.
The kiss was graceless and urgent, nothing like what she expected from a man of such careful precision.
She kissed him back. Her answer damned her more thoroughly than his advance.
She rose into it, her free hand gripping his shoulder, her body arching into the hard line of his with an eagerness that horrified and satisfied her at once.
His groan vibrated through her chest. His hand tightened in her hair, drawing her head back while his lips moved to her jaw, her throat, the hollow beneath her ear where her pulse beat wildly.
"Elizabeth." His voice against her skin. Wrecked. She had never heard him like this, the polished authority dissolved, the careful diction abandoned, nothing left but her name and the rough edge of want beneath it.