The Man I Chose to Despise (Pride, Passion & Promises #5)

She did not misunderstand him. That was the part she could never quite admit.

From the moment Elizabeth Bennet overheard Fitzwilliam Darcy at the Meryton assembly, she made a choice.Not the choice of a woman wrongly hurt, but the choice of a woman who recognized something dangerous in a proud, guarded man and decided, quite deliberately, that contempt was safer than the alternative.She polished that contempt until it shone.She wore it like armor. And for nearly a year, it served her beautifully.

Then her father’s secret arrived in a letter.

A debt, nine years old and quietly buried, owed to the late Mr. Darcy of Pemberley and now called in by his son’s trustees.Two thousand pounds Elizabeth’s family does not have.One arrangement that will settle it without scandal: Elizabeth must travel to Pemberley and spend a season closing the estate’s disordered ledgers, exchanging her labor for her family’s dignity.It is not charity. Mr. Darcy has been careful to make that clear.It is a transaction. A precise, respectable exchange of value.

Elizabeth tells herself she can manage a transaction.

What she cannot manage is the man himself, encountered daily across dinner tables and tenant lanes and one fateful, storm-stranded night in a widow’s cottage, who turns out to be nothing at all like the figure she has spent twelve months carefully constructing.The man in the ledgers is generous without audience.The man on the estate road settles a widow’s debt and walks away before she can thank him.The man across the fire, when the rain will not stop and there is no performance left to hide behind, says quietly: I think it frightens you rather as much as it frightens me.

He is right. That is the unbearable part.

Because Elizabeth’s prejudice was never an honest mistake waiting to be corrected by better information.It was a door she chose to lock, because she had watched her parents’ marriage curdle into mutual contempt and decided that needing someone was the most dangerous thing a clever woman could do.Despising Darcy had been so much simpler than examining why he unsettled her.Now, trapped at Pemberley by obligation, watched by Caroline Bingley’s calculating eyes, threatened by a neighborhood that has already decided what kind of woman trades her family’s debt for a wealthy man’s company, she is running out of room to keep the door shut.

And Darcy, who built his own walls after a woman once described him in a private letter as manageable and considerably more tractable than he appears, has spent three years mistaking his reserve for wisdom.He recognized Elizabeth’s hostility as chosen rather than honest almost from the beginning.He found it, against every sensible instinct, more compelling than any flattery London had ever offered him.What he has not yet decided is whether a man with his history is permitted to want someone who has made a study of not wanting him back.

Against the schemes of Caroline Bingley, the quiet menace of George Wickham quartered four miles away, and the whispered verdict of a neighborhood that has already named Elizabeth a fortune-huntress in muslin, two people who have spent years building identical fortresses against identical fears must decide whether the walls they constructed to protect themselves have simply become, in the end, the thing actually keeping them from living.

The ledgers will be closed. The debt will be settled. What remains between them, when every account has been reconciled and every armor stripped away, is the only figure that was never going to balance on paper.