The hours between Georgiana’s departure and Anne’s bedtime passed in the ordinary way—supper, correspondence, a brief consultation with Mrs Hatfield about the morning’s arrangements. Darcy moved through them with the outward composure of a man whose world had not rearranged itself before luncheon.
Anne’s bedtime ritual was sacred and non-negotiable. A story first—tonight it was the tale of a brave knight who rescued a horse from a dragon. Anne had firm opinions about narrative priorities and the horse was always more important than the princess. Then prayers, which she conducted briskly, and a pointed request that God make tomorrow’s weather suitable for the garden. Then the final act.
She reached up with both hands and took his face.
Her palms were warm and slightly sticky from the sugared biscuit Alice had slipped her after supper, a transgression Darcy was aware of and had chosen to overlook. Her fingers splayed across his jaw, small and certain. She held him there the way she held everything—completely, without reservation, the idea that he might not want to be held had simply never occurred to her.
“Goodnight, Papa.”
“Goodnight, sweetheart.”
She released him and turned onto her side. Muffin was tucked against her chest, his painted eye facing outward, standing guard. Her breathing slowed within minutes—the enviable, instantaneous sleep of a child with no guilt or regrets, and no knowledge that the world contained either.
He stayed, watching her silently. Then he rose, adjusted the blanket, and left the nursery on quiet feet.
He walked to the master’s chamber and closed the door behind him. The room was dark, save for the fire. He lit no candles. He poured a generous measure of brandy. Moderation had already failed him once today and he saw no reason to pretend it would succeed now. Besides, he needed it.
He sat in the chair by the hearth. He took a large sip and set the glass down, only to pick it up again.
He should write to his steward. The drainage problem in the east field at Pemberley required a decision, and the tenant at Elm Farm had written twice about a fence. These were real, tangible matters that deserved his attention andhad absolutely no connection to the curve of Elizabeth Bennet’s neck.
The brandy burned, amber and slow.
He gave up all pretences.
Her eyes.That was where the trouble had begun in the agency. The moment she had lifted her lashes and revealed them. Dark, sharp, lit with a defiance that poverty had not managed to extinguish. His breath had stopped, as if a hand had closed around his throat and squeezed. He had always had a soft spot for her fine eyes.
And then there was her neck. The line of it above the worn collar of her dress, where the fabric had been mended so carefully that the stitches were almost invisible. She had held her chin high—pride or habit, perhaps both. The gesture had drawn the tendon taut beneath her skin, a single clean line from her jaw to her collarbone.Christ, how he had wanted to press his mouth to the hollow at the base of it. Not gently or politely. He wanted to...No.
In the tea shop, she had wrapped her fingers around the teacup. He had watched her drink, and the thought had surfaced—unbidden, ferocious, ungovernable. He wanted to take the cup from her hands and set his lips where hers had been. The rim, still warm. The faint trace of her mouth on the porcelain. He had wanted it with a violence that did not belong in a perfectly innocent tea shop. He had sat there with his composed expression in place, and ordered more hot water as though he were not coming apart at the seams.
She had not eaten the toast. She was thinner than she should have been—her wrists were narrow, and her collarbones too sharp beneath the cotton. The urge to feedher had risen in him with a force that bordered on irrational. To put bread in her hands and watch her eat. The desire to nourish her and the desire to touch her had knotted themselves together in his chest, and he could not find the seam between them.
He drank some more while the fire cracked and settled.
He should stop. He should put the glass down, close his eyes, and think about drainage and fences and the mundanity of a life that functioned perfectly well without Elizabeth Bennet in it.
Instead, his mind continued its descent. Her mouth—the shape of it when she had smiled at him on the stairs. The lower lip, fuller than the upper, and the way it had curved, reluctant, as though the smile had been dragged out of her against her will. He wanted to trace that curve with his thumb. With his tongue. He wanted to know if she tasted the way she smelled.
His blood stirred. Heat gathered, low and heavy, pooling where it had no business pooling over a woman who had rejected him brutally and was arriving in the morning to teach his daughter her letters. He shifted in the chair. The fabric of his breeches was suddenly insufficient.
He was not Wickham.
The thought was cold water, and he needed it. He was not a man who took advantage of desperate women. She would be under his roof, in his care, dependent on him for her livelihood and her family’s survival. He would be her employer and her protector, and if there was a circle in hell reserved for men who confused the two, he would not be occupying it. She had never wanted him. She had made thatclear with a thoroughness that left no room for interpretation. He would respect it, and keep his hands, his thoughts, and his treacherous, inconvenient desire to himself.
He would.
He finished the brandy and undressed. He got into his bed. It was too large for one person. The sheets were cool, smooth, and entirely wrong, because his body was still radiating heat and his mind was still painting pictures he had not authorised. Her jaw, her throat, the shadow beneath her collarbone, the skin below the mended collar that he would never see and could not stop imagining.
He pressed his face into the pillow and groaned.
Tomorrow would be agony dressed as employment and he knew it. But it would be more than he had yesterday.
Sleep, he commanded his brain.
It did not obey.
Four