“Because I would rather do this poorly in an inn parlour, than perfectly a fortnight hence if it meant I spent that fortnight not knowing.” He stopped, his hands very still at his sides. “I resolved in April never to importune you again. It would make me the worst sort of?—”
“Mr. Darcy?—”
He shook his head in a quick, sudden motion. “Allow me, I beg you. If I do not say it now, I shall lose my nerve, and I have very little to spare. May I?”
She nodded.
He drew a breath. “Have I any hope?”
For one moment, the room fell away from her.
There was no inn parlour, no church across the green, no Monday waiting to take her south. There was only the manbefore her, pale with the effort of asking her something very important, and the astonishing knowledge that the question she had thought she had lost all right to hear had been offered to her again.
All her doubts, all her arguments, all the long miserable morning at the window, went silent at once.
“All you need do is ask,” said Elizabeth.
“I already have.”
This startled a laugh from her. He had managed to ask her without breaking the rules of propriety. How very Mr. Darcy.
The question she had refused in Kent was still open, still hers, waiting only to be answered differently. And this time, she would not make him stand one moment longer in doubt.
“Then I accept,” she said.
For a moment neither of them moved, the only sound in the room the ragged breathing that Elizabeth was surprised to discover did not entirely belong to her intended.
Mr. Darcy crossed the small distance between them and took her into his arms.
It was not like the day before, in the rain, when he had placed his hand at the small of her back, for he had done the same for Miss Pelham. There was no river now. No storm. There was only Mr. Darcy, quite steady and not steady at all, taking her into his arms. Permission, once given, had undone the last of his restraint.
His arms came round her fully, one hand spread firm on her back between her shoulders, the other at her waist, and she felt him take one breath against her hair, then another. He had not understood, until that moment, how much of himself had been held in suspense.
“Elizabeth,” he whispered.
For several seconds she stood with her cheek against hiscoat, both hands clutching the lapels of it and allowing herself to feel the strange, astonishing fact of feeling safe there. Safe from uncertainty, from wondering whether the warmth in his eyes had only been kindness, or the terrible possibility that she had imagined him still loving her.
“You are sure?” he said, so low that the words were almost lost against her temple.
She drew back just far enough to look at him. “Are you?”
“Entirely.”
“Then so am I.”
That did something to him. She saw it—relief, disbelief, joy—and then his hand came up, careful despite everything, to touch her face.
“Elizabeth,” he said, this time in a voice so low that something fluttered in her chest.
She put her hand over his where it rested against her cheek.
He kissed her then.
The door was not six feet away and the inn was full of servants and travellers, but Elizabeth doubted that one thought of that was in his head. And when his lips touched hers, all thoughts fled from her as well. She had spent a great many days being sensible. Now she gave it up and kissed him back.
They stepped apart at last, though not very far.
“I should like it understood,” she managed, “that I am not in the habit of kissing gentlemen in inn parlours when that gentleman has not spoken to my father.”