This washomenow.
A small part of her soul had hoped she could escape and go back to Longbourn, go back to Papa, and have everything be the same again. Hoped that she could become a girl again, a maiden, a happy laughing creature attending assemblies and reading books without a real worry in her head, but she couldn’t.
This was her life, married to this strange, confusing, intense, and ever changing man.
She hugged him back tightly, needing the comfort, even though it shamed her to need it.
And then she started crying.
Darcy seemed to have no idea what to do with that, at first, he shifted to look her in the eyes, but Elizabeth squeezed him harder. “No, no. Just let me cry, I beg you.”
He held her tightly and rubbed his hand up and down her back. “There, there. Lizzy, there, there.”
Slowly she stopped crying, smiled and began to feel warm again.
He gave her his handkerchief, and she wiped her eyes, and blew her nose in it, and then when she offered it back, he told her to keep it. There was a deep tenderness in his eyes, and Elizabeth saw that he had been moved by the chance to take care of her.
Elizabeth smiled and went to the water basin. She picked up the extremely soft towel, and, after marveling for a second at how fluffy and soft it was, soaked it. She scrubbed it over her face, and then around her neck, under her bun of hair, the whole time aware of Mr. Darcy watching her intently.
She looked at him and smiled at him, unable right now to feel anything but an affection towards him that she could notunderstand.
He was who he was in the end.
“Do you wish to do anything with the rooms?” Darcy asked, glancing around. “The style is quite old.”
Elizabeth shook her head. “No, no. I don’t want an extra expense for that.”
“It is proper when the new mistress comes for her to—”
Elizabeth raised her hand. “Please, I beg you. Not right now.”
He looked at her closely and then walked over and gave her another tight hug.
She buried her face in his chest, and breathed deeply, that scent of dust from the road, the echo of hiseau de cologne, and the spicy familiar scent of his body. “Thank you.”
He kissed her forehead again. “We do not need to tour the house at all today. You could wait here till dinner, or even till tomorrow if you wish to rest. I would—”
“No, no, no.” Elizabeth smiled up at him. “That is not needed at all. Besides, I like Mrs. Reynolds. At least my first impression of her.”
“I hope so, I have known her since I was four, and she is one of the finest persons in England.”
“Ah, then Imustlike her,” Elizabeth said. “But I will strive to control my contrary instincts and continue to like her even though I have been told that it is my duty to do so.”
Darcy laughed. “Now I begin to understand you. That is very like you.”
“I have told you, I never wish to say anything,” Elizabeth let down her hair as she spoke, and then began to pin it up again in a more comfortable way, “that will not astonish and amaze everyone, and be passed down as a parable.”
He grinned at her.
Elizabeth then pushed him towards the door to hisdressing room, which adjoined hers. “Now go, so that I can change my dress.”
“But I want to stay,” he replied, and he kissed her.
Elizabeth sank into the kiss, needing the comfort right now of that closeness, that binding of herself to her husband. Even if she was scared of this life and its irreversibility, she also found comfort in Darcy as the central person in this new life.
His fingers played along the line of buttons on the back of her dress. “You don’t need Mary’s help to undress.”
Her insides tightened and responded to the low seductive tone of his voice.
