“Did you imagine it was Elizabeth?” he roared. “Is that what was in your head whenever you were in her company?”
Bloody hell, his face hurt. He rolled onto his hands and knees. His head swam, and his ribs screamed. “No, I?—”
“As you sat at my table and slept under my roof, whenever you danced a reel with her, were you pretending to yourself that you had laid with her?”
Darcy loomed over him, his raised voice fearsome, but nothing to the murderous look in his eye. Much like a cornered cat, Bingley struck out. “Yes, then! Is that what you wish to hear? There were times I imagined an intimacy that was not mine to envisage.” And he instantly regretted it.
Darcy slammed his palm into the wall above his head. “She ismy wife, for God’s sake! Does that meannothingto you?”
Flinching against a blow that did not come, Bingley got a foot underneath him and hauled himself to his feet with a grunt. “But I never acted on it!”
“You tried to abduct her, for Christ’s sake!”
“Abduct her?” he cried, clutching at his ribs and sidling away. “Blast it, Darcy, what do you take me for?”
“I heard no word from Pemberley for two weeks before reports of your reprehensible actions reached me. If I discover that you hurt one hair on her head in that time, I swear?—”
“Good God, I did not, and I would not!” He pushed away from the wall, taking a wide berth around and away from the Titan. “You received no word because I took her letter, not because I tried to take her!”
Had he a needle and thread to hand, he would gladly have sewn his own mouth shut, for nothing that came out of it did him any good, and Darcy looked about ready to tear him in two. “It was not my design to cause you any anxiety. I took it on a whim. It was left out for posting. I saw it as I left the house, and I knew Lizzy must have written of what I said to her, and then I—well, I thought that if you read it, you would kill me.”
“I might.”
That, at least, would stop his damned runaway tongue! “I am sorry, Darcy! I took the letter. It was wrong, and I should not havedone it, but I did not attempt to abduct Lizzy! I thought she wanted to go!”
“You thought what?”
“I thought she was miserable!”
Darcy stared at him with much the same expression of incredulity as Elizabeth had when he suggested the same to her. “And you claim to love her? You do not even know her.”
“I fully comprehend that now. She made it perfectly clear that I was mistaken. But it is not so very difficult for somebody to misjudge a woman’s feelings, is it Darcy? Had you not done the same with Jane, none of this would have happened!”
He took several hasty steps backwards when Darcy lunged towards him, bellowing furiously. “Was this retribution enough for you? Taking my wife and child from me? I suppose, given the indifference with which you have just parcelled your unborn child off to another life, I ought not to be surprised that you did not blink an eye at the prospect of stealing mine.”
The backs of Bingley’s legs hit a chair; he could retreat no farther.
Darcy stepped close, his eyes savage. “Myson, Bingley, myheir!”
Bingley recoiled. ’Til that moment, there had seemed a world of difference between a swollen belly under a travelling cloak in a public house in Liverpool and a living, breathing child of such import as to make the Titan spit and rage. Amelia’s remark about forsaking his child suddenly became the most heartrending thing in the world. With what callous disregard had he sent his own child away! With what unspeakable indifference had he almost taken Darcy’s! He collapsed into the chair and looked up at his friend, who was all but panting with emotion. Yet, to Bingley’s dismay, it was no longer fury suffusing his countenance, but profound anguish.
“They are the two most precious things to me in all the world,” Darcy said in a voice low and hard. “Have you any idea what it would do to me were I to lose either of them? I would rather see Pemberley razed to the ground.”
Something turned over in Bingley’s gut. Never before had he seen his friend thus, and therein lay the rub to all his senseless presumptions. In his very own words,“If one were to dub inscrutability the harbinger of indifference, Darcy could be labelled the most unfeeling of all men.”He did not disdain Elizabeth. He loved her!
A nauseating torrent of remorse overtook him. How could he havethought so ill of thisman, whose rectitude he had ever aspired to emulate—who had ever been the most stalwart of friends? How could he have been so wilfully blind to his own iniquity? “Forgive me, Darcy. I have been an absolute cur, but none of it has been consciously done. It is as you once said. I am impetuous. I do not think of consequences when I act.”
“And now you have been careless with my family, and I will not tolerate it.”
Bingley’s heart reared up into his throat. He gulped it down and pressed himself back into his chair as far away from Darcy as possible. “Do you mean to call me out?”
“I suppose you would ask that,” Darcy spat disdainfully. “I ought to, for you have used me in the most despicable way imaginable. But I do not share your recklessness. I shall not risk my family’s interests to gratify my abhorrence of you.”
Bingley could not recall a single time when Darcy had spoken severely of him. It wounded him grievously to hear it now—not because it was untrue but because Darcy was the very best of men, and in treating him thus, he had carelessly, foolishly, irrevocably squandered his friendship. “What would you have me do?”
Darcy sneered. “Still, you are asking me that?” He stalked to the door. “Leave. After that, I care not as long as I never see you again.”
He left the room, and just as Bingley thought his day could get no worse, Jane appeared in the doorway.
