It must be because she was in a place where nothing and no one mattered anymore, where she had lost all sense of anything. There was no up or down, no north star. She must feel incredibly unbalanced.
He reached out for her before thinking better of it. He put a hand on her shoulder. “Oh, heavens,” he murmured. “I’m ever so sorry. You don’t deserve to have so many tribulations heaped upon you.”
Her lower lip started to tremble. “I am quite well, Mr. Darcy, I assure you. I’m managing admirably, and there have beencertain compensations, like the money and the house and… and the marriage.” But her voice cracked.
“What’s that?” he said. “What about the marriage?”
She looked away, her eyes shining, and she only shook her head back and forth, very quickly.
“It is as I said. He spirited you off and abandoned you and he did not tell anyone or make arrangements for you or treat you like a wife. He treated you like a strumpet, in fact, and when I see him again, I am going to wring his neck,” said Mr. Darcy, his voice growing more heated with each word, his hand still heavy on her shoulder.
She let out something like a sob and she ducked her head down.
He squeezed her shoulder.
She reached up to wipe at her eye. “I’m not crying,” she said in a voice full of tears.
“It’s all right if you are,” he said.
“No, it’s not proper, not done, to be so emotional—”
“Nothing about anything with you and I has been proper in some time,” he cut her off.
She looked up at him.
He wiped at the wetness on her face with his thumb.
She sagged against the place where he had her shoulder, and more tears slipped out over her cheeks.
He caught all of them with his fingers, gently brushing them away.
They held each other’s gaze, and he became aware of her in a way that he knew he shouldn’t be aware of her, aware of her warmth and her breath and the shape of her bosom as she heaved, and the way her nose got red when she was crying and he thought of crushing her against him, holding her tightly in his arms.
It had only been recently that he had been contemplating how little occasion it was he had to touch another person, and he thought the touch of Elizabeth might be the finest touch he could imagine.
“Why?” she whispered, shaking her head at him.
“Why?” he said.
“Why are you this way with me? I think you should hate me, sir. I really and truly think—”
“You keep coming back to this,” he said. “Do you not?”
“You don’t even think I’m pretty,” she said.
A laugh burst out of him. “What? Obviously, I think you’re pretty.”
“No, but you—” She flushed, color high on her cheeks. “Obviously,” she said. “But you have never said so.”
“Certainly, I have.”
“You have not,” she said firmly. “But I suppose I must have realized that you must… that somehow…” She shook her head again, but this time as if she were trying to clear it. She met his gaze once more. “The woman who told me about Larilane thought he was a fey prince. She said I was half-faerie and that men must be going out of their heads with devotion to me.”
Mr. Darcy’s hand fell away from her shoulder. He took a step back.
She let out a laugh herself now, but it was surprised, wondering. “Well, that’s clearly fanciful and foolish.”
“Yes,” he said, nodding. “Fanciful.” But what was itaboutthis woman, in the end?
