“You have been awake this entire time,” she said. It was not a question.
“The fire required tending.”
“The fire is nearly out.”
Something flickered across his face, not quite a smile, but the ghost of one. “It has been a stubborn night.”
He rose and crossed to the storeroom, returning with the last of the split logs. Two of them. He fed them to the embers with the deliberate care of a man rationing his resources, coaxing the flames back to life with practiced patience. The fire climbed, caught, and steadied. But even as its warmth pushed outward, the wind answered with a gust that rattled the windows and sent a draft scything across the floor.
Elizabeth shivered. The blankets were not enough. She could feel the cold working its way through the wool, through her skin, settling into the marrow of her bones with quiet persistence. Her fingers were numb. Her toes had gone past numb into something closer to absence.
Mr. Darcy noticed. Of course, he noticed. She was beginning to think he noticed everything about her and had been doing so for far longer than she had realized.
He stood by the fire, arms crossed, and she watched the calculation behind his eyes: the weighing of options, the discarding of solutions, the reluctant arrival at the one answer neither of them wanted to name.
“There are no more logs,” he said.
“I had gathered as much.”
“The fire will hold for perhaps two hours at this level. After that—” He stopped. Began again with the careful precision of a man choosing each word like a step across ice. “The blankets alone will not be sufficient. Body warmth is more effective than any fire.”
The suggestion settled between them like a stone dropped into still water.
Elizabeth felt heat climb her neck despite the cold. She knew he was right. She had read enough natural philosophy to understand the principle. Sailors used it, soldiers used it, shepherds used it with lambs born in snowstorms. There was nothing improper about the science of shared warmth.
But science felt very far away in a cottage at midnight, with a man she was only beginning to understand, while she wore nothing beneath these blankets but her own skin.
“You propose,” she said, pleased that her voice remained steady, “that we share the cot.”
“I propose that we share the blankets. On the floor, by the fire. The cot is too narrow, and the hearth provides additional warmth.” He paused. “I will remain fully clothed.”
The specificity of that reassurance told her how much thought he had already given to the logistics of this arrangement. She might have found it amusing under different circumstances. Under these, she found it oddly affecting, this careful, proud man, engineering propriety out of an impossible situation.
“Very well,” she said. “On the floor, by the fire. With your clothes on.”
“With my clothes on.”
“Then we are agreed.”
They were not agreed. They were both terrified, and the agreement was a thin rope bridge they were choosing to cross because the alternative was freezing to death on opposite sides of a gorge.
Mr. Darcy pulled the blankets from the cot while Elizabeth sat wrapped in the two she had claimed for herself, clutching them at her throat with a grip that was only partly about warmth. He arranged the bedding on the floor before the hearth with the methodical attention of a man setting up a military encampment — one blanket beneath, for the cold of the floorboards, the rest layered on top. He removed his boots but nothing else, not even his waistcoat, and when he lowered himself to the makeshift pallet and held the blankets open for her, his face the blank mask of a man who had retreated behind every wall he possessed.
Elizabeth rose from the cot.
The cold hit her, a vicious slap against skin that had been sheltered, however inadequately, by wool. She crossed the two steps to the fire quickly, blankets clutched around her, and lowered herself beside him.
For a moment they lay side by side, flat on their backs, a careful six inches of charged air between them. Elizabeth stared at the ceiling and listened to his breathing, which was not quite steady, and felt the heat of the fire on one side and the cold of the room on the other and the impossible, electrifying warmth of him justthere, separated from her by a space so small she could feel it like a living thing.
Six inches. That was all.
“This is absurd,” she said to the ceiling. “We are lying here like two effigies on a tomb, and I am still freezing.”
He exhaled. It might have been a laugh, tightly controlled. “What do you suggest?”
“I suggest you stop being so relentlessly proper and put your arm around me before I lose the feeling in my extremities.”
A beat of silence. Then his arm came around her.
