“No, you characterized it as I did not feel it incumbent upon me to make the acquaintance of every person in the room. But I have a translation.”
Darcy laughed. She shifted closer. Her forehead came to rest against his, and they breathed the same air, and the space between them was less than an inch and contained everything they had ever been afraid of.
“I do not want to run any more,” she said. “I am tired of running. I am tired of being afraid of wanting things. I am tired of measuring every feeling against my parents' marriage and finding it guilty before it has had the chance to prove itself innocent.”
“Elizabeth.”
He said her name the way his father used to say his mother's. As if it were the axis on which the world turned. As if the syllables themselves were a kind of prayer. She heard it. He could see that she heard it, because her breath caught and her eyes went dark and something shifted in her expression that was not fear but its opposite. The decision to stop being afraid.
“I want to choose this,” she said. “Not because we are trapped here or propriety demands it. And not because I am afraid of what people will say. I want to choose you because I know you. Because you rode into a storm for me. You followed me into the fog without anger. And you held me while I wept and did not ask for a single thing in return. Because when I told you about my parents, you did not flinch.”
Her voice steadied. Found its center.
“You answered with your own wound, and it matched mine, and I think —”
She stopped. Started again.
“I think that is what love is. Not the wanting, though the wanting is there, God knows. But the matching. The way your wound fits against mine and neither of us bleeds alone any more.”
He kissed her.
Not the way he had kissed her by the fire. That had been urgency and need and the desperate pressure of desire held back too long. This was something else. This was slow and deliberate, and it tasted of salt and morning and the terrifying tenderness of two people who had stopped pretending.
Her hand slid from his chest to his jaw. His arm drew her closer, and this time he did not hold himself rigid, did not maintain the careful distance he had kept through the night. He let his body press against hers the way it wanted to. Let his hand settle against the bare skin at the small of her back, where her shift had ridden up.
She breathed against his mouth and pressed closer.
Her fingers threaded into his hair, and he felt the entire length of her against him, warm and alive and choosing him, and the wanting that had been banked all night flared low and hot in his belly.
Her breath changed, and her hips shifted against his, and the kiss deepened into something that tasted less like tenderness and more like a promise of what was coming.
He did not pull back. She did not pull back. But the kiss gentled on its own, settling from that bright, dangerous edge into something steady and warm, a fire that would burn for a long time rather than consuming itself all at once.
She was the strongest woman he had ever met. She had survived her parents' marriage and Collins's proposal and a night in a snowstorm and her own fear, and she was here, in his arms, choosing him, and the magnitude of that choice left him breathless.
When they drew apart, her eyes were open. His were open. There was nothing hidden between them.
“Your father was right,” she said. “Real love. Not comfortable nothing.”
“Indeed,” he agreed. “Something more inconvenient and vastly more terrifying.”
“And worth it?”
He thought of his father's face by the lake. The steadiness of his gaze. The absolute certainty in his voice.
“Every day,” he said. “For the rest of our lives.”
13
THE PROMISE
They kissed again.It was a kiss that was less about want and more about confirmation.You are here. I am here. This is real.
When Elizabeth pulled back, her hand was still on his jaw. She could feel his pulse beneath her fingertips, fast and steady.
“If I had made it back to Longbourn before anyone discovered us here,” she said. “If there were no compromise, no scandal, no obligation.” She searched his face. “Would you have pursued me?”
His eyes were very dark in the gray light.
