The wanting was the point. The wanting was the whole of it.
His eyes opened. He blinked. Focused. Found her face. The smile that spread across his features was slow and unguarded and so full of quiet joy that it made her throat ache.
“Good morning, Mrs. Darcy.”
“Good morning, Mr. Darcy.”
He caught her hand and pressed his lips to her palm. “Are you happy?”
She thought of her father's question in the library. Are you happy with this? Not resigned. Not dutiful. Happy.
“Completely,” she said.
He pulled her closer. She tucked herself against him, her head on his chest, his heartbeat steady beneath her ear.
EPILOGUE: SPRING AT PEMBERLEY
The daffodils had appeared overnight, or so it seemed. Elizabeth walked the lakeside path in the late afternoon light and counted them, golden heads nodding along the water's edge, so many that the bank looked as though someone had spilled a pot of paint across it.
Four months ago this had all been white.
She wore her shawl loose around her shoulders and thought about the woman she had been in that storm. That woman had been running. From Mr. Collins. From her mother. From the particular cage that marriage without love represented.
This woman was walking toward something. She was not entirely sure what it was yet, but it had been making itself known for two weeks now, in the mornings, with a persistence that could not be attributed to the richness of Pemberley's cook.
She had not told Darcy. Not yet. She wanted to be certain first, wanted to hold the possibility close and private for a little longer before she gave it to him and watched it become real.
She turned away from the lake and took the path that led through the kitchen garden, past the hothouse, to the small stone building at the edge of the formal grounds.
The glass roof caught the afternoon sun as she approached, and the warmth hit her when she opened the door. Trapped beneath the north-facing panes, the air was almost summery despite the April chill outside. Easels stood where the light fell strongest. Canvases leaned against the walls. The smell of linseed oil and turpentine hung faintly in the air, though Elizabeth had no particular talent for painting and the supplies were largely untouched. It did not matter. It had never been about the painting.
He had built her the cottage.
Not a copy. Not precisely. But the bones of it were here. The glass roof. The small stone hearth, cold now in the spring warmth but blackened from the winter months when she had come here to read and think and be alone with the memory of the place where everything changed. He had taken the Keeper's Folly and rebuilt its heart at the center of his estate, and the first time she had stood in this doorway and understood what he had done, she had wept so thoroughly into his waistcoat that he had been genuinely alarmed.
She stood in the center of the room now and tilted her face toward the light and closed her eyes.
She could hear the house from here. The distant clatter of preparations, the bustle of servants readying rooms. Jane and Bingley were expected before dinner, their first visit to Pemberley since the wedding, and the household had been in a state of pleasant agitation for two days.
Georgiana had been particularly anxious. She had changed her dress three times and asked Elizabeth twice whether her hair was suitable, and Elizabeth had taken the girl's hands and told her that Jane was the kindest person in England and would adore her instantly, and Georgiana had smiled with the shy, hopeful trust that was slowly replacing the nervous reserve she had worn like armor when Elizabeth first arrived.
They were building something, she and Georgiana. Not the easy warmth of sisters who had grown up sharing secrets, but something quieter, more deliberate. Elizabeth brought laughter into rooms that had been silent too long, and Georgiana brought a sweetness that made Elizabeth want to be gentler than she naturally was, and the combination was producing a relationship that surprised them both with its steadiness.
Darcy watched them with an expression that Elizabeth had learned to recognize as the face of a man who is receiving something he wanted so badly he had been afraid to ask for it.
The door opened behind her.
She did not turn. It was not necessary for her to. The sound of his step was as familiar to her as her own breathing, and when he embraced her from behind, she instinctively leaned into him, sensing the comforting solidity of his chest and the pulse of his heart against her shoulder blade.
“You escaped,” he said against her hair.
“I did not escape. It was a strategic retreat.”
“From what?”
“From Mrs. Reynolds, who wished to discuss the dinner menu for the fourth time. And Georgiana, who has changed her dressagain. And perhaps from myself, because I find I wanted five minutes of quiet before the house fills up.”
His arms tightened around her. His chin rested on the top of her head, and they stood in the golden light.
