“Do you know what I have never told you?” he said.
“You have told me a great many things, Fitzwilliam. I could not begin to catalogue what you have left out.”
“When I had this room built. I told you it was because you see things clearly. That you should have a room where the light matches.”
“I remember. I ruined your waistcoat.”
“You did. Comprehensively.” His thumb traced a slow line along her forearm. “But that was not the whole of it. I built it because I wanted you to have what Mrs. Harlow had. Not the painting. The room itself. A place that was entirely yours. That existed for no other reason than because someone who loved you wanted you to have it.”
Her throat tightened. Four months of marriage and he could still undo her with a sentence.
“You built me a glass house,” she said, “because a man built his wife one a century ago, and the story of it moved you.”
“I built you a glass house because I wanted to be the kind of husband who builds glass houses. The kind who pays attention. The kind who does not retreat into his library and let the distance grow until it cannot be crossed.” He pressed his mouth against her hair. “My father would have built my mother one, if she had asked. But she never asked, and he never thought tooffer, and by the time he understood what she needed it was too late.”
She turned in his arms. Looked up at him. The late light caught his face, and he was not the man she had met at the Meryton assembly. He was the man who had ridden into a storm for her. Who had held her in a freezing cottage and told her the truth about his wounds. Who was standing in a glass room he had built because he refused to make his father's mistakes.
“It is not too late for us,” she said.
“No.” He kissed her forehead. Her temple. The bridge of her nose. “It is not too late for us.”
She rose on her toes and kissed him properly. With the unhurried attention of a woman who knows she has a lifetime to do this and intends to make every instance count. He responded in kind, one hand sliding into her hair, the other settling at the small of her back, and when she pulled away his eyes were dark and his breathing had changed.
“The light is the same,” he said. His voice had dropped into the lower register she knew as well as she knew her own pulse. “In here. When the sun comes through the glass at this angle. It is the same light as the cottage.”
“I know.” She settled against his chest, her head beneath his chin, and let the warmth of him and the warmth of the glass room hold her. “That is why I come here.”
His hand moved to her waist. His thumb traced a slow circle against her hip through the fabric of her dress, and the intention in the gesture was unmistakable.
“Jane and Mr. Bingley will arrive within the hour,” she said.
“Yes.” He kissed her ear.
“I should change for dinner.”
“You should.” He kissed her throat.
“You are not making any effort to release me,” Elizabeth protested.
“I am not.”
She was about to answer when she felt it.
Low in her belly. Not the morning nausea that had plagued her the previous month. This was a flutter, as though a bird had brushed its wing against the inside of her.
She went still.
It came again. Like bubbles rising, or the brush of a fingertip from within. So faint that if she had been walking, if she had been doing anything other than standing still in his arms, she would have missed it.
She pressed her hand to her stomach.
“Elizabeth?” His arms tightened around her. He had felt her go rigid. “What is it? Are you unwell?”
She could not speak. The flutter had stopped, but the knowledge of it had not.
“Elizabeth. You are frightening me.”
“I am not unwell.” Her voice came out strange. Thick and unsteady. She took his hand and drew it from her waist to her stomach and pressed it flat. He would not be able to feel whatshe had felt. It was too early for that. But she needed his hand there, anyway.
