Darcy sat in the chair by the hearth, his legs stretched toward the fire, his greatcoat draped across his lap as a makeshift blanket he did not need. The cottage was warm now, almost uncomfortably so. He had built the fire too high, feeding it with the urgency of a man who needed to keep his hands occupied, and the heat pressed against his face and chest like a living thing.
He should bank it. Let it settle to embers and build it again before dawn. The wood supply in the storeroom was finite, and if the storm continued through tomorrow?—
He did not bank it.
He stared at the flames instead and tried very hard not to think about what had happened over the wine.
My mother painted.
He had said it. Three words, spoken to a woman he had known for a matter of weeks, a woman whose family he had catalogued as beneath his notice, a woman who had every reason to despise him and who wielded her wit like a blade he was never quick enough to parry.
Three words, and he had watched her facechange.
The sharp intelligence had not left her eyes — it never did — but something else had arrived alongside it. Something soft and startled and almost tender, as if he had placed a living thing in her hands and she was being careful not to crush it. She had not pressed him. Had not asked the obvious questions:When did she die? What was she like? Do you miss her?She had simply sat with the silence he offered and let it be enough.
He had wanted to tell her everything.
The words had crowded behind his teeth like prisoners at a gate, his mother's studio at Pemberley, the tall windows she insisted upon, the way the light fell across her face when she worked. He remembered the smell of linseed oil that still clung to the room years after her death, because his father had forbidden the servants to scrub the floorboards clean. And the portrait she had painted of his father. Not the formal one that hung in the gallery, stiff and lifeless, but the small one she kept in her studio, where he was laughing, his cravat loosened, his eyes bright with a warmth that Darcy had not seen on that face since the day they buried her.
Darcy had wanted to crack himself open and show Elizabeth Bennet every hidden room.
He had not. He had reached for the wine instead, and the moment had passed like a door swinging shut on oiled hinges before he could decide whether to hold it open.
But the wanting had not passed. It sat in his chest now, heavy and warm and entirely unwelcome, like an ember he could neither fan into flame nor smother to ash.
Most stories are different from the inside.
He had said that too. It was the sort of thing one says when one means something else, when the real confession is too dangerous to speak aloud. He had been talking about the cottage, about the painter and the village children and the ghost story that had grown up around a woman whose only crime was loving her work. But Elizabeth had looked at him across the scarred table with those dark, knowing eyes, and he had seen the recognition land.
She understood he was not talking about the cottage at all.
He was talking about himself.
Darcy did not know how she had done it. He had spent thirty years building walls that his closest friends could not see past. Bingley, who thought him merely proud. His aunt, who thought him dutiful. Even Georgiana, who loved him without fully knowing him. And Elizabeth Bennet, in one evening, over stale biscuits and bad wine, had looked straight through the stone as if it were glass.
It terrified him.
The fire crackled, a log shifting and sending a cascade of sparks up the chimney, and Darcy's gaze moved without his permission to the cot in the corner.
She lay on her side, facing the fire, her body a long curve beneath the rough blankets. Her hair had dried into dark waves that spilled across the thin pillow and down her shoulder, catching the firelight in shades of auburn he had not noticed before. One arm lay outside the blanket, pale against the dark wool, her fingers curled. The blanket had slipped from her shoulder, revealing the line of her neck and the hollow at the base of her throat where her pulse beat, slow and steady and visible even from where he sat.
He looked away.
He looked back.
She was wearing nothing beneath those blankets. He knew this because he had heard the wet slap of fabric hitting the floor, the fumbling with laces, the quick desperate rustling of a woman trying to cover herself before the thin door between them could open. He knew it because he had helped her with the fastenings of her pelisse. And after, he had stood in that storeroom with his hands pressed flat against the shelves and his jaw clenched, listening to sounds he had no right to hear, breathing through his mouth because even the act of breathing felt too intimate, too close to the woman undressing mere feet away.
He had not moved. Had not opened that door. Had held himself still with a force of will that left him shaking, and when her voice had come —You may return, Mr. Darcy— he had needed a full breath before he could trust himself to walk through that door with anything resembling composure.
She was wearing nothing beneath those blankets, and she was asleep, and the firelight was painting gold across the curve of her neck, and he was thinking about it.
He needed to stop thinking about it.
He stood and crossed to the window, pressing his forehead against the cold glass. The shock of it helped. Outside, the storm raged on, snow driving horizontally past the panes in sheets so thick the world beyond the cottage had ceased to exist. There was nothing out there. No Netherfield, no Longbourn, no Meryton. No assemblies, no society, no expectations.
Just this cottage. This fire. This woman.
Think, he commanded himself.Be rational.
