I lifted her hand, and now I was holding her hand in both of mine. I rubbed my thumbs over her knuckles. “No, it’s nothing the same.”
“Even so, I’m sorry,” she said.
“I don’t need you to look out for me, Elizabeth,” I whispered. “I can take care of myself.”
She nodded. “I can take care of myself, too.”
“As long as it doesn’t require riding horses,” I said in a soft voice, tracing my thumbs over her fingers.
She gasped. “Yes, and you’ll be fine as long as you don’t have to talk to strangers.”
I chuckled. I lifted her hand. I turned it over and surveyed the inside of it. Then, I did something very awful. I planted a kiss in the middle of her palm.
She sucked in an audible breath.
We gazed into each other’s eyes.
I swallowed. “We need to try harder first,” I said in a guttural voice.
“You mean, we need to try to get to Friday harder?” she said.
“I won’t just ruin you because of… we’ve barely tried.”
“Would I be ruined if no one knew?”
I nodded. “I think so.”
She looked up at me, there in the stables, in the moonlight, and she was impossibly lovely and impossibly small, and I knew she was mine, that she’d been mine now for a string of Thursdays, and that if I wanted her, I could just… have her.
I kissed her forehead.
She shut her eyes.
CHAPTER NINE
elizabeth
“So,” I was saying, and it was the wee hours of the morning, and we were sitting atop the carriage together, taking turns driving it as we bounced over the road back towards Rosings, “if we can get ourselves to Friday, then it will be as if none of this happened.”
“True enough, I suppose,” he said.
We had not stayed for the ball. I suppose that phase of it, the phase where we were having fun, it was over now.
“And if that is the case, if we are back the way things were, we won’t be together, obviously. It’s not as if you wish to marry me.”
“I do, actually,” he said. “I wish very badly to marry you.”
“No, you wish to bed me,” I said. “You wish that, and you said that to Lady Catherine that time—”
“Oh, please, I beg you, let us never speak of—”
“And you feel guilty about it,” I said. “So, now we are going to exhaust every avenue we can before you give in. But if we manage to get to Friday, I lose you.”
His lips parted. “Since when did you want me, Elizabeth?” he said hoarsely.
“I don’t know.” I gazed off into the darkness. “I’m not sure when it started, but it did, and I do. You would rather break my heart than be with me, that is how this feels. You wish to make it so that we can’t be married, when we could… with each other… now.” I wasn’t sure what I wanted, truthfully, but this felt a bit like a rejection. Maybe it was the enormity of it, of whatever it was we were even considering with each other, maybe I wanted some way to put him off.
“Break both our hearts,” he sighed. “I would breakbothour hearts, Elizabeth. But it would be better for us to be heartbroken than for me to treat you with dishonor. You deserve better than that.”
