"Around one. I tried not to wake anyone." He looked at the toaster. "I was hungry."
"You were hungry," Elizabeth repeated. She lowered the bat slowly. Her heart was still going at a speed that was frankly unreasonable for a Tuesday morning. "At two in the morning? You came back from a work trip, let yourself into the house in the middle of the night, and decided that what the situation required was toast."
"I had not eaten since noon."
"That is not the point."
"What is the point?"
“It is two in the morning. I thought you were a burglar.” She gestured at the makeshift weapon in her hand.
He looked at the bat again with an expression that was not quite a smile but was in the approximate vicinity of one.
“What exactly were you planning to do with that?” he asked.
“Defend myself, obviously.”
“Against a burglar. With a baseball bat.”
“Yes,” she said. “I was absolutely prepared to use it.”
He looked at her for a moment. Something moved across his face that she could not immediately classify and did not particularly want to examine at two in the morning in her nightgown.
She was not examining it.
She was also not examining the fact that he was standing in the kitchen without a shirt, which was information her brain had registered, filed, and was now retrieving with an enthusiasm she found deeply inconvenient. She had seen this before. Once. Eight years ago, briefly, in the specific context of a month she had spent a considerable amount of energy not thinking about since. She had apparently not been as successful at forgetting about it as she had believed, because her memory had produced the relevant information with immediate and unwelcome accuracy.
He had not changed. That was the irritating part. Eight years, and he looked exactly the same. His chest was defined, precise, like something engineered rather than accidental, with a small line of hair just below his navel that looked almost deliberate.
Elizabeth blinked twice, as though that might erase the thought.
It did not.
There was also the deeply unfortunate fact that she was standing in a kitchen at two in the morning in a nightgown, holding a baseball bat, while Fitzwilliam Darcy was shirtless in the same room. She could almost hear Jane and Charlotte laughing about the situation.
Elizabeth looked anywhere but at him, adjusting her grip on the bat. “You… might consider wearing a shirt.”
“I was not expecting company at two in the morning.”
“It is not company. It is a shared living arrangement, and common decency suggests—”
“Elizabeth.” His voice was even. Patient, in the particular way that suggested he was choosing patience deliberately. “Can we have a civilised conversation without you being rude to me?”
“I am not being rude. I am making a reasonable observation about shared living standards.”
“‘Common decency?’ For not wearing a shirt in my own kitchen… when I thought I was alone?”
“It is not your kitchen.”
Darcy paused, then corrected himself. “Our kitchen.”
She opened her mouth. Closed it. He was right, and they both knew it, which made it worse.
“Fine,” she said. “Our kitchen. In our kitchen, in the middle of the night, while Mia is asleep upstairs, perhaps the goal could be to make toast without waking the entire apartment. That is a reasonable request.”
“The toaster is louder than the ones I am used to.”
“The toaster you are used to is probably some overpriced thing you bought from an engineering company no one has ever heard of.”
