She met his eyes. "That I do not despise you. That I have not despised you for some time. That the contempt I performed was a costume I wore because the alternative -- admitting that Fitzwilliam Darcy made me feel things I could not control -- was more frightening than any villain Wickham could have invented."
The dance ended. They stood facing each other, and Darcy realized he was smiling. Not the near-smile, not the twitch at the corner of his mouth that Elizabeth had catalogued so carefully. An actual smile. He felt it on his face like sunlight, unfamiliar and warm.
"You are smiling," she said, and she sounded astonished.
"You have given me reason."
"I have given you an apology and a confession of emotional cowardice. These are not typically occasions for smiling."
"They are when the woman making them is you."
She laughed. The sound cut through the noise of the assembly like a bell, bright and startled and real, and the heads that turned toward them saw something they had not expected: Miss Elizabeth Bennet laughing at something Mr. Darcy hadsaid, and Mr. Darcy looking at her as though the rest of the world had just become irrelevant.
The evening that followed was unlike any they had shared. They walked together in the garden behind the assembly rooms, Jane and Bingley a convenient twenty paces ahead, lost in their own quiet conversation and making no effort whatsoever to chaperone.
The night was cold, the sky clear, stars sharp as pins above the bare trees. Their breath made ghosts in the air. Elizabeth's arm was through his, and the pressure of her hand against his forearm was a steady warmth that he felt through coat and shirt and skin.
"Tell me about Georgiana," she said.
No one asked about Georgiana. His aunt inquired after her accomplishments. Society asked after her prospects. No one asked about her, and the fact that Elizabeth did -- with genuine concern, with the voice of a woman who had wept over a stranger's pain because a letter told her of it -- made something crack inside him.
"She is the best person I know," he said. "She is gentle and kind and so afraid of the world that she barely speaks above a whisper in company. She plays piano like an angel and believes she is not good enough. She trusts too easily and then does not trust at all, because the one time she gave her trust fully, it was used to destroy her."
"Ramsgate."
"Ramsgate."
Elizabeth's hand tightened on his arm. "You saved her."
"I arrived in time. That is not the same as saving her. The damage was done. She has not been the same since, and I --" His voice caught. He cleared his throat. "I hired the woman. Mrs. Younge. Wickham recommended her and I did not question it because I was too busy, too distracted, too confident that my judgment was infallible. My sister nearly eloped with a predator because I was too proud to ask questions."
"You were deceived by a man who deceives everyone. That is not pride. That is trust, and trust is not a failing."
He looked at her. In the starlight, her face was silver and shadow, her eyes luminous, and she was looking at him with an expression he had never seen before: not challenge, not defiance, not the grudging respect of a woman who had been proved wrong. Something warmer. Something that made his breath unsteady.
"You are being kind to me," he said. "I am not accustomed to that."
"Then you have been keeping poor company."
"The best company I have ever kept is yours. Even when you were trying to destroy me."
"I was never trying to destroy you. I was trying to resist you. There is a difference."
The word resist hung between them, loaded with everything they had done and everything they had not. He stopped walking. She stopped with him. They stood in the garden path with the stars above and the distant sound of the assembly behind them, and the twenty paces between themselves and Jane might as well have been twenty miles.
"Is that what this is?" he asked. "Resistance?"
"It was." She tilted her face up. "I am less certain what it is now."
He wanted to kiss her. The wanting was a physical force, a gravitational pull that operated at the cellular level, and it required every ounce of restraint he possessed to stand still and let her choose the distance between them.
"Your letter," she said. "The things you wrote about me. About what I --"
"Every word was true."
"I know." She said it simply, without deflection, and the simplicity was more intimate than any touch. "I know they were true. I could feel the truth of them. That is what frightened me most."
"Are you still frightened?"
