"Liar."
Something warm moved behind his eyes. He crossed to the fire and stood with his back to it, facing her, the flames casting his shadow long and dark across the carpet. Outside, thunder rolled, a deep vibration that Elizabeth felt in her bones.
"Are you well?" he asked. "The storm came quickly."
"I am not afraid of storms, Mr. Darcy."
"I did not suggest you were. I asked if you were well."
She leaned against the bookshelf and studied him. He was in shirtsleeves, his coat abandoned somewhere, his cravat loosened, and the informality transformed him. Without the armor of his perfectly tailored coat, he looked younger, more approachable, less like the master of Pemberley and more like a man standing in a room with a woman he wanted.
"I am well," she said. "Better than well. I have been thinking about your letter."
"You have mentioned the letter before. If its contents distress you --"
"They do not distress me. They undo me." She said it plainly, because she had promised him honesty, and honesty was the only currency she had left. "I have read it seven times. I have memorized passages I should not have memorized. The paragraph about the room emptying when I left it -- I have carried it in my head for days like a song I cannot stop hearing."
He was very still. The firelight moved across his face, highlighting the sharp planes of his cheekbones, the tense line of his jaw, the way his hands hung at his sides with a carefully maintained looseness that she now recognized as restraint.
"I did not intend to cause you discomfort," he said.
"You did not cause discomfort. You caused -- reckoning. You forced me to look at myself honestly, and what I saw was a woman so terrified of feeling something she could not control that she built an entire fortress of contempt to avoid it. You held up a mirror, and I did not like my reflection."
"Elizabeth --"
"Let me finish." She pushed off the bookshelf and crossed to him, stopping two paces away. Close enough to see the rapid pulse at his throat. Close enough to feel the warmth radiating from him. "You asked me to see you. I am seeing you. I see a man who carried his sister's pain in silence because speaking it would hurt her more. I see a man who offered marriage to a woman who did not deserve the grace of his proposal and then laid his heart open in a letter because he would rather be rejected honestly than accepted under false pretenses. I see --"
Her voice faltered. She pressed on.
"I see a man I misjudged, and I am sorry. I am so sorry, Fitzwilliam."
His name again. She saw the effect of it on him: a visible shudder, a crack in the marble, his eyes closing for a moment as though the sound of it was too much.
"You have nothing to apologize for," he said roughly.
"I have everything to apologize for. But that is not why I came to the library tonight."
"Why did you come?"
She took the last two steps. Close enough now that she could see the firelight reflected in his eyes, the individual threads of his loosened cravat, the fine tremor in his hands as they fought to remain at his sides.
"Because the room emptied when you left it," she said. "And I followed you."
His breath caught. She heard it -- a sharp, involuntary intake that sounded almost painful. She reached up and touched his face, her fingers tracing the line of his jaw, and the sound he made at the contact was something between a sigh and a surrender, low and rough and so honest it made her ache.
"Elizabeth." His hands came up, hovering at her waist, not quite touching. "If we --"
"I know."
"I cannot -- if you touch me like that, I cannot be responsible for --"
"I know."
"We are not married."
"We are engaged. You said so yourself, in this very room. That night." She ran her thumb across his lower lip and watched his eyes darken. "You said, 'We are engaged, Miss Bennet.' Do you remember?"
"I remember everything about that night. I remember the way you tasted. I remember the sound you made when I --"
