"I love you," she said against his mouth.
"I know." His hands settled on her waist, drawing her closer, and he kissed her forehead, her temple, the tip of her nose, each contact gentle as a benediction. "I love you too. Magnificently."
"Three times in one letter."
"It bore repeating."
She laughed softly and leaned into him, and they stood in the gallery at Pemberley, surrounded by the painted eyes of his ancestors, and the house settled around them like an embrace.
Outside, the first snow of winter was falling, quiet and white and new, covering everything with a fresh page. And Elizabeth, who had come to Pemberley expecting a house, found instead a home.
Chapter 11: The Night Garden
Elizabeth could not sleep.
The bed at Pemberley was absurdly comfortable -- goose down and lavender-scented linen and curtains heavy enough to block the world -- and she could not sleep, because the world she wanted was not outside the curtains but down the corridor, in his own room, probably lying awake in his own absurdly comfortable bed, and the knowledge of this was making rest impossible.
Three days at Pemberley had taught her things about Fitzwilliam Darcy that no letter could convey. She had learned that he took his coffee black and his eggs soft and his morning silence seriously, that he read correspondence standing up as though sitting might weaken his resolve, that he was gentle with his sister and patient with his staff and entirely incapable of leaving a crooked picture frame uncorrected. She had learned that he walked the grounds every morning before breakfast, regardless of weather, and that he checked on his horse himself rather than leaving it to the grooms, and that when he thought no one was looking, he stood at the windows of the gallery and watched the lake with an expression that was not quite melancholy and not quite peace, but something in between.
She had learned that living in proximity to a man she loved and desired and could not yet have was a form of exquisite torture that no one had thought to warn her about.
The house was silent. The clock in the hallway had struck midnight an hour ago. Elizabeth slipped out of bed, pulled a wrapper over her nightgown, and padded barefoot through corridors she was still learning to navigate. The house was warm -- Pemberley's fires were maintained with a generosity that spoke of deep pockets and deeper concern for comfort -- and the stone floors were cool but not cold beneath her feet.
She found the garden door unlocked. The night outside was clear, the earlier snow melted, the air cold enough to sting but not bitter. A nearly full moon hung above the park, turning the grounds to silver and shadow, and the formal garden behind the house lay in a geometry of hedges and paths and stone, beautiful and still.
She walked among the roses. They were bare this late in the year, thorny stalks stripped of color, but the structure of the garden was elegant even in its winter bones. A stone bench sat beneath an arbor of dormant jasmine, and she settled onto it and tilted her face to the sky and breathed the sharp, clean air and tried to quiet the wanting that had taken up permanent residence in her body.
She heard his step on the gravel. She did not turn. She smiled.
"You are stalking me, Mr. Darcy."
"I am taking a constitutional. At one in the morning. In December. A perfectly normal activity."
"Perfectly."
He materialized from the shadows, and the sight of him in the moonlight did things to her equilibrium that should have been illegal. He was in shirtsleeves and breeches, his feet in boots hastily pulled on, his coat absent, his hair disheveled ina way that suggested either restless sleep or no sleep at all. Without the armor of his coat and cravat, he looked younger, rawer, more human.
"You could not sleep either," she said.
"I have not slept properly since the night we met." He sat beside her on the bench. The stone was narrow, and his thigh pressed against hers. "You have made sleep an impossibility."
"How flattering. I have replaced rest itself."
"You have replaced everything." He said it simply, without performance, and the honesty of it settled over her like a blanket.
They sat in silence for a moment. The garden was extraordinarily quiet, the kind of silence that exists only in the country, far from roads and towns, where the only sounds are night birds and wind and the distant murmur of water. The lake gleamed beyond the park. The house rose behind them, dark except for the single lamp Elizabeth had left burning in her window.
"I have been thinking," she said, "about fear."
"An encouraging midnight topic."
"You told me in the garden at Longbourn that you were afraid. You said the things most worth having are the things that frighten us most."
"You said that, actually."
"Did I? It sounds like something I would say." She looked at him. In the moonlight, his face was all sharp planes and soft shadows, and his eyes were fixed on her with an intensity that made her pulse accelerate. "I have been afraid for most of thisengagement. Afraid of you, of what I felt, of what it meant to want something I had not chosen. But I am not afraid anymore."
"No?"
