"You risked Georgiana's secret to do it."
"I would have. If necessary." His arms tightened. "Some things are more important than secrets."
She lifted her face and kissed him, and the kiss was not slow or careful. It was urgent and grateful and slightly desperate, and when he lifted her and carried her up the staircase and into his rooms and closed the door, she did not think about propriety or scandal or what the servants might know.
She thought about his hands, sure and steady, undressing her with a tenderness that contrasted with the urgency of their mouths. She thought about his body against hers, skin on skin, the warmth of his bed after the cold of the garden. She thought about the sound he made when she pulled him down and saidI need you, and the way his whole body answered: a shudder, a surrender, a coming home.
They made love with a desperation born of fear and gratitude, fast and then slow, urgent and then tender, and when it was over, they lay tangled in his sheets, her head on his chest, his hand in her hair, and the silence was not empty but full: full of relief, full of love, full of the particular peace that comes from having weathered a storm together and emerged on the other side.
"Six more weeks," Elizabeth said.
"Six weeks until what?"
"Until I can do this every night without sneaking through corridors."
He laughed softly. Kissed the top of her head. "I will count every one."
She fell asleep in his bed, and this time, he slept too, deeply, dreamlessly, with her body warm against his and her breath steady on his skin, and when she slipped away before dawn, he felt the absence like a missing limb and began counting the days.
Forty-two. Forty-two days until she was his, openly, permanently, without apology.
He could endure forty-two days. He had endured a lifetime without her. Forty-two days was nothing.
It was everything. But he could endure it.
Chapter 13: Before the Wedding
Longbourn in January was a battlefield of wedding preparations, and Mrs. Bennet was the general.
Elizabeth returned from Pemberley to find her childhood home transformed into a command center of tulle, guest lists, and maternal hysteria. Her mother had commandeered the drawing room as a war room, spreading fabric samples across every surface and maintaining a running commentary on flower arrangements, seating charts, and the precise shade of white that would best complement Elizabeth's complexion, delivered at a volume that made the walls vibrate.
"Ivory, Lizzy, not cream! Cream is for cheese! You are marrying Mr. Darcy, not a dairy farmer!"
"Yes, Mama."
"And the lace must be French. English lace is for housemaids. I will not have my daughter married in housemaid lace."
"Yes, Mama."
"Have you written to the florist about the gardenias? I distinctly said gardenias. If he sends carnations, I will have a nervous attack."
"I believe you have already had three this week, Mama. You are meeting your quota."
Mr. Bennet, observing this exchange from behind the shield of his newspaper, caught Elizabeth's eye and offered a small, sympathetic grimace that was as close to paternal solidarity as he was capable of expressing. Elizabeth returned it with a look that said help me, and he responded with a look that said I have been trying to help for twenty-three years and have accepted my limitations.
She found him in his study that evening, after Mrs. Bennet had exhausted herself into sleep and the house had settled into its nighttime quiet. He was reading by candlelight, his spectacles perched on his nose, a glass of port at his elbow, looking exactly as he had looked every evening of Elizabeth's life: comfortable, sardonic, slightly elsewhere.
"Papa."
He looked up. Set down his book. The gesture was significant -- Mr. Bennet rarely set down his book for anyone, and the fact that he did so now told Elizabeth that this conversation had been anticipated.
"Sit down, Lizzy."
She sat in the chair across from his desk, the same chair where she had sat as a child to be read to, the same chair where she had received his consent to the engagement. The leather was cracked and soft, molded by years into a shape that fit her exactly.
"You have come to tell me something," he said.
"I have come to talk to you about the wedding."
