"And yet." Elizabeth pressed her fingers against her own lips, a gesture that was becoming a habit, a compulsive return to the scene of the crime. "My body appears to have formed an opinion independent of my mind, and they are not in agreement."
Jane smoothed the quilt between them. "Perhaps your body knows something your mind does not."
"My body is an idiot."
"Lizzy."
"What do you want me to say, Jane? That the kiss was -- that it meant --" She stopped. Took a breath. "It was a kiss. A very thorough one, admittedly. But a kiss does not erase the fact that Mr. Darcy considers himself my superior in every meaningful way, and I am to spend the rest of my life married to a man who proposed to me out of guilt."
"Did he seem guilty? When he proposed?"
Elizabeth thought about the morning room at Netherfield. Darcy's careful formality. The way he had absorbed her anger without flinching, the way he had said not dispassionately in a voice that suggested she had no idea -- none at all -- what he felt. The garden. The way he had looked at her in the fading light, as though she were a wound he could not stop touching.
"He seemed," she said slowly, "like a man in pain."
"Then perhaps guilt is not the right word."
Elizabeth pulled her hand free and stood. She could not have this conversation. Not yet. Not until she had sorted the tangle of fury and confusion and something else -- something hot and persistent and entirely unwelcome -- that the kiss had left inside her.
"I need air," she said.
Darcy called at Longbourn that afternoon, as propriety demanded. He was shown to the drawing room, where Mrs. Bennet descended upon him with questions about Pemberley's furnishings that he answered with the frozen courtesy of a man enduring dental surgery. Elizabeth watched from the doorway, torn between sympathy and something darker.
He looked tired. The realization struck her with unexpected force: there were shadows under his eyes that had not been there before, and a tension in his shoulders that suggested he had not slept either. He was wearing his usual immaculate dark coat, his cravat tied with mathematical precision, every detail correct and controlled, but his eyes were wrong. They kept finding her across the room with an expression that was not cold, not proud, not any of the things she had learned to associate with Mr. Darcy. They were uncertain. Almost pleading.
She looked away before he could see her looking.
"Mr. Darcy." She entered the room when she could bear the doorway no longer. "Perhaps we might walk in the garden. I believe we have arrangements to discuss."
Mrs. Bennet opened her mouth, undoubtedly to suggest that arrangements could be discussed just as well in thedrawing room where she could overhear them, but Mr. Bennet intervened from behind his newspaper.
"Let them go, Mrs. Bennet. They are engaged. A walk in the garden is the least scandalous thing they have done this week."
The silence that followed this observation was excruciating. Elizabeth seized Darcy's arm and all but dragged him through the French doors.
The garden was gold and russet, autumn in full decline, the roses brown and brittle on their stems. They walked the gravel path in silence for several yards, side by side but not touching, the space between their arms charged with an electricity that made Elizabeth's skin prickle.
"We should establish terms," she said, because terms were manageable. Terms were a framework. Terms kept the chaos at bay.
"Terms?"
"For the engagement. And the marriage. If we are to live together, we should understand each other's expectations."
Something flickered across his face -- hurt, she thought, quickly suppressed. "Very well. What are your terms?"
"Honesty. Whatever else we cannot manage, I require honesty. I will not live with a man who tells me what he thinks I wish to hear."
"You will never be accused of that failing yourself."
"Was that a compliment or a criticism?"
"Both." The corner of his mouth moved. Not a smile. That same almost-thing she had noticed at the ball, before everything changed. "What else?"
"Respect. I am not a decoration for Pemberley. I am not a prize you won by accident. I am your partner, or I am nothing, and I will not be treated as --"
"Miss Bennet." He stopped walking. She stopped with him, and they stood facing each other on the gravel path with the dead roses listening. "I have never, for a single moment, considered you a decoration. A torment, yes. A challenge, certainly. The most bewildering woman I have ever met, without question. But never a decoration."
Her heart did something complicated. She ignored it. "Good. Then we understand each other."
