If she allowed this to continue—if she permitted herself to feel what she had begun to feel—there would be no safe retreat. Her heart would not remain untouched. And if she gave it—She would lose it. Elizabeth pressed her arm more firmly against her eyes. She was in very real danger. And she knew, with a clarity that offered no comfort at all, that if she did not guard herself now, she would most certainly end in heartbreak.
Chapter Twelve
Darcy did not soon put aside the memory of the previous afternoon.
It lingered with a clarity that resisted dismissal, not as a moment of impropriety, but as one of consequence. He had not intended it. That much was true. Yet intention did little to diminish the fact of it. His hand had lifted of its own accord, guided less by thought than by something quieter and more certain, and for a brief space of time, he had touched her face.
He could still recall the warmth of her skin beneath his fingers. The faint difference in texture where the scar lay, barely perceptible, and yet unmistakable to him now that he had known it. The slight stilling of her breath. The way her hand had risen to cover his, not in rejection, but in something far more difficult to define—an instinctive answer to his own movement, as though she had not yet decided whether to accept or deny it.
And then the retreat.
Darcy stood at the window of his chamber, his gaze unfocused upon the grounds below as he considered it again. The morning light stretched across the lawns of Netherfield in long, pale bands, the air still carrying the coolness left behind by the previous day’s rain. A groom crossed the drive at a distance, leading a horse toward the stables, but Darcy scarcely saw him.
There had been no anger in her withdrawal. No offense. Only something like alarm, as though she had glimpsed a possibility she was not prepared to entertain.
He understood that.
He did not, however, regret the moment.
If anything, it had clarified what had previously been only forming. His interest in Miss Elizabeth Bennet was no longer a matter of passing admiration or idle curiosity. It had settled into something more intense. More personal. More difficult to ignore with each passing hour.
He drew a slow breath and straightened from the window.
The hour required his attention elsewhere. The picnic at Longbourn had been arranged with enthusiasm he could not entirely attribute to chance, and though he might once have found such an engagement trivial, he anticipated it now with a degree of interest he did not trouble to deny.
If she would be there, then it was not trivial.
The parlor at Netherfield was already occupied when he descended.
The air within was warmer than the corridors, the fire laid though scarcely needed, and the faint scent of polished wood and morning chocolate lingered in the room. Miss Bingley stood near the hearth, her posture elegant, though her expression bore the unmistakable marks of irritation she had not troubled to conceal. Mrs. Hurst sat nearby, adjusting her shawl with languid precision, her movements unhurried, as though nothing in the world required haste. Mr. Hurst occupied a chair beside her, hishead tipped slightly forward in a state that suggested sleep or something very near to it. Bingley paced the length of the room, his good humor strained but not extinguished, while Georgiana sat near the window, her hands folded neatly in her lap, her gaze moving between the speakers with attentive interest.
“Ah, Darcy,” Bingley said at once, turning with evident relief. “You are just in time.”
Miss Bingley inclined her head only slightly. “We were discussing a matter of some consequence.”
Darcy stepped forward, pausing near the back of a chair. “Indeed?”
“My brother,” she said smoothly, “has formed a most imprudent attachment.”
Bingley let out a breath that might have been a laugh on another morning. “Caroline exaggerates.”
“I do not exaggerate,” she returned. “I observe.”
She turned toward Darcy more fully, her expression composed into something that suggested concern rather than censure. “Mrs. Collins is a widow. That alone presents difficulties. She has a child, which complicates matters further. A gentleman must consider his own heirs. Her connections are inferior—an uncle in trade, a family dependent upon her father-in-law. And she has not been long widowed. Such attentions, so soon, invite speculation.”
Mrs. Hurst inclined her head slightly. “It is not an advantageous match.”
Miss Bingley continued, warming to her subject. “And beyond all that, she has been mistress of a household not her own. It cannot be supposed she would relinquish such authority easily. There would be expectations. Claims. Attachments that might prove inconvenient.”
Bingley stopped pacing and faced her. “You make it sound as though I have no judgment at all.”
“I make it sound as though you have too much feeling,” she replied.
He turned toward Darcy. “Well? What say you?”
Darcy did not answer immediately. His gaze shifted briefly to Georgiana, who watched in silence, then back to Bingley. He had no difficulty discerning that Miss Bingley’s objections were less about Mrs. Collins’s character than her usefulness to their ambitions.
“I think,” he said at last, “that Mrs. Collins is a steady woman.”
