“Then I shall have to return for further inspection.”
I glanced at him, and it was a mistake, because the March light caught his profile in a way that was thoroughly inconsiderate of my composure. “Mr. Darcy. If you continue inventing pretexts to visit Gracechurch Street, you will exhaust the supply. You have already deployed the tortoise, the basking stone, the strawberries, and the merino wool. What remains? A silk bonnet for Sir Bertram? A private tutor for Rose?”
“Rose does not require tutors. She issues her own edicts.”
“Then why do you keep coming?”
The question escaped before my judgment could intervene. It hung in the cool air between us, naked and dangerous. We slowed our pace, letting the others drift ahead until the distance felt cavernous.
“Miss Elizabeth.” His voice dropped, stripped of the usual social varnish. “I did not come today for Charles. I came because…” The familiar tightness took his jaw—that devastating, silent tension I had come to recognize as his struggle for control. I stood breathless, waiting.
“I should like,” he said, his gaze holding mine, “to ask your uncle whether I might be permitted to call upon you, specifically.”
My heart seemed to stutter to a halt, then resumed at a reckless pace. The heat in my blood was instantaneous.
“You wish to call on Elizabeth Bennet, specifically?” I managed, clutching at my wit to steady the dizziness. “Not on the household? Not to confer with the children?”
He didn’t smile, but his eyes softened, the expression more intimate than any touch. “I find I have quite exhausted my interest in the tortoise.”
His look unraveled me. The warmth in his face was startling, as if I were suddenly the sun in his sky. It was not Bingley’s open adoration, but something steadier, more serious, and far more dangerous than any pronouncement.
“You may ask my uncle,” I said, my voice not sounding like mine, and I did not care. “Though if he inquires as to my approval, do not be surprised if I reserve the right to be entirely difficult.”
“I would expect nothing less of you.”
“And I reserve the right to change my mind.”
“You will do no such thing.”
“And how, pray, can you be so certain?”
“Because,” he said, his gaze dropping briefly to the line of my bodice, “you wore the green dress to Burlington House and the white dress with the green sash today, and both were chosen with a care that you would deny under oath. A woman who chooses her dress that carefully for a man she dislikes is a woman who has already made up her mind.”
It took me a moment to find a retort. “That, Mr. Darcy, was an insufferably perceptive observation.”
“I have been studying you, Miss Elizabeth, and I don’t find that you dislike me as intensely as you did.”
“I believe a man who visits his tortoise is hard to dislike.” I took his arm to avoid spilling more of my surprising sentiments. If he kept me speaking, I would be liable to declare love, and I could not let down my guard that easily.
Once Jane and I returned to Longbourn, he would continue the Season in London, attend balls we were not invited to and promenade with ladies approved by theton. I tried not todwell on the gulf that existed between one who merely visited Cheapside with one who stayed.
The pastry shop was warm and crowded, smelling of burnt sugar and marzipan. Bingley had secured a large table by the window and was already engaged in the serious business of ordering for five adults and four children.
“Rose, strawberry. Samuel, chocolate. Alice, lemon. Thomas—what does Thomas eat? Everything? Excellent. Thomas gets one of each. Mrs. Gardiner, lemon cake? Jane, anything you wish. Darcy, do not even think of refusing. Miss Elizabeth?—”
“Strawberry,” I said, without thinking, and then felt the blush rise again because Darcy was looking at me, and the look contained a memory of strawberries brought to Gracechurch Street in a basket.
We sat together around the crowded table, the children between us like cheerful barricades. Thomas wore his ice more than he ate it. Rose fed hers to an imaginary Sir Bertram who lived, she explained, inside her napkin. Samuel debated the military applications of frozen desserts while Alice drew the scene, capturing the angle of Bingley’s gesticulating arm and the precise curve of Jane’s smile.
Bingley, to his infinite credit, did not sit still. He mopped Thomas’s chin, negotiated a truce between Samuel and Rose over a contested spoon, and managed to convince Alice that her drawing would benefit from the addition of a lemon tart in the foreground. He did all of this while maintaining a conversation with Jane that appeared to consist mostly of their looking at each other and forgetting to speak. I watched him and thought:this is the man my sister deserves. A man who is not afraid to be ridiculous. A man whose dignity can survive a strawberry stain on his cravat and a four-year-old’s commentary on his hairstyle.
“I am happy,” I admitted to my sister. “That Mr. Bingley is as cheerful as when we first met him at the assembly.”
“Then you may credit it entirely to Darcy,” Bingley declared, his exuberance undimmed. “It has been a grey four months, but the sun is shining again.”
“I should have acted sooner,” Darcy said.
“You acted the moment you saw it,” Bingley said. “No man could ask more.”
