He caught her eyes, and the humor between them was a bridge. “We are to do this forever, are we not?”
“I am rather counting on it.”
A growl sent Darcy retreating from the hedgerow, mindful of his trousers, but the sound was accompanied by a tail wag so vigorous that Nettle’s entire hindquarters joined in. Approval and warning, affection and ferocity, all contained in one small body—much like her mistress.
“She approves,” Elizabeth said, laughing.
“Of the message or me?”
“Both.” She wrapped her arms around him, and then she growled.
And he covered it with a deeper kiss.
EPILOGUE: THE HAPPIEST TRUTH
Darcy’s cravatwas too stiff. He shouldn’t have asked his valet to starch it with so much buckram that it felt more like a wooden brace than neckwear. But here he stood in the Meryton Assembly rooms, against the walls, now sweltering in the June humidity. Too hot, too small, and pathetically provincial, decorated with the ambition of a market town aspiring to elegance. The candles were the same. The musicians were the same, or possibly their sons. The punch was, by the smell of it, precisely the same vintage, and Darcy suspected it had been aging in the bowl since October.
He did not mind any of it.
Or so he told himself. Elizabeth was enjoying herself. Laughing gaily and dancing with another man.
The knight was the host, and as the host, he had insisted on his duty to open the ball with the most significant woman in the room, which was Darcy’s beautiful bride-to-be.
It is a public honor, Darcy reminded himself, his teeth grinding behind a smile of rigid politeness.It is a civic duty. It is, quite frankly, a trial by fire.
He despised the necessity of sharing her. Every gentleman in the room seemed to feast their eyes upon the woman whonow laughed at Sir William Lucas’s latest witticism. Her cheeks glowed with the pleasure of being the evening’s celebrated guest—a considerable ascent for the second daughter of a gentleman presently losing his dignity, and his shillings, at the card table.
The assembly was in her honor. The town fathers had proposed it after Elizabeth returned from London.
Darcy could not stop watching her, even though the watching dug holes in his gut. She had agreed to marry him, and one would suppose that a man who was betrothed did not have to endure watching his future wife dance with another man.
“You are brooding, Fitzwilliam.”
His puckish godmother, Lady Sophia, glided to his side, an emerald in a sea of muslin, and settled into the chair next to his with the languid grace of a duchess holding court. She surveyed the assembly with a keen, assessing gaze that missed nothing.
“I see you’ve chosen the wallflower’s post, Fitzwilliam. How uncharacteristically retiring of you.”
“I am merely observing,” he replied stiffly.
“You are staring at your intended with an expression that would scandalize the patronesses of Almack’s, if any of them were present, which mercifully they are not.” Lady Sophia arranged her cane against the chair. “The Meryton assembly is considerably more forgiving. They expect besotted gentlemen to stare. It confirms their romantic sensibilities.”
She glanced toward a group of young ladies huddled near the window. “You are permitted to move, my dear. In fact, you are currently failing your duty as a guest of honor. That young lady in the blue muslin has been glancing this way for ten minutes, hoping for a partner. If I were forty years younger, I would be quite insulted if you did not find me tolerable enough for a set. Do go and be useful.”
Darcy blinked, momentarily disarmed by the suggestion. “I have not been introduced to her.”
“It is a public assembly, Fitzwilliam, not a private viewing of a painting,” she cut in, her eyes twinkling. “You cannot simply hover against the wainscoting like a disgruntled ancestor.”
She watched, amused, as he hesitated, his gaze snapping back to Elizabeth.
“I should not allow Elizabeth to miss a step should she look to my designated spot and find it empty.”
“Hmmm… I suppose you are careful of the perils of the dance floor. Fear not, Fitzwilliam, your boots are quite resistant to being trodden upon, although I couldn’t say the same about your heart.”
As if she overheard Lady Sophia’s words, Elizabeth turned in the set, her eyes flashing with amusement at his discomfort before taking a turn with the next man on the line. Her silk swirled, and her feet were light, but it was the sheer joy of dancing with people she’d known all her life that tightened Darcy’s chest. He would be taking her away from this when they married. And his family never attended the public assemblies in Lambton, nor did they host balls, as Pemberley had no mistress since his mother’s…
The thought of his mother was a phantom that still held the power to chill him. How he wished she could have known Elizabeth. How he wished she could see her now.
“She is a vision, is she not?” Lady Sophia murmured, her tone softening into a sudden, poignant resonance. She leaned in, her gaze tracking Elizabeth as she spun, her laughter trailing behind her like a silk ribbon. “Anne always said she would be. ‘The woman Fitzwilliam marries will dance with joy in her step and laughter in her eyes,’ she told me. ‘For only such a woman could draw him out of his solemnity and into the light.’”
