Page 66 of Inventing Mr Darcy

My breath is so tight in my lungs it’s an effort to squeeze out the words “Then why?”

His dark eyes search my face. “I did it for you, Elle. Because I–I’ve only ever wanted you to be happy. Because I still … care for you. I never stopped. I thought if I fixed things, then maybe someday you’d forgive me. And if you couldn’t—can’t—well, I understand. I brought that on myself.”

That’s not entirely true, and I know it. He was exhausted, worried about his father—and also, I now know, his sister—and that awful, fateful night in the hotel, I told Geoff to stay and all but pushed Fisher out the door.

“At least this way,” he says, dropping his gaze, “you’ll get credit for your work.”

His palm has been resting on his thigh just above the almost-rip in his jeans, and when he finishes speaking, his hand slides off his leg onto the couch cushion, like he wants to reach for me but doesn’t know whether he should.

At that tiny, uncertain gesture, something in me begins to soften. The ice around my heart, which has only gotten thicker since New York, starts to thaw.

I have to swallow to get words past the lump in my throat. “You know, for a pretty smart guy, you’re kind of an idiot.”

His chin pops up and his eyes scan my face, as if he can’t quite believe what he heard. I see a flicker in their dark depths—amusement, maybe, but mostly hope. “Yeah,” he agrees. “I am. No kind of about it.”

I slide my palm across the smooth leather of the couch and interlock his fingers with mine.

He leans toward me, coming in for a kiss I think, then pauses. “God, I’ve missed you,” he says. “I don’t think I realized how … necessary you’d become, until you weren’t there. Until I had to try to fall asleep without hearing your voice. Until I couldn’t reach out and—” Trembling fingers brush a loose strand of hair away from my eyes, tuck it behind my ear.

“I’m here now,” I murmur.

“Yes.” A breath shivers from him and he squeezes shut his eyes. “Unfortunately, I’m scheduled to leave Grantham for good in the morning.”

FIVE-AND-TWENTY

The news itself doesn’t shock me. But the timeline is another matter entirely. So many things left to say, and do, and I don’t want to rush through any of them.

Uncertain how else to respond, I curl against his side and nestle my head against his shoulder. His arms come around me and I try to time my breaths, my heartbeats, with his. Beneath my palm, resting on his chest, I can feel the screen printing on his t-shirt. He’s wearing the one about recursion again—fitting, I suppose, since we seem to have circled right back to the beginning.

Oh, I was so, so wrong about the t-shirts.

I know perfectly well, now, what he looks like beneath them, the muscled shoulders, firm pecs, and chiseled waist. I’m so pathetic, I even bookmarked that blog about his workout routine. But right now, I’m focused on what lies deeper: the smart, sexy, perfectly imperfect man behind the silly graphic designs and the nerdy glasses and the champion rower’s body.

“That night in New York,” he says, his voice rumbling against my ear, “as I was leaving the hospital to go to your hotel, Dad looked me in the eye, sick as he was, and said something he’s never said before. Not that he expected or even wanted me to move back home and go to work at Davis Investments, but that he needed me to. I swear that company is more than a business to my dad. It’s who he is.”

Which means, of course, that any refusal on Fisher’s part would seem to his father like a personal rejection.

He shifts enough to rest his chin on the top of my head. “I’ve been thinking a lot since then about what he said all those years ago, about family. I understand now that things like tradition and duty are more complex than they seemed when I was fourteen. I know what I should do. I thought I knew what I was going to do.” His arms tighten like steel bands around my body, the only thing keeping me from flying apart at the seams. “Then you showed up on my doorstep.”

We’re facing similar dilemmas, it seems. Because what I want to do and what I should do are two very different things.

I lift my head just enough that my words won’t be muffled. “You have to go.”

“Elle …” I feel as much as hear my name as it sighs from his lungs.

But he doesn’t argue.

“At least this time,” I say, reaching up to press my lips against the pulse in his throat, “we’ll have a chance to say a proper goodbye.”

He hauls me onto his lap and I wrap my arms around his neck, tangling us together in a knot that won’t easily come undone—though we both know it will have to, soon enough. When I lean in for a kiss, he pauses to remove his glasses and lay them aside. If there’s ever been a better way to signal the seriousness of a kiss, I don’t know what it could be. Because in that moment before his mouth reaches mine, when there’s just a second or two of eye contact before our eyelids fall, and I can see the intensity of his expression without impediment or distortion … wow. It feels like falling.

And in spite of everything, I am ready and willing to take the plunge.

His lips are soft but insistent, melding to mine with an eagerness that takes me back to our very first kiss, when it seemed as if he’d been waiting for that moment forever.

I relish the hot sweetness of his mouth and the way his hands tremble just a little when he lays them on either side of my face, his fingers spearing into my hair, the warmth of his palms making my cheeks tingle. Every kiss lasts a moment longer than the one before it as we sink closer together, joining our lips, our tongues, our breath, ourselves.

His hands slide over my scalp, down my back, to cup my bottom, and I feel the muscles of his arms harden as he pulls me closer still, dragging his mouth to my throat, where the heat of his breath makes me shiver. I clench my thighs around his waist, notching his growing erection right where I need it.