Page 93 of What Change Entails

The familiarity between them resumed before either attempted to stop it. Attraction alone would have been easier to manage. It was the ease with which they slipped back into companionship that Darcy found infinitely more frightening.

A clock somewhere deeper within the house struck one.

Elizabeth startled slightly. “Good heavens.”

“You have discovered the hour at last.”

“And you permitted me to sit here talking nonsense for half the night.”

“I participated willingly.”

“That was poor judgment.”

“Undoubtedly.”

She rose then, smoothing her skirts unnecessarily before retrieving the abandoned slipper from beside the hearth.

Darcy moved instinctively toward the door before she could reach it herself.

Elizabeth paused beside him once they entered the corridor.

The house had gone almost silent now. Distant rain and the occasional settling creak disturbed the darkness.

Candles flickered warmly along the walls.

“Good night, Mr. Darcy,” she said.

The words themselves were ordinary enough. The quiet that followed was not.

“Good night, Miss Bennet.”

She made it perhaps three steps before looking over her shoulder. Darcy remained standing exactly where she had left him.

Elizabeth’s expression melted into something perilously near tenderness before she disappeared up the staircase.

Darcy stayed motionless several moments afterward.

Then he closed his eyes and rested one hand against the library door.

This could not continue indefinitely.

Miss Bingley was observing too closely. Bingley noticed more than most people believed, and Georgiana and Lydia together had become alarmingly difficult to deceive.

Best of all, Elizabeth herself no longer regarded him with the same guarded dislike she once had. That thought followed him upstairs long after the rain finally faded toward dawn.

Chapter Eleven

The morning began in confusion. Darcy descended the stairs expecting order and found instead that Lydia Bennet had somehow persuaded Horace to carry off one of Bingley’s gloves while Miss Bingley attempted to restore dignity to the breakfast table through increasingly brittle conversation.

“Your dog has criminal tendencies,” Bingley informed the room cheerfully as Horace trotted beneath the table with the glove hanging from his mouth.

“He prefers your scent to anyone else’s,” Miss Lydia replied. She reached beneath the tablecloth and scratched the dog behind the ears. “You ought to feel honored.”

Miss Bingley set down her teacup with unnecessary precision. “I confess I have never understood the modern enthusiasm for enormous animals indoors.”

Horace, hearing her tone if not her words, rested his heavy head directly upon Miss Lydia’s lap and stared at Miss Bingley with mournful reproach.

Mrs. Gardiner hid a smile behind her napkin.