Page 58 of Stuck

“Any suggestions?” I asked, stopping to look up at one of the portraits. The man in question—my sixth great-grandfather—stared silently back at me with a penetrating gaze and the ghost of a smile. “I didn’t think so.” He wouldn’t have had any advice for me if he’d still been alive, because there was nothing to be done. Elizabeth wasn’t mine, and that was that.

I’d hoped some physical distance would give me a better perspective on the situation and help me get these feelings under control. It hadn’t. The look on Elizabeth’s face in the hospital—as though she wanted me to kiss her—still filled my head every time I closed my eyes. The gut-wrenching envy I’d felt when she walked away with Bingley’s arm around her still skewered me every time I thought about it, which I had been doing incessantly since it happened.

I eventually found my way back to my study in the family wing, where I poured myself a glass of cognac and sank into the armchair in front of the unlit hearth. I looked at the empty chair opposite me. My father’s chair. Over a decade since he left us, and I still felt the loss as keenly as I had then. Yet in all that time, I’d never felt as raw as this. I didn’t think I’d ever missed him as much, either, because if there was anyone I wanted to talk to about this situation, it was him.

The next best option would be my cousin Fitzwilliam, and I almost turned my phone on to call him, but I resisted the temptation, none too keen to read any texts or listen to any voice messages that might be waiting for me. Bingley had said we needed to talk, and I could guess what about. I knew he’d seen how close Elizabeth and I were when he arrived to pick her up. But I didn’t need him to tell me to back off—I already knew I had to do that. That was why I was here.

I nursed my drink for another half an hour before I gave up waiting for Pemberley to work any of its usual magic on me and went to bed wholly uncomforted—and still wholly consumed by Elizabeth.

Even though I hadn’t called him, my cousin was there the next morning. I suspected Sam had something to do with it. I’d left a note out for him before I went to bed, informing him that I was home, and my unannounced return would have alerted him that something was amiss. The sight of Fitzwilliam’s goofy grin in my kitchen when I came down to make coffee put the first smile on my own face in what felt like weeks.

“There he is!” he said cheerfully. “The prodigal son, returned from the big city.” He walloped me on the shoulder and handed me a freshly brewed coffee. “You look like shit.”

I opened my mouth to tell him to bugger off but instead heard myself say, “I feel like shit.”

He raised an eyebrow, probably as wrongfooted by my candour as I was. “What happened?”

“Can I drink my coffee first?”

“By all means. Then we’re going for a ride.”

I couldn’t help but grin at that. I hadn’t been riding for months, and it always cleared my head.

“Where’s Georgiana?” Fitzwilliam asked.

“Still asleep. Likely will be until lunchtime unless one of us wakes her up.”

“Oh, to be a teenager again, eh?”

I grunted. I thought I’d left all the painful relationship dramas of youth long behind, but I felt like a bloody teenager at the moment—and I was not enjoying it.

Fitzwilliam talked while the caffeine filtered into my veins, filling me in on his current post at RAF Waddington and telling me a highly amusing tale about the trouble his brother’s eldest daughter had got into at school the week before. But it wasn’t long before we were saddled up and giving our horses their heads across the estate. We reined them in after a while and rode steadily for another half an hour around Pemberley’s outer limit before hacking back along the lip of the escarpment overlooking the river. It was glorious.

Fitzwilliam drew his horse alongside mine, and though I didn’t cease admiring the landscape, I could feel his eyes on me.

“Well?”

I sighed. Where to start? After a few minutes of hesitation, I admitted, “Bingley has a new girlfriend.”

“Bingley? What’s the pup got himself into now?”

“I thought at first she might be playing him, because she didn’t seem… I don’t know… into him?”

“But you don’t think that anymore?”

“No, but something isn’t right. They’re not right for each other. They don’t seem to know anything about each other—what they like, what they don’t like. She doesn’t confide in him—he doesn’t know half of what’s going on in her life. We were at a gala this week, and they didn’t dance together once. I had to take her to hospital yesterday to get stitches, and I had to call him to come and get her, because she didn’t. And when he did turn up, he kissed her on the damned cheek. The woman is stunning—I can’t understand why he’s not…” I shook my head in frustration. “I don’t know why they’re together.”

Fitzwilliam was quiet for an uncomfortable length of time, digesting what I’d told him while continuing to regard me in an irritatingly shrewd way. Eventually, when he had to look away to steer his horse around a ditch, he asked, “What’s the real problem here? Are you actually worried that Bingley is going to have another breakup under his belt, or⁠—”

“They’re not going to break up. I think he’s asked her to marry him.”

He shrugged. “Getting married doesn’t mean they won’t break up. It’ll just make it more expensive.”

“Bingley would have to be absolutely cooked to leave Elizabeth.”

“Ah, shit. You like her, don’t you?”

I passed the reins into one hand and ran the other over my face, all the helplessness of my situation pressing down on me until it felt as though I was breathing through treacle. “I’m completely gone for her. I can’t get her out of my head. I’ve tried everything, but… yeah, I’m screwed.”