Page 55 of When Elizabeth's Cat Chose Darcy
“I rather beg to differ, your mother is resourceful.”
She chuckled, shaking her head, but no doubt admitting that her mother could call it a compromise, and we would be well on our way to the altar, a notion I found quite interesting.
She turned toward the door, but Cinnamon did not follow, watching us both as though waiting for a scene that had not yet played.
“Miss Bennet.” The words arrived before the thought, and the thought arrived only in time to observe that I had already begun speaking. “Before you go. At the assembly next week. Might I request the honor of a dance?”
She turned back, and the firelight caught the edge of her jaw, the line of her throat, and the expression on her face—not surprise or coyness, but the steady, open regard of a woman hearing a question she had not expected and choosing not to hide behind wit.
“Yes.”
One word, unadorned, without a barb, turning a simple affirmative into the most dangerous thing Elizabeth Bennet had ever said to me, precisely because it carried nothing but itself.
“Good night, Mr. Darcy.”
“Good night, Elizabeth.”
The name escaped. I heard it leave, and the hearing was like watching a horse bolt from a stable—too late to stop, too sudden to deny, and the consequences were galloping toward an uncertainhorizon.
She paused, one step past me, one hand onBelinda, the other on the doorframe.
“Elizabeth,” she repeated, very softly. “That is the first time you have used my name.”
“It was a lapse, and I apologize.”
“Do not,” she said, and left, Cinnamon following her silently.
I stood in the library holding a cravat that smelled faintly of lavender, listening to her footsteps retreating, and then, because it would have been unseemly had I followed her from the library, especially at this late hour, I lit my candlestick and sat down in the wing chair, picking up a treatise on crop rotation or turnip yields, I wasn’t sure because I did not read a single word.
