Page 45 of Stuck

King’s home was every bit as posh as you’d expect of an address in Chiswick—and then some. It had a gated entrance, manicured gardens, a fountain at the head of a lit-up drive, and a house that looked like an architect’s wet dream, all white render, black metal, and glass. Sliding doors that appeared to stretch around three sides of the house were open, and waiting staff milled about both inside and out with trays of drinks and canapés. There were hundreds of guests, every one of them looking as though they’d stepped off a catwalk. I was inordinately grateful I hadn’t had to wear the giant leg warmer to this party.

Bingley was waiting for me by the fountain. He rushed to open my door when the car came to a stop, all but yanking me out of my seat with what I’m sure he’d intended to be gentlemanly assistance. He thanked the driver and sent him on his way before turning to me with urgent eyes and no preamble.

“How is she?”

“How do you think she is?”

He closed his eyes briefly. He looked tired. “I’m sorry.”

“I’m glad to hear it, but I’m not the one you should be apologising to.” I hitched up my dress enough to keep it off the gravel as I set out across the driveway to the patio.

Bingley followed. “I will—I have! At least, I tried. I told her over and over that she’d misunderstood.”

I stopped short of the main body of the party and turned to face him. “She didn’t misunderstand anything. Your sister said she wasn’t good enough, and you didn’t disagree.”

“Of course I did!”

“Are you taking her to the family dinner?”

“Well, no, but—” He stopped when I gave a noise of disgust. He ran a hand through his hair, completely messing it up. “You don’t understand.”

“No, I don’t,” I said quietly, stepping close to him. If it were up to me, I might have left him to walk around all night looking deranged, but for Jane’s sake, I reached to flatten his hair down. “Deny it all you want, but actions speak louder than words. And yours are hurting her.”

Someone cleared their throat, and I turned my head to see Darcy standing nearby. He looked displeased, and I realised he must have been there before I started whispering to Bingley. I stepped back, my mouth open, maybe to apologise for not noticing him, I couldn’t exactly remember. My mind had gone blank, because Darcy in a tux was mind-blowing.

He always wore a suit well, but this evening he was, quite simply, gorgeous. His dinner jacket managed to look both expertly tailored and about to burst at the seams courtesy of the way it hugged his broad shoulders and thick arms. He wore his dad’s vintage watch, which felt delightfully unpretentious in this opulent setting, and a signet ring on his little finger that was inexplicably sexy.

Mostly, though, it was his eyes that had rendered me stupid. It might just have been the shadows, but they looked darker somehow, and there was something intense in the way they roved over me that had me flushing hot everywhere.

“Evening, Darcy,” Bingley said distractedly.

“Bingley,” he replied, though his gaze never left me. “Elizabeth. You look stunning.”

Bingley seemed to shake himself out of his daze and see me for the first time. “He’s right. You really do.”

“Nice of you to notice,” I said pointedly.

“Bingley,” Darcy snapped, that one word dripping with disappointment.

And that’s when I realised that, amongst all the drama and upset of his argument with Jane, Bingley had forgotten his promise to tell Darcy that we weren’t actually together.

I barely repressed a groan. I’d almost told him yesterday, but then I’d found Dad slumped on my doorstep, and it had gone completely out of my head. By the time I remembered, Darcy had been in the middle of telling me what an amazing friend Bingley had been during the worst time of his life, and there was not a cat in hell’s chance I was going to respond to his heartbreaking disclosure by revealing that we’d all been lying to him for weeks. And not just any lie—the dumbest, least justifiable, most unnecessary lie in the history of falsehoods.

Telling him now was tempting, but I held my tongue. Apart from how reluctant I was to ever confess to being involved in such an idiotic scheme, we were surrounded by the investors he and Bingley had been working hard to impress, and it wouldn’t be fair to distract him from that task. Besides, given the state Bingley was in, I didn’t think he could handle two relationship dumpster fires in one night. It might be best to let him try and fix things with Jane before torching his friendship with Darcy.

“Shall we get this over with, then?” Bingley asked, completely missing the reprimand in his friend’s tone.

I took the arm he held out for me and tried to smile as though I wasn’t mad at him as he led me into the throng. For the next hour or more, I stayed by his side, listening to him talk finances while I smiled sweetly and nodded at compliments on what a handsome couple we made. It was equally as boring as it had been the last time I did it. All anyone wanted to talk to me about was my dress, and much though I was enjoying wearing it, there was a limit to how many times I could discuss the fabric or the fit without feeling my eyelids droop.

We were in the kitchen now—a vast modern space with more marble than the Parthenon and a fridge bigger than the bathroom in Jane’s flat. Not for the first time, I looked for Darcy in the crowd. He’d split away from us after the first few minutes, insisting he and Bingley would do better if they worked the room separately. I’d been surreptitiously seeking him out ever since.

Sometimes, when I caught sight of him, he’d be deep in conversation. Most often, he was listening while other people talked, his mouth closed in a firm line of concentration and his gaze attentive. Once or twice, I found him looking directly at me. Like he was doing right now.

I swallowed and turned back to our host and hostess, horrified to discover Bingley furtively checking his phone, which he was holding half out of his pocket, while King asked him a question. I elbowed his ribs as I answered for him.

“Lowering energy consumption is one of our key objectives for the next two years. There are funding channels opening through Defra’s ELMS strategy that we’ll be able to tap into once we’ve proved we can deliver sustainable efficiency, so it’s in our interests to keep pushing. Our work on introducing circadian optimisation to the lighting is a major step in that direction.”

It was a waffling answer, covering lots of bases with no technical detail whatsoever, but I assumed King wanted assurances more than he wanted the science. The way his eyes widened in surprise that I knew even that much sparked the usual irritation in me, but I was used to the reaction—as was every other female engineer who’d ever existed—and I let it slide.