“Mr. Darcy.”
The sound struck like flint to tinder—unexpected, sharp, and far too near. He froze before he even registered why.
He turned. Elizabeth Bennet stood before him, cloak unfastened, cheeks flushed from the heat of the ballroom—or something else. Her eyes were far too clear for the hour.
“I was hoping to catch you,” she said lightly. “You are meaning to retire.”
It was not a question.
“I am,” he replied. “Eventually.”
Her smile intensified—just slightly, the ghost of something amused or furious or both. “Good. Then there is time.”
“For what?”
“For a proposal,” she said.
His pulse did something strange—skipped, maybe. Or tripped over itself. It could not possibly mean what it sounded like.
She waved a hand. “Notthatkind.”
Darcy stared. He could not remember ever being more tired, more suspicious, or less equipped to interpret Miss Elizabeth Bennet. She was commanding the conversation with the precision of a general and the mischief of a child, and he—Darcy of Pemberley—could not seem to marshal a single coherent response.
She stepped closer. “I have had an idea.”
“Must it involve me?”
“Entirely,” she said, and he could not decide if the word was meant as a kindness or a threat. “You are going to London.”
He blinked. “I am?”
“Of course you are,” she went on, as if he had already told her. “You have exhausted the local supply. No more mothers to impress. No more daughters to ignore. You have had tea and biscuits with every girl in the county who meets your impossible standards—except one, and I daresay that omission was deliberate.”
Darcy opened his mouth to protest—what, exactly, he could not say.
Elizabeth only smiled. “It is the most logical course. London. Where fortunes bloom in drawing rooms and daughters are not measured in pigs.”
He cleared his throat. “It seems you know more about my plans even than my own coachman does.”
“Well, if he has been long in your service and still has not guessed your temperament by now, I daresay you should find a new coachman. Anyone with half an eye can see what you mean to do. And I will be going to Gracechurch Street to stay with my aunt.”
He blinked. “You are leaving Meryton?”
“Only for a little while. But it occurs to me that we are both—how shall I put this—cornered.”
His eyes narrowed, the flicker of suspicion flaring once again. She saw it—of course she did—and that only seemed to amuse her more.
She forged on, cheerful and maddening. “You need a wife. Or so everyone says.”
He tensed.
Not visibly—no, not in any way most would notice—but Elizabeth had spent years honing her observations of him. She saw the minute shift in his shoulders. The sudden stillness in his jaw. As if her words had struck something he had tried very hard to keep buried.
“Do they?” he asked, voice level. Too level.
She tilted her head, the picture of innocent mischief. “Oh yes. You are the subject of quite a number of drawing-room dissertations. They have you firmly pegged as a man on a mission.”
“Do they,” he said again, flatter this time.
