He bowed. Briefly. Stiffly. “Miss Bennet.”
“I had just been lamenting,” she said with a cheerful sigh, “how few eligible gentlemen there are in Town. And then—behold! An old acquaintance.” She beamed. “How very convenient.”
He could not even glare. There were too many witnesses.
Elizabeth turned to her companion. “Miss Pennington, allow me to present Mr. Darcy of Pemberley. He is known for his excellent taste in libraries, his commendable hauteur, and a truly astonishing ability to identify the precise moment when a conversation ought to be strangled.”
His left hand clenched involuntarily behind his back, the tension pooling in his shoulders before he remembered he was supposed to be charming.
Miss Pennington curtsied, wide-eyed and amused. “A pleasure, Mr. Darcy.”
He bowed again, already wondering what crime he had committed in a past life to deserve this.
Elizabeth’s smile sharpened. “I shall leave you to it. So many guests still to meet. Good luck.”
She vanished into the crowd, leaving a faint scent of lemon soap and mischief in her wake.
Darcy stood beside Miss Pennington, who smelled faintly of rosewater and matrimonial expectation, and did his best to summon a polite smile.
“I understand you are a great admirer of Gothic architecture, Mr. Darcy,” Miss Pennington said brightly.
“I am more acquainted with drainage reports,” he replied, before managing something slightly more civil. “Though I respect the integrity of good stonework.”
She giggled.
Darcy, against his will, glanced after Elizabeth.
She was laughing with a colonel’s wife now, animated and bright—and not once did she look his way.
She had trapped him. Cheerfully. Effortlessly. Like a fox tossing a rabbit into a stranger’s lap and strolling off with a wink.
And the worst part?
She had done it in perfect accordance with their agreement.
God help him, she had done it very well.
The Harringtons' drawing roomwas a riot of candlelight and chatter. Gilded mirrors reflected theassembled guests, creating the illusion of an even more crowded gathering. The room buzzed with anticipation, the impending musicale lending a veneer of culture to what was, in essence, a matchmaking affair.
Elizabeth navigated the throng with somewhat falsified ease, her eyes taking in the scene with a mixture of amusement and resignation. Ladies fanned themselves with delicate motions, their eyes darting toward eligible gentlemen. Gentlemen stood in clusters, their laughter a touch too loud, their gazes appraising.
She felt the familiar itch in her fingers—the urge to capture the absurdity of it all in her journal. That ridiculous turban on Mrs. Bartram’s head alone deserved a paragraph. The dramatic sighs of Lady Ellingwood’s daughter every time a violinist so much as tuned a string required at least a footnote. And someone—surely someone—ought to document the way Mr. Finch’s cravat appeared to be strangling him into romantic submission.
But, of course, she could not write any of it. Her journal was gone.
The bitter truth settled like dust along her spine. It was likely nestled in the bottom of Miss Bingley’s trunk, crumpled beside a pair of embroidered slippers and whatever infernal cosmetics one used to maintain a perpetual sneer.
At least she had left that woman behind in Meryton. She had taken some satisfaction in the idea that Miss Bingley’s influence might end at the county line. And yet here she stood, still entirely vulnerable, all because she had been careless. Or arrogant. Or both.
The thought made her teeth clench.
She did not miss the journal itself—well, perhaps she did. Its pages had been her private parliament, her only refuge for observations too sharp for daylight. But it was not the object she mourned.
It was the danger.
Everything she had written—about Meryton, about Darcy, about herself—was now someone else’s property. Every cruel remark, every joke too barbed for company, every confession dressed as satire. If even one page found its way into the wrong hands…
No, she could not allow that to happen.
