He waited until she returned to the salon—laughing at something with her aunt, accepting her cloak from the maid. He saw the moment her eyes fell on the settee. On the book.
She crossed quickly, retrieved it.
He stepped forward.
“If I may,” he said, voice cool.
She turned, caught short.
“I do hope,” he continued, “that the sequel includes at least one moment in which your pen pauses long enough to consider whether the furniture might speak for itself.”
Her eyes narrowed. “Pardon?”
“You left your notebook.”
She took it from his hand without hesitation. “How fortunate that you found it.”
“Fortunate,” he repeated, “and enlightening.”
She clutched it close and tilted her chin. “You read it, then?”
“Only the page that fell.”
“And the one it fell from?”
His mouth curved, just barely. “Hard not to.”
Elizabeth gave a shrug that did not quite reach her shoulders. “I did not use names.”
“No. But you used voices. And some of them were easy to recognize.”
She blinked, just once. “That is hardly a crime.”
“No,” he said. “Just a very dangerous habit.”
The air between them shifted—no longer charged, just still. Her grip tightened.
“You write things,” he went on, tone deceptively mild, “that no one else would dare speak aloud. Not in the moment. Not to their faces.”
Elizabeth’s mouth twisted. “Yes, well. Someone ought to.”
He looked at her then, properly, like a man balancing a question in his palm and turning it over for the weight of it.
“You do not write like someone hoping to be clever,” he said quietly. “You write like someone who cannot help herself.”
She inhaled once. Not sharply. Not with surprise. But slowly, as if bracing for something. “You make it sound noble. It is not. It is ink and nonsense and vanity.”
“No. What you do—” his eyes flicked down to the leather-bound volume, then back to her face “—is not vanity. It is a fortress. Observations stacked like sandbags. Humor in place of gunpowder.”
She opened her mouth. Closed it again.
“You think it is tragic?” she said at last, carefully.
“I think it might have been,” he said. “Once. When it started.”
“Careful, Mr. Darcy,” she said. “That almost sounded like sympathy.”
“God forbid.”
