I am not in danger of falling in love. That would be absurd.
But I am in danger of being understood. And I find I like it less than I imagined.
The ballroom was alreadythick with candlelight and chatter by the time Darcy took his place beside Bingley near the entrance.
He would rather have been anywhere else. A cold stable. A collapsing roof. A duel, possibly.
But as Bingley’s house guest—and, more damningly, a single man of income—he had no excuse for absence. Not unless he meant to insult the entire county and undo every social connection Bingley had spent the last two months cultivating.
And so here he stood. Ready to tolerate pleasantries until his mouth soured of them. Prepared to count overdressed daughters and their eager mamas. Wishing the night would end before it began.
The door opened, and the first cluster of guests spilled in—laughing too loudly, shaking rain from their cloaks, peeling off gloves as if they had been sprinting through a field. Meryton society had come dressed in every scrap of silk and expectation they could manage.
Bingley welcomed them with a grin so natural it bordered on oblivious. Darcy inclined his head, murmured civilities, and kept a tally in his head of every person who walked away from him whispering behind their hands, “Ten thousand a year!”
Mrs. Wheaton. Miss Wheaton. Miss Mary King, blinking too hard under her fringe and carried forward by an overzealous aunt.
The Breretons—three daughters, two overdressed, one suspiciously quiet.
The Markhams—sisters in matching gowns, neither of whom had yet discovered the concept of subtlety.
The Gouldings arrived en masse, with Miss Lavinia and Miss Eugenie both giggling into their gloves and one of them managing to drop her fan at his feet within seconds. He returned it without a word. She blushed. He said nothing else.
And so it went.
Miss Latimer smiled at him with the unerring confidence of a girl who had practiced in the mirror. Miss Everly attempted a curtsy so deep she nearly toppled. Miss Drayton, who barely spoke three words all evening, still managed to walk past him three separate times and sigh.
He endured.
Bingley had handed out invitations like sweets at a christening, and the room was beginning to swirl with color and sound. Darcy kept to the edge of it. Unless some miracle occurred tonight, there would be nothing here that he had not already rejected.
He had fulfilled his role: he had shown up, greeted people, made himself visible. That was enough. It should have been enough.
Then the Bennets arrived.
He saw them before the room did.
Miss Bennet was the first through the door, her posture perfectly upright, her eyes scanning the room too quickly to be at ease. She was smiling—Bingley would never notice the strain in it—but Darcy did. He suspected she had been rehearsing it all the way from Longbourn.
Miss Lydia—if, indeed, that buxom creature deserved the appellation“Miss,”burst through next with the velocity of a cannonball, already laughing at something no one had said. Miss Kitty clattered after her, nearly tripping on her own hem as she twisted her neck, probably looking for a uniform. Miss Mary trailed behind with a selection of piano music clutched like a weapon and the expression of a woman preparing to be disappointed.
Mrs. Bennet swept in behind the cluster of her daughters, beaming at everyone, waving to no one in particular, and bubbling into conversation before she had even removed her gloves.
And then—
He looked away too quickly.
Elizabeth had not yet spoken to anyone, but she was already doing something deeply aggravating. She looked amused. As if the entire evening—this ballroom, this crowd, this county—were hers to critique.
She wore green. Not soft, not shy. Sharp through the waist, cut close at the bodice—a shade too modern to be modest, and just bold enough to suggest she had not dressed for him, but fully expected to be seen. The sleeves were slightly modern. Thetrim unnecessary to draw the eye, for her way of moving was sufficient to the task. The effect—infuriating.
It made his collar feel too tight.
Her gaze drifted over the room with idle curiosity, pausing briefly at the windows, the orchestra, a few heads of note. Not his.
Which only made it worse.
And unless his eyes deceived him, she was carrying a reticule large enough to hold a small novel—or, more likely, a selection of scathing observations she planned to immortalize in ink the moment she got home.
