He cleared his throat, gesturing. “Would youeat, Miss Bennet?”
She turned back to the potatoes. “I should like to take something with me.”
“Yes, you must,” he said. “And I shall make sure that there is more food for you. I suppose you cannot come to dinner each evening?”
“No, I cannot,” she said, gesturing the swell of her belly.
He looked at it and swallowed visibly. He met her gaze and he was like a man lost at sea, looking at her with a sort of hopeless longing.
Oh, dear.Couldhe have some regard for her?
It hurt her that there was a shadow of it, of his wanting her, because she wanted him, and it hurt her the most that Mr. Wickham had stolen this from her, this impossibly happy ending that she would now never have.
She must, of course, never let him know this was Mr. Wickham’s child. She could not imagine how he would react to that, but it must disgust him beyond all reason, she thought. He would never look at her with longing if he knew.
MR. DARCY PACEDafter she left, thinking about it.
He thought positively scandalous and awful thoughts that he should never have thought.
All right, here it was: he had always wanted her.
Likethat, he had wanted her. He had found her wildly appealing at that stupid ball, not at all ‘not handsome enough to tempt him’. There was a reason he had used the word tempt, after all, and it was because he felt incredibly tempted by that woman.
It was… he didn’t know why exactly.
She was rather tempting all round, a light and pleasing figure with the right swells to her hips and bosom, just exactly the sort that made his body lurch. But she also had theselips. They were shaped in such a way as to make a man think awful things, and whenever she spoke, her entire face would take onsuch expressions, her mouth bending and lifting and he would become mesmerized by her lips, entirely mesmerized.
Then, of course, she arrived at Netherfield practically out of breath, color in her cheeks, her hair falling in strands into her knowing eyes, and her lips parted and… and…
Well, it was no reason to marry a woman, really.
Or perhaps it was the only reason to marry a woman. Maybe that was really the purpose of marriage if one wanted to be base and vulgar about it, to boil it all down to whatever its essence was.
But he had not wanted to marry her, of course, because she wasn’t the right sort of woman, not connected in the way his wife was supposed to be, and he had thought about other wretched options, given them far more thought than was entirely necessary, when he knew that she would never acquiesce to something like becoming his mistress.
At any rate, was he entirely surprised that some other man had set eyes on Miss Elizabeth Bennet, had gone entirely out of his head, and had ruined her without care or thought?
He was not.
There but for the grace of God went Fitzwilliam Darcy, after all.
Well, he would never have donethisto her. If he had gotten her with child, indeed, if he had besmirched her honor, he would have considered her his responsibility, and he would not have run off and left her to be bundled off to the north with the Bingley sisters to be half-starved and hidden away and… slapped?
What was going on over in that dower house with those women, after all?
He could not even contemplate that.
At any rate, while he might have some understanding for the man who had been swept away by Elizabeth Bennet and had nothad the presence of mind to do anything other than take her virtue and leave her, he must ultimately condemn him.
However, it was sort of convenient that this man had done this, because now she was here.
Here, handily already divested of her virtue, and ripe for the taking.
Oh, that was beneath him.
Except what did it matter at this point? She was with child. She was shamed. She was practically already under his protection. She was at least under his roof. At this point, making her his mistress was an entirely different proposition than it had been.
She, of course, might not welcome it, he supposed. She had said that if the Bingley sisters abandoned her and refused to claim her child that her family would be painted with a brush of her transgressions, and he supposed, from a certain perspective, she might not want the protection he could offer her.
