Page 55 of The Widower of Pemberley

Elizabeth glared, standing between him and the drawing room door. “I shall make your excuses.”

She was quite prepared to order the footmen to remove him on her own authority. Her mother would not object once Elizabeth had told her that Mr. Darcy would wish her to do so, and her father was unlikely to protest, simply because he would find Elizabeth ordering a man from the house amusing.

She would not give Mr. Wickham another chance to speak to Georgiana, as she suspected that her friend harboured an infatuation towards the gentleman.

“My dear Miss Elizabeth,” Mr. Wickham drawled. “You are a lovely woman. Darcy always had an eye for lovely women. I never could—”

A sharp, familiar voice came from the direction of the vestibule. “George Wickham! Step away from her.”

Chapter Fourteen

Darcy refused to consider why he was desperately eager to return to Meryton.

He hurried through meetings with his lawyers, keeping them up late each night to prepare the settlement papers.

The third morning after he had left Netherfield, he waited in his lawyer’s office while the clerks who had worked all night finished their fair copy of the settlement. After that he started off directly by horse on the road to Hertfordshire.

Colonel Fitzwilliam accompanied him on the ride of nearly thirty miles without any complaints, though he smirked the whole way and several times referred to the eagerness of the lover.

Even though he in no way needed the approval of his relations for his marriage, Darcy desired that Colonel Fitzwilliam would like Elizabeth.

The colonel was his most sensible cousin—and the only one who had never liked Mary.

No. That was not quite correct.

His cousin hadlikedMary well enough, but from the first he had spoken about her in a manner that showed that he thought Darcy to be ill matched with her.

For the last hour on the road the two spoke little, and Darcy’s mind was full of how Elizabeth might greet him.

He wanted to hear her voice.

He wanted to watch her play with Emily. He wanted to hear her talk about her father’s health, he wanted to admire the capableway in which she handled her difficult family, and, when the moment was precisely right, he wanted to kiss her.

Instead of the imagined joyous reception, he found the woman he would marry in conversation with Wickham.

George Wickham’s face had leered at him in the background of a hundred horrifying dreams since Mary fell to her death. That same face now leered at Elizabeth Bennet.

His enemy.

In front of him.

Darcy stalked up to Wickham.

The habits instilled in him by his father, who whipped him if he ever let his temper get the better of him, were all that kept Darcy from punching the man in the face, grabbing him by his coat, and hurling him through a window. “Why are you here?”

“I—”

“Why?”

Wickham’s eyes bulged.

Colonel Fitzwilliam stood next to Darcy, his form tense and ready.

The raised voices brought the people in the drawing room out.

Georgiana’s eyes were wide at seeing her brother glaring at the miscreant.

An officer whose name might have been Denny hurried to stand next to Wickham. He glared at Darcy. “Why are you shouting at my friend?”