Page 95 of The Widower of Pemberley

She was so much shorter than him.

He rubbed his hand up and down her back. “There, there. There, there. It will all be well. It will all be well.”

Elizabeth tilted up her head, and then she reached up and desperately kissed his mouth, holding him against her.

Then she shuddered, put her head against his chest again, and just embraced him loosely.

“I apologise,” she said. “I have not slept enough—I do not know how. I do not want to ever make Emily feel unwelcome. These dinners have been important. And…I miss my family. It is Christmas, and they are opening their presents, and my uncle Gardiner and his wife are there, and I do not know when I shall ever see them again, or my little cousins. And I never have time to write to anyone. It is all so large and so different. There is always so much that I must learn and do. And…and…pay no attention to me. I am only overwrought. I shall be well as soon as I sleep more.”

“You wish to fulfil every duty you have.”

“I promised to be a good wife. That was what I agreed. When you…saved me. I owe you this. I must do everything. I…I must not…not…fail you.”

“Elizabeth.” Darcy tilted her chin up so he could look her in the eye. “I want you to be happy. Why have you told me nothing about this?”

“I would not complain.”

“No,” Darcy said. “I would not have either. We are much alike in that—perhaps too much alike.”

He tugged at his whiskers and studied Elizabeth.

She yawned widely.

“Well, first you must sleep more,” Darcy said. “Emily, can you help me put Lizzy into bed?”

“Oh! Yes! But we must read a bedtime story to her.”

“Then you had best pick a book.”

“I will!”

A book was instantly selected from Emily’s shelf, and Darcy took Elizabeth’s soft hand to lead her across the hall.

She smiled. “I am not confident that listening to Emily pretend to read will be conducive to quickly falling asleep.”

Darcy grinned. “As you said, it is difficult to deny her.”

They went through their sitting room and into Elizabeth’s bedroom. The way the room looked by candlelight and moonlight had become quite familiar to Darcy over the last weeks.

In the morning light, with Elizabeth’s maid dusting in the corner, it looked fresher.

Less magical and more lived in.

The appearance of the room had not changed much in the few weeks since she had moved into it, yet there was something subtle about the whole that proclaimed to Darcy that the room was nowElizabeth’s.

“Apparently Mr. Darcy agrees with you,” Elizabeth said to her lady’s maid, who was arranging the gowns in her closet. “He and Emily are come in state to put me back to bed. I am a great personage, you understand”—she winked at Emily—“who cannot go to sleep without a parade of attendants.”

Emily giggled at this. “You are like a duke!”

“No,” Darcy corrected her, “a duchess.”

“I like to consider myself a queen,” Elizabeth said. “Like the French ones but more fortunate than the most recent possessor of the title.”

Now Darcy laughed. “Elizabeth, to bed with you. And I shall read you to sleep.”

“No, I read, I read!” Emily exclaimed. And she took the book from Darcy’s hands.

Elizabeth grinned at him in that warm, sunny manner of hers as he let Emily take the book and sit on the bed. She opened the collection of nursery rhymes, then ‘read’Little Tom Thumband the story ofRed Riding Hood,repeating them nearly word for word from the book.