Page 4 of Courting Elizabeth

“Elizabeth.”

It was the first time I had spoken her Christian name in her presence without the “Miss.” It seemed to me it already belonged to the most intimate part of my life.

She raised her chin, surprised.

“May I take your hand?”

She hesitated before giving it to me.

Her fingers were cold through the glove. I enclosed them between mine, then bent forward. My lips touched the fabric, and this trifling contact awakened in me a hunger so fierce that I had to close my eyes.

She did not withdraw her hand.

I took her stillness for an emotion similar to my own.

“Tomorrow I will ask permission to travel to Longbourn,” I said. “Nothing will be announced before I have spoken to your father.”

“Thank you.”

“I will do everything in my power to make you happy.”

A silence followed.

“I hope we will learn to be so together,” she replied.

We.

I did not perceive all the caution in that word. I heard only the promise it held.

When I left the parsonage, the rain had stopped. The sky remained heavy, the paths waterlogged, and yet the entire world seemed changed.

Elizabeth Bennet could become my wife.

I knew she doubted my judgment, my actions, and my ability to accept her family.

I did not understand that the most important doubt concerned her own heart.

Chapter 2

ELIZABETH

I did not regret it immediately.

Regret would have required a certainty I no longer possessed. Since my arrival in Kent, my certainties had come undone one after another. Charlotte was not unhappy—at least not in the simple way I had imagined. Mr Collins remained ridiculous, but she had gained a house, a position, a future that no longer depended on her father's health or her brothers' generosity. Jane suffered with a gentleness that rendered her grief almost invisible. My father laughed at my mother's imprudence without ever truly preparing for his daughters' future.

And Mr Darcy loved me.

This thought should have been the least believable of all. It had become the only one I could not doubt.

I stayed alone for a long time after he left. The room still held his presence: the chair he had circled, the carpet where he had paused, the very air still charged with the conviction of his words. His proposal had been proud, offensive, almost unbearable. He had offered me marriage like a man crossing an abyss with me at the bottom.

Yet I had accepted.

I pressed my fingers to my temple.

“What a brilliant proof of constancy, Elizabeth.”

My voice sounded strange in the empty drawing room.