Page 85 of Courting Elizabeth

Then I finally crossed the distance I had maintained between us.

“And I love him.”

The words filled the drawing room. They felt like neither a debt nor an expression of gratitude. I had spoken them knowing he heard them.

Fitzwilliam did not move. Yet the hope that crossed his gaze made me forget even his aunt’s presence.

Lady Catherine seized her cane.

“You permit her to speak of you with such familiarity?”

He entered and bowed to her with glacial correctness.

“My wife received you with more patience than I would have shown. Your carriage will be waiting in five minutes.”

“You are turning me out of this house?”

“I am asking you to leave ours.”

Our house.

Lady Catherine protested, threatened, invoked her deceased sister and the future of Pemberley. Fitzwilliam made no reply. He rang, sent for his secretary, and waited until his aunt understood that the discussion was over.

When she had left, silence fell.

I remained near the fireplace.

Fitzwilliam stood on the other side of the drawing room.

“You heard,” I said.

“Yes.”

“Which part?”

“Enough.”

The word hung between us.

In his eyes, there was neither triumph nor certainty.

There was hope.

And a fear almost equal to my own.

Chapter 20

DARCY

I had never understood why men knelt to propose marriage.

At Hunsford, I had remained standing. I had offered my love as an argument to which Elizabeth must yield.

After Lady Catherine’s departure, I finally understood that one knelt because love placed a man at the mercy of an answer.

The drawing room still smelled of my aunt—an overpowering lavender water that lingered in the draperies for hours after her departure. A chair had been pushed back. Her cane had left four marks in the carpet, four points pressed in a semicircle, at the exact spot where she had held her ground.

Elizabeth had not left the fireplace.