Page 114 of Faceless

He let his eyes close.

“She had always half-wondered whether someone had discouraged him from her side.” Her hand moved down the length of his back, unhurried, warm. “She never said so plainly. But I think she wondered.”

The warmth of her palm spread between his shoulder blades and rested there.

“He has married elsewhere, in any case. I thought she would be grieved, but Jane says she bears him no ill will and is not sorry for how it fell out.”

His heart slowed a little more. Her hands moved lower, slow and easy, tracing the curve of him with a tender ease that suggested she had no other thought in the world but either letting him sleep or slowly coaxing him to rise again. She would have a job of it, for he was no better than a puddle at present.

“She has made her peace with whoever it was.” Her voice was very soft. “And I find I have as well. I think they believed they were acting rightly. And at the end of the day, it is the man himself who heeded the advice he was given.”

He was warm and heavy, and the dark was entire, and her voice was soft, and her hands were a gentle wonder on his skin. Everything in him had gone to dissolution. From somewhere below the surface of himself, without thinking, without guarding, the whisper nowhere at all —

“That is well. Bingley was a fool.”

Her hands stopped moving.

“I did not tell you his name was Bingley.”

Darcy’s heart shuddered, and he heard what he had just said, and the cold came in from the edges of the dark so fast it took his breath.

She was already moving. Her arm reached across him towards the table, and he caught her wrist in the dark. She wriggled free and went anyway, and he could not… would not stop her by force.

“Elizabeth!” His own voice. Not the whisper. Not George Carlisle. His own voice, in full, for the first time in eight months. “I beg you. Do not—”

The flint struck.

The candle caught.

XLIV

One More Moment

The light was small, and it caught his face before he could turn away.

She had known. She had been building him in the dark for four months — the jaw, the cheekbone, the brow she had traced on a hundred nights — and she had known before the flint struck. But knowing and seeing were not the same country, and the face staring back at her from her own pillow was the face she had last seen eight months ago across a drawing room in Kent.

He twisted away from the light, one arm coming up, and an oath broke out of him, low and raw, and then his own voice, unguarded and full and nothing like the whisper. “You can have no possible idea what you have done!”

“I rather think I have every idea.”

“You have put yourself—” His jaw worked. “You have no comprehension of what is now at stake!”

“Then tell me what is at stake.”

He would not look at her. He pressed himself to the far edge of the bed, his back half-turned, and she held the candle and waited.

“You tricked me,” he said, and his voice was scraped raw.

She raised the candle a fraction. “You are a fine one to talk.”

He turned at that, and his eyes found her face first and then dropped, and she saw what happened to him when they did — the colour in his face, the arrested breath, something he could no more master in the light than he had been able to master it in the dark — and he wrenched his gaze to the wall.

“For the love of God,” he said, and it came out ragged and nothing like a command. “Please put something on.”

“You threw my chemise across the room some while ago.”

A curse came out of him. He took the sheet and wrapped himself without grace and got to his feet. He was taller in the light than she had remembered — she had last stood in a room with him in daylight eight months ago at Rosings, and she had not been attending to height then with anything like her present clarity — and he crossed to where the chemise had landed, retrieved it, held it out with his head turned away.