Page 129 of Honor Requires

“You are certain,” he said.

“Yes.”

He exhaled, though it did not seem to ease him. “And he—” Richard stopped himself, then began again more deliberately. “He does not acknowledge it.”

“No.” Elizabeth moved away from the window, needing motion, needing something to anchor the restless energy that had not left her since the previous evening. She gestured toward the chairs near the hearth. “Sit, if you please. We shall speak more easily.”

He did so, though his posture remained taut, his attention fixed upon her with the apprehension she might vanish if he looked away.

She took the seat opposite him, folding her hands in her lap for want of anything else to do with them. “I have known since I first met him as the count,” she said.

Richard’s brows drew together. “From the first?”

“Yes.” She met his gaze steadily. “Not in the sense of proof, but in certainty. I could not have mistaken him, not even then.” She did not speak of the shock, the disorientation, the moment in which the world had seemed to tilt beneath her feet. Those things belonged to her alone. What mattered now was the truth that had followed.

“He denied it,” she said in evident frustration. “Or rather, he refused to acknowledge it. He would not meet me in it. Every word, every look was…carefully chosen. He acted like he spoke to a stranger.”

Richard’s expression hardened. “That is absurd.”

“It is deliberate,” she said.

He fell silent momentarily, absorbing that. “And you are certain.”

“I am.”

She hesitated then, not from uncertainty, but from what she would say next.

“It was confirmed after Almack’s.”

Richard leaned forward slightly. “In what manner?”

She related how she had sneaked into his carriage, how he had spoken the name Darcy before depositing her at Matlock House. She related how the truth had dawned on her afterward as she reflected upon the encounter.

Richard did not interrupt. There was a gravity in his attention now that matched her own.

“I have watched him since,” she went on. “In company, in conversation, in silence. It is all there, beneath what he chooses to show. The restraint, the distance he maintains between all but his ‘brother.’ The…control.”

She met Richard’s gaze.

“He is not lost to himself.” A pause. “Not that I have observed.”

“But he is hiding,” Richard said.

“Yes.”

“And from you.”

She held his gaze. “From everyone.”

The words lingered. Richard leaned back at last, though the tension did not leave him. “Then the question remains. Why?”

Elizabeth gave a small, humorless smile. “That, I believe, is the same question I would ask him.”

“And I intend to,” he said.

She could not help it; a faint note of levity touched her expression despite the heaviness of all else. “Then perhaps you will learn more than I have.”

He returned the look, though only briefly. “I should like to think so.”