Page 19 of Yearning

“I suppose you don’t feel lust anymore,” she whispered, and there was something in her voice that he had not heard before, a sort of barely controlled rage that was overtaking her. She meant to hurt him. He had hurt her, so he deserved it, but…

“How could I?” he said in a very ugly voice. “What can I do with you, after all?”

“Give me to your cousin so that he can ‘claim’ me,” she said, nostrils flaring. “I am not an object, you know, Fitzwilliam. I am not a toy to be discarded simply because you no longer wish to play with me yourself.”

“No longer wish?” He could not believe she had just said that. “Of course I wish it.”

“Do you?” And now, she was suddenly not angry, but so very, very vulnerable.

“Elizabeth.” His voice was guttural. “It was never that. It was never lust between us. Never something so base. You must not think that I think of you like that.”

Her expression shuttered. “No, of course not.”

He could see now he’d said the wrong thing. “I only mean that there is no point in trying to take it to that level, that is all, that you must understand what it is to walk into a room with a woman like you on a man’s arm—” He swallowed. Something he would never do again. He turned to look at the wall, and everything seemed black, too black to even continue speaking.

“Well, since I am so incompetent, perhaps you will not object to my excusing myself without reading to you today.”

“It does not matter whether I object or do not, does it? Everything will go on the way it will go on.”

“Yes,” she said. “So it will.”

He heard her getting up, but he stared at the wall. He heard the door open. “Elizabeth, I only said that thing about your being tolerable because Bingley would not let me be. I barely looked at you when I said it. It was not accurate in the slightest.”

But she didn’t respond.

He turned. “Elizabeth?”

The door was open.

She was gone.

CHAPTER SEVEN

THE BARON HELLIG was at a dinner party Elizabeth went to three days hence.

No one would have gone to this dinner party if Elizabeth had not been sorting through the invitations that had come in the mail. There were ever so many of them, and Jane had been talking all the time of how tired she was of late.

Elizabeth tossed them all in a pile and began shuffling them like cards, pulling out one and then another, laughing, saying that Jane was ever so very sought after these days, quite the toast of London.

Jane snatched one of the invitations from her. “We should go to this one.”

“You are tired,” said Elizabeth. “You are too tired for dinners.”

“I am not, not at all,” said Jane. “We are trapped in these four walls too often.”

“I leave the house every day,” said Elizabeth.

“To go to a man’s sick room,” said Jane. “And do not think I have not noticed you come back earlier and earlier these days.”

“Only sometimes,” said Elizabeth. “We… quarreled.”

“Oh,” said Jane.

“No, I think it is a good sign,” said Elizabeth, who had told herself this again and again, to the point she almost believed it. “If he can argue with me, it means he is improving.”

“I suppose so,” said Jane.

But Elizabeth did not object to the dinner party, and she did not object when the baron switched the nameplates so that he was seated right next to her, and she did not object when they spent the entire dinner talking about dogs.