Page 40 of Yearning

“Yes,” she said.

He searched her gaze for several long moments, and then he removed his hand from her, and he reached down and moved the chair backward, putting distance between them.

She let her hand drop to her side.

A spell had been broken.

He was not smiling anymore.

She did not feel loose and happy.

They regarded each other for several moments, and she knew that, even though it had come to this sensation eventually, she was happy to have had this between them, that this had quite been worth it, that she would endure any number of moments of his soberness and forced distance between them if only she could have the moments before, the sheer sweetness of the way he had touched her, the look in his eye as he took her in.

“You are pleased,” he said eventually. “You have your babe now.”

“Yes.” Her hand went to her belly.

“So, you see, it is exactly as it should be.”

Perhaps. Perhaps she was grateful to him in some ways, that he had pushed her into someone else’s arms. There was something to be said for the way her husband doted on her and the comfort of her life as a baroness, even if she didn’t think anyone really thought of her as a baroness, not her husband’s grown children or the men he counted as friends. They thought of her as Hellig’s foolish indulgence. Even so, she was a baroness. She was with child. There was a time, long ago, when she had despaired of ever having another marriage proposal after she had denied the two men who had asked for her hand, and she had never dreamed she would have a life like this, not back then.

In some ways, she was grateful, and she would not deny that, not to him, not to herself.

But there was this, too, the fact that she had needed him to coo over her rounded belly in order to feel as if the experience of being with child was complete. Perhaps she did not want a life with him, but she also did not want a life without him.

It was a messy thing.

“You should go,” said Mr. Darcy softly, regretfully.

“I… yes,” she said. “I suppose I should.”

When she got back to her sister’s house, both Jane and Ferdy were napping away the rest of the gray afternoon.

Elizabeth curled up with a book on a couch, and the moment she sat down, her little babe began to roll about and stretch inside her. She ran her hand affectionately over her belly, and she loved this babe so much already, so very, very much. She had never loved in this way before.

Not even him, she thought, and it was true.

But of course, if she had loved him, really loved him, she would never have left him, would she?

CHAPTER FOURTEEN

ELIZABETH DALLIED.

SHE saw him sometimes, on the walks, and she was never alone again, but she saw him, off in the distance, concealing himself behind some tree trunk or tall rock outcropping. She saw him, and she knew that he saw her, and she experienced some kind of intense gratification from seeing him, and she did not know how she was going to tear herself away.

She made an excuse to stay an extra week and there was no objection from Jane.

She sent a letter off to her husband about it, and she got no response, but his letters had been sparse and short, anyway. They were always about the lawsuit, what the lawyers were saying, all of that.

When she mentioned staying another week, however, Jane gently pointed out that Elizabeth was to be delivered in March, and that it would become increasingly uncomfortable to travel if she delayed too long. “You would not wish to be trapped all the way up here in Derbyshire to have your babe. You wish to be closer to the babe’s father.”

Elizabeth knew that Jane was right.

She began to make her arrangements to ready herself for travel. She sent a letter to her husband telling him so. She would leave the following week, mid-January. She got a response remarkably quickly, two days before she was meant to embark, and her husband wrote that he was away from their house in Hellig, but that he had written to the servants to make it ready for her, and that he would surely be back in time for her to be delivered, and that he missed her.

So, the following day, on her very last walk, when she saw Mr. Darcy, she broke away from Jane and Ferdy and hurried up to where he was concealed around a bend in the road.

“Lizzy, what are you doing?” Jane called.