Page 54 of Yearning

He turned around and seized a bottle of wine that was sitting on the sideboard behind the table. “I have an idea. Let us cease to speak of him.”

She smiled. “Oh, all right. Yes. Between you and me, we have often done little except speak of him. And I would like some wine.”

“As would I,” said the colonel.

They passed the bottle back and forth between them as they moved around the table, eating cold chicken and talking of an opera that they had both seen some months ago, one that everyone else had found quite good but that neither of them had much cared for. He kept saying everything she had been thinking—the costumes had been garish, the soprano was always shrill, the resolution was rushed.

They finished the bottle of wine, and she found another one. But now, she led him upstairs to the sitting room up there. After all, her husband was laid out downstairs, and she was not going to sit in the room with a corpse.

If she noticed that her bedchamber was right there when they passed it on the way to the sitting room, she tried to push that aside. She knew that it was not proper behavior for a newly grieving widow to be hosting a man alone in her house.

Lily was not even there that evening. Her little daughter had been inconsolable over her papa, sobbing into the dead man’s chest and begging him to get up, and Lily—of course—could not be doing that when the guests were there to pay their respects. Lily would not leave her father’s side until Elizabeth suggested seeing her cousins, the Bingley children. Jane’s youngest was not quite a year older than Lily. They were fast friends. So, Elizabeth arranged for Lily to stay there for the next few days. Hopefully, the company of other children would have cheered her daughter up at least a bit.

Elizabeth herself had not cried enough, she did not think. She was too busy with everything to fully allow herself to grieve.

This, with the colonel, it was simply madness, but she needed something mad right now, perhaps. She could stand something outrageous in that moment.

“Well, it seems to have worked out for you,” the colonel said at one point. “I did not think you should marry a man so much older than you, but it has left you a widow at what? Six and twenty?”

She sat up straight and glowered at him.

“What?” he said. “Not that you planned for him to die or anything.”

She continued to glower.

“Not that you are not devastated,” said the colonel. “Clearly.” He gestured at the one bottle of wine they were drinking out of together.

She rubbed her forehead. “Oh, I am giving you such a dreadful, dreadful impression. This is not proper!”

“I seem to remember that you and I are beyond propriety,” he said.

“But that was all so long ago, and everything was different then!”

“It was different,” he said, and he held her gaze for too long, and her heart started to speed up in her chest.

She and the baron had not been as close after Lily’s birth. Maybe it was that he was always busy settling various spats between his sons. Maybe it was whatever had passed between herself and Mr. Darcy, something that her husband never spoke of to her. Or maybe it was only that having a baby had gotten them out of the habit of touching each other.

At any rate, it had been a long time since she’d been kissed or looked at in a way that indicated any desire. It had been a long time, and she had not realized she even missed it, but then, here was the colonel, and he seemed so much handsomer than he had been before, and there had been far too much wine, and she had not cried enough, and perhaps if she had cried, perhaps that would have changed everything, but she had not, so…

She turned away. “You are still not married, sir?”

“I…”

She turned back, raising her eyebrows.

“Actually, I am engaged to be married.” He was not looking at her. He was staring into the bottle of wine.

“Oh,” she said in a very different voice. “Well, how wonderful. I wish you joy.” She snatched the wine bottle away from him.

“It is not the marriage perhaps I wished for myself, but I am growing older, and my father grows tired of funding my existence, and so I must find a wife’s money to pilfer, and she has… money.”

“Who is it?” She took a very large drink of wine.

“Lady Marybeth Constance. The daughter of the Earl of Mountebill.”

“Oh,” said Elizabeth, who knew of this woman, knew that she had a bit of a reputation. She was three and thirty, had never been married, but seemed to have kept company with a number of men.

“It’s a bit of an arrangement, I suppose. She has this ‘friend,’ and I am the sort of man desperate enough to turn a blind eye to it all if she will keep me in the style I am accustomed.”