Page 57 of Yearning

“I did not think I would lose you over it. I am sorry if I hurt you. I never thought—”

“You will not lose me,” he said gruffly. “I am yours, always yours.”

“You are marrying another woman, and you had no plans of doing anything except making me your mistress.”

“You once told me to ask for your hand,” he said. “What if I did now?”

She bit down hard on her lower lip, and she barely shook her head.

He ran a hand through his hair. “All right, then.”

“It would not make any sense, and you know it,” she said. “You need money, and I do not have it, and I never have. I have more now than I did, and we could survive on it, but it would be difficult for you. You would not have all the things you are used to having. And I would lose the dower house. Where would we live? And Lily—”

“Stop, stop,” he said. “I have not asked.” He reached out and feathered his thumb over her jawbone. “You have not lost me.”

She let out a relieved breath. “I do not wish to lose you, Richard.”

CHAPTER TWENTY

MR. DARCY HAD thought it odd that Elizabeth had sent him a letter two days before. He thought she had given up on that, really. It had been years now, and she had stopped trying to contact him quite some time ago.

He was on the street—he walked now, with a brace that led to a cane on his stump of an arm and a fake leg—and he heard someone say something about the death of the Baron of Hellig, and his heart stopped.

He took the person by the shoulder. It was not a complete stranger, but someone he had made the acquaintance of in ballrooms once or twice. It was still rude of him. He did not care. He demanded to know the details.

The man, red-faced, sputtered them out. “This is highly irregular, Mr. Darcy,” he said, shrugging out of the other man’s grasp, shaking his head.

“Apologies,” said Mr. Darcy, and let the man go.

He changed direction and went directly for her house in town.

It was late, he realized. Too late to call. Too late to knock on the door. And his behavior now, it was really ghastly.

Here I am to celebrate the fact that your husband is dead. Welcome me, Elizabeth, let me in.

Yes, but she had sent him that missive, and it must have been some sort of invitation, saying essentially that—her husband was gone, there were no more barriers, and he had been off making himself back into a man for some purpose or other, and clearly, this was it.

He stood there, upright, gazing at the house, and he thought he must knock anyway.

And then, the door opened.

A figure slid out, looking this way and that. The man was not wearing a shirt beneath his waistcoat. The man was… Richard?

Mr. Darcy wobbled on his brace and his cane and his stump and his one good leg, and cursed himself for returning that letter, for not even opening it, for having been too late.

Richard slunk through the darkness, hands jammed into his pockets, and he walked off down the sidewalk with his head down.

Well, how am I to compete with that? Richard has two legs and a whole prick and he can get you with child and if he is walking out without a shirt on, something has obviously happened between the two of you, and I probably put that idea in your head all those years ago, and this is all my own doing, damnation.

He went home.

The next day, he tried to write her a letter.

Tried because he kept stopping, ripping the thing up, and starting over. He must have written twelve false starts before he got one finished. He read it back, did not like it, and put it in a drawer to sit until the next morning. Surely, on the morrow, he would know if it were the right thing to say.

But on the morrow, he felt driven to write something completely new.

He did so, and then he put that one away in the drawer with the first one.