Page 10 of One Night with Mr. Darcy
She blinked at him, seemingly also confused. “Well, Mama says I have to get married.”
“You don’t,” he said. “You’re an heiress and you’ll have this whole place to yourself after they’re dead. Your mother only wants us married so that she can be assured it all stays in the family, you see? Do you wantmeto have your estate, Anne?”
Anne sat up, pushing at her blankets. “I do not.”
“I didn’t think so,” he said.
“I can really do that?” She raised her eyebrows. “Not get married? Be on my own here?”
“Yes,” he said.
She smiled. He’d never seen such a smile on a woman’s face. She looked deranged.
Anyway, from then on, everyoneelsetalked about their marriage, but Anne wasn’t interested and he wasn’t either.
And now, Anne was dead.
He wasn’t sure how he felt about it. It was supposed to be sad. One was supposed to feel grief in these instances, and if he didn’t feel that, it likely meant something about him was damaged in some horrible way.
Truthfully, Mr. Darcy felt a niggling concern always that perhaps something was damaged within him in some horrible way. He always had. He didn’t know why. He was often ridiculed for his strict adherence to rules and righteousness. He only did that because he wasn’t really sure what it was that was wrong with him, so he figured he’d best cover his bases and try to do everything right.
Sometimes, however, he realized that the only thing that was actually wrong with him was that he was trying to fix himself all the time and guard against damage, and all of that—his obsession with such things—that was it.
He really didn’t have any actual defect.
Oh, but that was what Elizabeth Bennet had said to him once.Mr. Darcy has no defect. He owns it himself.And then she’d laughed in that way of hers, that maddening way.
The thing about Elizabeth Bennet was that she was everything that he was not, everything that he wished he could be. Why, she thumbed her nose at propriety.
Walk two miles in the mud, unchaperoned, just to look in on her sister?
Surely.
Decline games of cards for reading?
Easily.
Claim that there were no accomplished women in all of England while snickering?
But of course.
She was not pretty. She shouldn’t be, anyway. She should be rather ordinary, and she had a funnily large nose and her teeth were too prominent—he didn’t know. But the more he looked at her, the more he liked it. And the more she seemed, by sheer force of will, and by that laugh, to become the most beautiful woman he’d ever seen.
He’d become a wreck for her.
He’d tried to convince his friend Bingley to marry her sickly sister to rescue the family.
“Just offer for her, Bingley,” he said. “I’ll get you out of it if you don’t want to go through with it. But it will mean Elizabeth won’t have to marry that wretched Collins, and I shall have time to properly woo her and get her to marry me.”
“Just ask her to marry you,” Bingley said.
“I can’t,” he said. “She doesn’t like me. Please, do this. You owe me. Think of everything I have done for you.” Truly, Bingley should not have been afforded an association like what he had with Darcy, anyway. Darcy was far too intimate with a family who’d come from trade than was proper, but Bingley was different than other people Darcy knew. He was real, rather like the way Elizabeth was real.
Darcy didn’t know how to explain it. He lived his life according to propriety. He was obsessed with being proper. Propriety was, however, the scourge of his existence. He despised propriety.
“I can’t offer for a woman I don’t want to marry,” said Bingley, chagrined.
“I said I’d get you out of it.”
