Page 33 of One Night with Mr. Darcy
“I didn’t realize either, I don’t think, when I left you,” he continued. “If I had known, I might have…” He shook his head. “But there’s nothing for it. It had to be this way, I suppose.”
“You could have visited Lady Catherine,” she said. “He could have been there, playing. You could have… I’m sorry.”
“I think, if there’s anyone who needs to apologize for this entire situation, it’s me,” he said darkly.
“Well, it might have been my fault. I think I started it with us.”
He raised his eyebrows. “What?”
“Well, you kissed me, but then I’m the one who showed you my…” But she couldn’t say it out loud.Breast. “Skin.”
Mr. Darcy shifted on the couch, letting out a sigh she recognized, a sigh that was reminiscent of the sighs she’d heard from him when they were skin on skin all those years ago. “No, no, Mrs. Collins. You were innocent. You didn’t know what you were offering me. I am the one who took advantage.”
“I think you were much more drunk than me,” she said. “I was drunk, too, but I remember it, and you don’t. People do all manner of things that they wouldn’t do otherwise when they have had too much drink. It was the absinthe that took advantage.”
“That’s not true,” he said. “I bear the responsibility.”
“Well, then, I do, too.”
“No, it’s not the same. It’s on my own shoulders—”
“I have told you, I do not need your guilt.”
“No, you need nothing from me.” His mouth twisted. He was bitter.
“I don’t,” she agreed. “But now, I realize that I have been unfair to you. I should not have banished you from William’s life. I don’t know why I was so harsh with you that night, but—”
“Obviously, you had every right to be harsh with me!”
She leaned forward. “I thought about what you said, about how I didn’t try very hard to find you or to tell you. I think I resigned myself to a certain fate, because I felt guilty.”
“But you have no reason to feel guilt.”
“Oh, no? Was it only you in that bed? Did I even attempt to stop it? I flung myself at you like a wanton. I teased and tempted—”
“Well, I don’t remember any of that.”
“You think I’m lying?”
“I don’t know.” He rubbed his face. “No.”
“Well, perhaps we have both suffered enough. In the end, it is not such a very horrible sin, I don’t believe. We all know couples who did not wait until they got to the altar before they succumbed to temptation. If we had married quickly afterward, it would have been nothing, really. I daresay either of us would think of it as if it were so very horrible.”
He considered this, and then he sighed. He nodded, looking away.
“So, we must find some way for you to see William.”
He lifted his face, and he looked wounded and hopeful all at once. “Truly?”
“Yes, I think so. It is obviously killing you to be away from him, and he has no real relationship with Mr. Collins, who is very ill, and who… who… he has never bonded with little Willie. Maybe I didn’t encourage it enough. Maybe if he really had been Willie’s father, I would have brought the babe into the sickroom more often or—”
“I don’t want him to have a bond with my son,” Mr. Darcy growled.
For some reason, this gratified her. She found herself smiling. “Well, perhaps it would have made no matter, anyway. At first, babes just cry and sleep, and there is little to entice a sick man to want to be near them. And then they become so… well, Willie gets into everything, and I must watch him every second, and Mr. Collins is only screeching at me to take him out, so—”
“I wouldn’t screech.”
Her smile widened. “What I’m saying is that it would also be good for William to have a strong, male presence in his life.”
