Page 76 of One Night with Mr. Darcy
Elizabeth gasped. But no, he would not manage it. He was badly dependent on the opium. He would want it. He would succumb. And then she and Mr. Darcy would find some way to be together.
CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE
“WHY DIDN’T YOUcome to me?” Richard said.
Mr. Darcy was in Richard’s bedchamber, standing against the wall, rolling the back of his skull against the hardness of it, looking up at the ceiling. “What do you mean?”
“Instead of going to her alone?” Richard was shrugging into a banyan. “I thought that was my role here, to be pretending to court her for the sake of being a barrier between the two of you. You didn’t use me?”
“I went to comfort her, not to… bed her. It just happened.”
“Of course it did, she’s grieving. All anyone ever wants to do in the face of grief is that.”
Mr. Darcy looked away from the ceiling and at his cousin, furrowing his brow. “No, that’s not true.”
“Of course it is.” Richard ran a hand over his face. “Well, you need to be preparing to leave, I suppose. But if you like, I shall stay here, and perhaps I can facilitate some conversation between you and Elizabeth, at least for a short time. However, if her husband is up and about, I doubt he’ll tolerate my presence here, since I am supposedly prematurely courting her, anticipating his death.”
“He’s ill and addicted to laudanum,” said Darcy. “He can’t simply make some sort of miraculous recovery, can he?”
Richard shook his head. He did not answer.
“He dies,” said Mr. Darcy. “If Elizabeth marries another man, a man that is not me, that mandies.”
“Is that the way of it, Fitz?”
Darcy groaned, banging his skull into the wall, glaring at the ceiling again. “What if I challenge him to a duel?”
“On what grounds?”
“On the grounds that she’s really my wife and that he stole her from me all those years ago.”
Richard snorted. “Well, I don’t think that would work, and didn’t you say he said that he wouldn’t duel, and besides,hemight shootyou.”
“You’d be my second?”
“Darcy, I don’t think he’d accept. It’s foolish for him to do so.”
“He’s never… she only tricked him into thinking he’d fathered Willie. Their marriage, it could be annulled.”
“Oh,” said the colonel.
“I could have it done. I’ll speak to a lawyer, and I’m sure we can find a way. But then… what about Rosings? Does Willie still get Rosings? Can I marry her and give him Pemberley instead?”
“No, Willie is your by-blow for all time, Fitz. You can’t undo that. You’d take away all her respectability and you’d destroy your son’s future, and—”
“But I’d marry her. I’d take care of him. Everyone would know—”
“Exactly, everyone would know,” said the colonel. “Not suspect, not gossip,know. You’d both be ruined. It would affect Georgiana as well, too, and her own prospects for marriage—”
“She doesn’t ever have to get married,” said Mr. Darcy. “I don’t think she wishes a marriage, Richard.”
“All right, but you wish to take that option away from your sister?”
Darcy groaned again.
“You need to be packing, Fitz. You were discovered in flagrante in another man’s wife’s bed. Why are you lingering?”
“She’s mine.” His voice was low and miserable.
