Page 56 of Bitten By Mr. Darcy
“It’s about Darcy,” she said.
“Darcy,” he said, nodding.
“You don’t like him,” she said. “When we spoke before, you indicated you wished him dead.”
“I suppose,” he said with a shrug, because it was Caroline who had confirmed for him that Darcy was a vampire, that Darcy was essentially unkillable, that crossing Darcy was a sort of idiocy that even someone as willing to take risks as he might not wish to undertake.
“I wish him dead also,” said Caroline with a shrug. “I wish your help.”
“My help?” he said. “What can I do against him?”
“Well, you are human,” she said. “There are certain advantages you have against him.”
“What?” he said. “I am not as strong and I have no capacity to force people to do my bidding and I cannot drink blood and—”
“You can walk in the day,” she said. She covered his hand with her own, on her thigh, and she urged his hand closer to the apex of her thighs.
He sucked in a sharp breath, feeling the suppleness of her leg through her skirts. His prick throbbed, and he knew that was going to be a bit of a problem, thinking clearly while he was aroused. Damn this woman. He should send her on her way. “If I say no, will you make me look in your eyes and force me?”
“It doesn’t work that way,” she said. “Charming is best only done in the short term. I could make you forget I was here, yes, but not if I come back every night. I could convince you to come with me now, but not over and over again, not if you are determined you don’t wish it.”
He nodded.
“Do you not wish Darcy dead?”
He sighed. Did he care? He had hated the thing that had taken the place of his childhood playmate at one point, butthen, he’d come around to thinking it was all for the best. If the real Darcy had been alive, it might have given him pause to go after Georgiana in the way he had. He was annoyed with the new Darcy, the vampire, who had put a stop to it, anyway, he supposed, but he couldn’t have expected anything different.
He had thought sometimes about trying to use Darcy’s secret to extort money, but he was frightened of the man’s ire. He could be frightening, after all, being a blood-sucking fiend. So, that scheme remained a scheme, never a reality.
“What do you want in exchange for your help?” said Caroline.
He thought about it. “Turn me,” he said finally. “Make me like you.”
She pressed her lips together, clearly not liking this request.
“I know, I know, you need me to be human for the scheme to work, you say. I can walk in the sun. But after he is dead, then you turn me.”
She brightened. “All right.”
He eyed her, because he wasn’t sure if she was simply lying to him. It was a good deal for her, after all, because she would get what she wanted and then could renege on it once it was done. He made a vow that, after she showed him how to kill a vampire, that if she would not uphold her end of the bargain, he’d use that knowledge to end her.
ELIZABETH REALIZED IThadn’t worked.
She saw Colonel Fitzwilliam at a ball and her attraction to him, such as it was, had not disappeared simply because her husband had finally taken her virtue. Indeed, the act itself, though quite pleasant and something they had repeated in various ways and in various positions and with his teeth in herskin and not, it had not transformed her in the way she had sort of hoped it would.
There was such talk of it, after all, such a furor about ruining and virtue and she had sort of thought she would be one person on one side of it and then a slightly different person on the other side. And it truly had not altered her in the way she might have thought it would.
She thought her husband seemed more altered by it than she had. Not that he was different either, but that he seemed to be both more and less careful with her—he didn’t seem to be treating her as if she was about to break (or die as the case may be) at the drop of a hat, but he also seemed to treat her with a certain physical tenderness that seemed to have grown from their physical joining. There was an echo of his being inside her when he took her hand, somehow, a tug low in her belly, a surge in the bond. When helookedat her sometimes, she felt as if she were beneath him, crammed full of him, his in that way.
So, anyway, it had definitely brought her and her husband closer.
What it didn’t seem to have done is to make the colonel’s smirk any less appealing.
She danced with him at the ball, for that was only polite, and afterwards, Mr. Darcy asked her what was wrong, saying that he could feel something through the bond, and she was disgusted with herself and protested too hard and too loud that it was absolutelynothing.
She was not sure he believed her.
She said she was out of sorts because she’d been thinking about her last letter from Jane, and her husband nodded slowly.
