Page 59 of Bitten By Mr. Darcy
He closed the distance between them and he touched her face. “Perhaps it’s him, then?”
“What are you talking about?” She furrowed her brow.
“I told you, you would tire of me, and you would wish—”
“I have hardly been your wife for two months,” she said. “I have not had time to tire of you, and it is not that atall. I don’t know why I keep feeling things when I look at him, I truly don’t.”
“I am only saying that it would make sense you’d want a human man. I know he cannot marry where he chooses. He is beholden to finding someone with enough money to keep him, and perhaps he’d be amenable to an arrangement. If he knew his children would inherit because I claimed them as my own—”
“Oh, Lord!” She struggled out of his arms.
“Something to think about, anyway,” he said. “I could speak to him about it if you like.”
“You are handing me off to him?” She was going to start crying. “So easily?”
“Not easily,” he said, and his voice was gruff. “But we both know this arrangement between us is unnatural. This would be better for you, in many ways.”
Her lower lip trembled. “You are always so quick to foist me off on others for my own good, or so you say. You claim to loveme, but I don’t know if you can love me if you’re so easily rid of me—”
“My love, I do not in any way wish to be rid of you.” Suddenly, he was right next to her and he had taken her by the shoulders. His grip was tight as he forced her to look at him. “What do you wish?” he said in a strained voice. “For me to go into a jealous rage, to say that I cannot bear it if you find another man attractive, when we all find any number of people attractive at any time? You wish me to say I shall destroy him or that I shall keep you prisoner and never let you see him again? You wish me to truly be a monster, Elizabeth, is that it?”
“Ty, please,” she whispered.
“For I could. I wish to,” he said in a low, shaking voice. “I never wish to let you go. I think about turning you against your will. I think about locking you in that room and refusing to let you out, denying you the sun. I think about being very, very selfish with you. You don’t know how badly I want you. You don’t appreciate the way I struggle.” He let go of her, and he was trembling all over, and his eyes were flashing.
“Ty,” she said again, a whisper.
He turned on his heel and quit the room.
She went after him, after she caught her breath, but he had left to go hunting. She felt him drinking through the bond, felt the way he was angry, barely in control, and she wondered at herself.
Something in what he had said kept surfacing in her thoughts.
we all find any number of people attractive
She kept hearing it again and then turning it over in her mind.
Had she assigned significance to her attraction to the colonel when there was none?
What had she thought, in the end, that she would fall in love and then she would never feel attraction to anyone else ever again? That was some sort of odd idea, she realized, a fanciful one that might appear in love poems and very overwrought plays, but not the truth of humanity. Attraction happened. She had not thought there was anything notable about it before she had gotten married, and she likely should not think it notable now.
The colonel was an amiable man with an appealing smirk.
And she was in love with her fiend of a husband who wanted her very badly but was always struggling against his deep desires to drain her of blood.
I should let him turn me, she thought.
And she knew it would be easier for him. It would solve certain problems as well. And she could live forever. If she wished to see London in two hundred years—or two thousand, perhaps?—she could see it.
But it would mean giving things up, and she wasn’t yet sure if she wished to give up her life, give up her humanity, drink blood, never see the sun.
When Mr. Darcy got back, he was in one of his self-recriminating moods. He tried to lock himself away from her, but she wouldn’t let him.
He did not cast her from the room, but he wouldn’t allow her to sit on his lap.
She stood behind him, then, running her fingers over his neck, through his hair. “I am sorry,” she said.
“You have nothing to be sorry for,” he said sternly. “I lost control.”
