Page 91 of A Searing Acquaintance
He grinned, imagining the nine-year-old Elizabeth Bennet. He yearned to see a childhood photograph. “You must have been adorable. Scraped elbows and scabby knees and a soccer ball under your arm.”
“You wouldn’t have thought so then. You would’ve been, um, thirteen? I was singularly unimpressive to boys with surging hormones until I was seventeen or so.” She stared up at Venus twinkling brightly in the sky. “I wanted my family to call me Scout.”
He thought he’d melt right there. He loved her so much. “Your beauty was disguised by the dirt and smudges of the playing fields.”
She stilled but didn’t speak. None of this seemed real at times. He didn’t seem real. He was too good. Far too good to her.
Finally, in a quiet voice, she said, “I would have loved having a big brother.”
“Well, Elizabeth Bennet, I am very, very, very glad that I’m not your brother.”
Neither spoke. The stars were too bright; the air was too full. She smiled sadly up at him, but in the darkness, he couldn’t see the melancholy behind her eyes. She shivered.
“Are you cold?”
“A bit.”
“Let’s go inside. I know where there’s a soft couch and some excellent brandy.”
“Will it taste like my Uncle Leo smells?”
He shook his head and soundly kissed her. “Wine for you.”
Darcy walked into the library with a bottle of wine and saw Elizabeth standing at the bookcase filled with family photo albums. Her hand was on the last one on the shelf, the one containing pictures from that final six months they were a family. He felt his heartbeat speed up until she pulled out an earlier album from the middle of the volumes and walked over to the sofa. He took a tremulous breath and waited for her to notice his presence.
She turned and smiled shyly. He knew she wanted to ask him questions. She wanted to know about his family, about Georgie. He owed it to her—to them. He’d tried so hard to share parts of himself, everything but that. It had been easy to talk to a girl he’d barely known but somehow trusted while they sat in the dark in a house without memories. It was as though he’d known that she was only half-listening, that he was safe. Only the first part of his assumption had proven true; he’d been vulnerable to her from almost the moment they met. Should he tell her everything and reveal his shame when this was all new and wonderful? Perhaps now was the time, when he already felt exposed and raw. It would be starting fresh, picking off the scabs and letting those wounds heal. Renewal.
He swallowed, aching, as he acknowledged how careful she was around him. Everyone who knew about his past was. He didn’t want that with her. He wanted to know her, and he wanted her to know him. She was so sensitive, so gentle, with him. He knew she held back her curiosity, afraid to throw fuel on the embers of his past. Darcy wanted her to understand him and not mistake his moods or be confused by the times he turned quiet. Those moments were fewer now. Even if she was not present, Elizabeth simply made him happier. He’d even smiled at a waiter in San Francisco last week when he’d announced his name was Leo.
“Your mother was so beautiful,” Elizabeth said, recapturing his attention. “You’ve mentioned her a little, but I don’t know anything about the Darcys…about your father.” She decided not to bring up Georgie, not yet. Slow was smarter. “He was a good-looking man, quite the natty dresser.”
Her eyes roamed his features. Darcy’s handsome face was defined by his mother’s dark eyes and her enigmatic smile, but it was framed by his father’s square jaw and thick wavy hair. The photos of him as ayoung boy always holding onto one of them were heartbreakingly beautiful.
“Oh.” Darcy put the bottle and wineglasses on a side table. He sat down next to her and glanced quickly at the album in her hands. He was young, an only child, posed with his father aboardYankee Girl. He stared at the pictures and remembered that day.
“My father,” he began, his voice hoarse and careful. “He was much older than my mother, did you know that? They met when she was in London on her internship.”
Elizabeth shook her head and rubbed his knee. She had studiously avoided looking for information on the Internet about his parents and family. Her foray months earlier had brought her nothing but misjudgments and heartache. He deserved to be the one to tell her about his family, to sketch them and shade in their characters as only a son and brother could do.
“An internship? Where? Doing what? How much older?”
He smiled at her eager questions and told her about his mother’s work in London at the Tate Modern: mornings spent staring at and sorting paintings, afternoons in record stores, nights at clubs, concerts, and recitals. She’d been tired of the social whirl and expectations in New York and found London freeing. And then she’d met his father and decided she didn’t want to go home.
“He couldn’t leave England. ‘House of Darcy’ and all.” Observing the confusion on her face, he quietly added, “My mother was twenty-three. He was forty and just taking on stewardship of the family’s interests after his father had died. They wed in the spring, I came along, and life was set.”
Elizabeth, still digesting the vast age difference, thought for a moment.Will’s birthday is in September. He did more than come along; she was pregnant when they got married?
“They were happy?”
“Mostly. It ebbed and flowed. But they were happy when I was very young.”
Looking down at the album, Elizabeth beheld a six-year-old Fitzwilliam smiling at the camera, hugging his mother, and opening birthday presents. She paused at a photo of him wearing a big gap-toothed smile, his arm around another boy.Rich?She recognized the room they were in, the living room here at Pemberley. Tears surged to her eyes.He’d been so happy.
She cleared her throat and turned the page. The family—the threeof them—at a Yankees game. “The pictures are precious. You look like your mother. You have her eyes.”
“So did Georgie.”
Elizabeth looked up. Darcy sat with his head leaning back on the couch, eyes closed. She closed the album and set it on the table. Then she laid her head on his shoulder and threaded her fingers through his. “She did?”
