Page 123 of A Searing Acquaintance
She leaned her head on his shoulder. “We’ve come a long way in a very short time.”
Darcy tensed a bit. “Has it been too short? Too fast? Sometimes I worry that I rushed you into moving in with me, that I’ve put you through too much change.” He could feel her looking at him, but he avoided her eyes and stared out at the stars. “You’re the greatest thing that has ever happened to me, but I wonder if it’s been too much, too soon for you.”
“Not at all.” She sat up and cupped his chin, turning his face to hers.
“I just…I’ve never wanted for anything, right? Anything material, anyway. But I met you, and I was bowled over from the first moment, and at some point, I realized what I wanted. You.” He glanced at her and then returned his attention to the night sky. “Things, people, get snatched away so easily, so quickly. I was an absolute prat around you, and now I have you and I want more, and I keep asking for more. And that’s not fair, not to you. I know this rationally. It’s about security and permanence.”
“Will…”
He sighed, feeling as though he’d moved from being a prat to beingan idiot. “Dammit. I’m sorry, I didn’t expect this here, to feel this wave of memory.”
Elizabeth took his hand, kissed it, and brought it to her lap. She took a deep breath. “My father can be insufferable. He used to be better, nicer. When I was younger, he used to sit me in his den and play me ‘the music of the gods.’”
Darcy looked at her, confused. “Bach and Dylan,” she said, smiling. “When I first started playing soccer, he used to say this line from a documentary about Dylan from back in the sixties when he first toured England. The title was this phrase from a baseball player. My dad would say, ‘Don’t look back. Something might be gaining on you.’”
Darcy nodded.“Satchel Paige.”
“It’s true, you know?” Elizabeth tilted his chin and forced him to meet her gaze. “Stop looking back. The past is the past, remember? I want what you want. We’re on the same page, Will. We have been for a long time.”
The next morning, Elizabeth wore another birthday present, riding boots, as they headed to the stables. She’d been thrilled to hear Darcy had had Athena and a second horse for her brought over from the boarding stable.
He laughed in surprise when she trotted off. “You ride far better than you’d intimated, my dear. I was so looking forward to fixing your seat and arranging your thighs.”
“I know how to ride,” she sniffed. “I just haven’t done it much on a real live horse. I had lots of practice on the plastic motorized ones at the grocer. And,” she added, puffing out her chest and giving Darcy a smug smile, “I watchedNational Velvetabout a million times.”
The couple rode out a few miles before rounding back to collect their lunch. They picnicked on a hill, looking down on the rocks and stream where a year earlier she’d sung Bugs Bunny’s version of Wagner to him while he’d helped her limp to the house.
“I was really obnoxious that day. Didn’t I frighten you, this girl who mixed a painkiller with alcohol and tried to rip your clothes off?”
“You terrified me because I couldn’t look away.”
“I was a disaster.” She sounded chagrined.
“No, you were fascinating—beautiful and sexy and more damnintriguing than any woman I’d ever known.” Darcy folded his napkin and placed it back in the basket. “None of that has changed.”
Elizabeth smiled at the wonderful ways he had to make her feel good. “Andyouwere fascinating—and handsome and sexy and scruffy—and so damn intriguing under all that flannel and wool and that smoldery dark demeanor.” She played with her new necklace, tucked underneath the flannel he claimed to find sexy. “All of that has changed. I like this new light version of my beloved Ferdinand.”
He smiled at her for so long and with such a dreamy expression that she worried something was wrong.
“Will?”
He leaned over and gave her a tender kiss. “‘Love, all alike, no season knows, nor clime,’” he whispered. “‘Nor hours, days, months, which are the rags of time.’”
Elizabeth gazed at him, wondering about his distraction, and now this. “Donne, right? I thought you weren’t a poet.”
He nodded, took her hand, and pulled her up. “Shall we walk a bit?”
She glanced at the horses, tied securely by a tree and happily eating grass. “Sure.”
They walked to the very top of the hill, surveying the red and gold trees spread out below, the sky a vivid blue above them. Darcy turned to her, squeezed her hand, and dropped to one knee.Oh my God,she thought before her mind went blank.
He took a deep breath and looked up at her, his voice solemn but his eyes bright. “Elizabeth, I love you more than I knew a man could love a woman. More than I knew I was capable of or even deserved. Marry me, and give me the great honor of being your husband?”
She looked down at him, her eyes filling and her heart overflowing. A sudden noise in the bushes flushed out a flock of birds, arcing higher into the October sky.
A murmuration of swallows,she thought idly before sinking to her knees and into the arms of the man she loved.
CHAPTER TWENTY-FIVE
