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By the time we got home, my mind was still spinning. I wanted to ignore the fact that the three of us had made a whole-ass spectacle of ourselves, but that was impossible. And given the texts I’d received from both Tabby and Garrett, it would be a while before the school let it die.

I couldn’t have been more thankful that I didn’t need to go the next morning.

“I’ve got to message Wilson about this parade thing ASAP. You good on your own for a bit?”

“Yeah,” I replied dismissively as I watched an online video of me fighting with AJ on the lawn of City Hall. “Totally good.”

When I didn’t look up at him, he walked over and plucked my phone from my hand. A deep scowl carved its way into his expression before he turned it off and tossed it onto the table. “Ignore that,” he said as he looked at me. “You didn’t do anything wrong, and you don’t have anything to be embarrassed about.”

“Those in attendance might beg to differ with you—”

“And they’d be wrong.” His dead-serious face was a little more than I could handle at that moment and I looked away, taking a sudden interest in the grain of the kitchen table.

“AJ really has it in for you,” I said as my finger traced the looping pattern in the weathered oak, “and he has some rather twisted notions about your motives.” I forced a laugh. “Guess it’s a good thing he’s not doing any detective work.” When Dawson didn’t join in, I dared a glance at him. Yep . Stoic and unreadable as ever.

“You should get some reading done,” he said before he started down the hall.

“Or maybe I should watch the stupid movie to see if I can actually get ahead in something,” I countered. “You think you can suffer through it with me if I can find it?”

“Give me ten minutes.” He disappeared into my bedroom while I hunted for Pride and Prejudice on the TV, then emerged seven minutes later. “Wilson said they got another hit on Marco’s vehicle in Pennsylvania, heading east.”

“So he really might be heading for the homeland,” I said.

Dawson nodded. “Something bigger is going on here, and we just don’t have enough of the picture to figure it out. But we will once he’s caught.”

“Did Wilson shut down the parade appearance?”

“Surprisingly, no. But he is sending a couple of agents down to help with security, and he’s going over the details with Sheriff Higgins.”

“That’s a conversation I’d like to overhear,” I muttered under my breath.

“Agent Wilson will get it sorted. I have no doubts about that.” His gaze drifted to the TV. “Did you find the movie?”

“Nope. It’s not on any service we actually have, which means I’ll have to read the damn thing—and you dodged a rewatch bullet.”

“Here,” he said, snagging his laptop off the kitchen table as he walked by. He rounded the couch and sat down next to me. “I’m pretty sure one of my accounts will have it.” With deft fingers, he quickly logged into an account and searched for the most recent version of the film—an important distinction, he assured me. “Here it is,” he said, placing the computer down on the coffee table. “You want to start it now, or do you want to finish up that Spanish project?”

“ Ahora ,” I replied with a triumphant smile.

“ Muy bien. Entonces probablemente deberías empezar —”

“All right, all right, hotshot. Point made. No need to show me up.”

“You should be used to it by now, Danners.”

I turned with alien slowness to stare at him and his bravado. “Can you fit that overinflated ego of yours on the couch with you at night, or does it have to sleep on the floor?”

“We manage,” he replied, positioning the laptop on the coffee table. “Spooning helps.” I marveled at his ability to say that with a straight face without a break in the conversation while he jumped up to kill the lights. “You ready?”

I sighed heavily and grabbed a pillow to cuddle. “As ready as I’ll ever be.”

* * *

“Well, he seems fun,” I said in jest as I watched the brooding Mr. Darcy hold up the wall during an otherwise festive event. “A whole party full of chicks dressed to the nines who wanna dance, and this guy’s all ‘no, dancing isn’t fun’ about it. Can’t wait to watch a whole movie about Captain Buzzkill.”

“Would you just shut up and watch? You’re supposed to be learning something.”

“Oh, I am: how not to choose a man.”

“I don’t think you have to worry about these particular issues any more, Danners.”

I turned to him slowly, a glare firmly in place. “Don’t make excuses for the grump just because you are one, Dawson. If Darcy were a real person, I’d think he might have been your great great great uncle or something, given his mannerisms.”

“You probably need another great or two to make that work, but A for effort—the only A you’ll be getting on this assignment if you don’t stop talking and watch .”

“‘If you don’t stop talking and watch ’,” I parroted in my most childish, mocking tone. He grabbed the pillow beside him and swatted it at my face. “I’m regretting this decision already.”

“Welcome to my world. Now shut up.”

Against my better judgment, I curled my legs up under me and tucked the pillow he’d just whacked me with next to me so he couldn’t grab it and hit me again when I complained. A pleasant scent drifted off of it, and I inhaled reflexively. It smelled like rain and leather. It smelled just like Dawson.

Something strange fluttered in my stomach, and I quickly set the pillow back between us.

* * *

“It’s coming up now,” Dawson said as Elizabeth walked out to the carriage awaiting her.

I leaned in, intrigued by the strange relationship brewing before me, and watched as Mr. Darcy unwittingly helped her up the steps without her realizing. The expression on her face when she saw her hand in his was amazing—but the way he pulled away and stormed off, hand flexing as though he’d been jolted by electricity, was everything Tabby had promised.

“What makes that moment so powerful,” Dawson said without prompting, “is the way his reflex embodies his feelings for Elizabeth. He’s fighting them as he’s realizing just how badly he’s falling for her. It’s as though she’s gotten under his skin and he can’t get her out.”

“Does he want to?” I asked, feeling the weight of that question in my bones.

He hesitated for a moment before he dared a sideward glance at me. “At this point, I don’t think he could even if he wanted to.”

I swallowed hard and turned my attention back to his laptop.

Twenty minutes later, I was hooked. “Why didn’t anyone tell me this was the OG enemies-to-lovers story?” I cried out as Elizabeth vowed to never have anything to do with Darcy right after he proposed (however clumsily). “That changes EVERYTHING !”

“Of course it does,” Dawson sighed. “You wouldn’t want to do anything the easy way, would you?”

“Like you can talk. I don’t believe for a second that you choose the path of least resistance when it comes to the women you date.”

“Normally, I do.”

“Normally?” I asked, my chest suddenly so tight it was hard to breathe.

Silence.

“Yes. Normally.”

“But not now?”

“Watch the movie, Danners.”

“That’s not an answer—”

“Watch. The. Movie.”

So I did.

I watched the botched romance go through highs and lows, and even lowers. I watched Darcy humble himself and fight for the woman he loved. And I watched Elizabeth see past her own issues long enough to stop sabotaging the best thing to ever happen to her. It was, in a word, perfect.

It was dark in the living room except for the rolling credits on the laptop screen. I pretended to cough to clear any evidence of my emotions away as he turned the lights back on.

“You good over there, Danners?”

“Yep. All good.”

He rejoined me on the couch and looked at me intently. “So…what did you think?”

“Real talk? I did not expect to love it as much as I did.”

“Interesting…”

“Why is that interesting?”

“I didn’t have you pegged for a true romantic.”

“I’m just a complex female, Dawson. You’re probably not used to those. But don’t worry, I won’t tell anyone you were wrong.”

He leaned his elbow against the back of the couch and rested his head in his hand as he stared at me, assessing—always assessing. “What was your favorite part?”

“Well, Tabby will be thrilled to know that I am now officially a member of the hand flex club, but there was something so amazing about the final scene. That ‘bewitched me’ line…” I puffed up my cheeks and released my breath. “Utter perfection.”

“Sooo interesting.”

“It’s not interesting at all, Dawson, because the universal truth about women is that we all want that level of commitment and passion from someone when we think all is dark and lost. We want you to storm over the hill and profess your deepest feelings while staring at us like we’re all that exists in this world—that we’re all that matters. That’s romance. That’s real love.”

There was a curiosity in his gaze that cut right through me as he leaned forward ever so slightly. “Except it’s fiction, Danners.”

“In this example it is…but it doesn't have to be.”

Tension swallowed us as we sat on the couch, staring at one another. I’d seen that intensity in his eyes many times: when he’d stormed toward me in the rain after shooting Donovan. When he’d arrived on the scene after I’d escaped Mr. Matthew, thinking he was too late. When he’d busted into the sheriff’s interrogation room after I’d been arrested. Women fantasized about that look in the dark of night, and I had it sitting only a couch’s width away.

But it wasn’t the same, and I knew it.

Because I wasn’t Elizabeth, and he wasn’t Darcy.

“You should probably go make some notes for your paper while the story is fresh in your mind,” he said, breaking me from the wayward thoughts that clearly needed to be reined in ASAP. “You can cross-reference them with analyses you find online.”

“Good idea,” I replied with way more enthusiasm than necessary as I launched myself off the couch. “I’m just gonna go shut myself in my room until I’m done.” I snatched my backpack off the table and continued down the hall without breaking pace, needing to escape that moment, my traitorous thoughts, and the feeling that I’d unlocked something dangerous in my mind that I might never be able to tuck away again.