Page 3 of Mr. Darcy’s Forgotten Heir (Pride and Prejudice Variations #1)
CHAPTER TWO
COMFORT IN HIS ARMS
The storm, it seemed, had decided that propriety was an inconvenience to be washed away like autumn leaves in a torrent.
Elizabeth lay in the darkness, clinging to the blankets, lying stiff and still with Darcy’s measured breathing beside her.
Thoughts raced through her mind, filling her with sorrow.
Had it only been a week ago that she’d felt part of her family?
Included? Cared for? Giggling with her sisters before the ball?
Scolded by her mother to stand straight, smile at the gentlemen, and mind her manners?
She had thought she’d belonged. That they were family. The bond was permanent, that even if she made mistakes, they would still embrace her.
Then two days ago, Collins proposed and she’d rejected him. Her mother screamed and cried the rest of the day. Elizabeth had expected her father to back her, to stand up for her. Then this morning, she’d been bundled into a hired coach and sent off despite the incoming storm.
She had not cried then. She had maintained her composure as Jane sobbed and clung to her and Mary prayed for her.
As Kitty and Lydia ran down the lane after the departing coach until they could no longer keep pace.
She had not cried when her father stood silent on the steps of Longbourn, watching his second daughter cast out for the crime of refusing to marry a man she could never respect.
She had not cried when the footman and lady’s maid accompanying her had exchanged knowing looks as they approached the inn, clearly aware of their instructions to abandon her there.
She had not cried through any of it. But now, in the darkness, with the storm raging outside and a man she was barely acquainted with lying beside her, the walls around her emotions crumbled.
A sob escaped before she could stop it. She turned her face into the pillow, mortified at her lack of control, but once begun, the tears would not be contained. She wept silently, her shoulders shaking with the effort to muffle the sounds.
“Miss Bennet?” Mr. Darcy’s voice came through the darkness, closer than before.
“I am perfectly well,” she managed, the words muffled by the pillow and utterly unconvincing even to her own ears.
“You are not,” he said, his voice gentler than she had ever heard it. “And you have every right not to be.”
Something in his tone—compassion without pity, understanding without judgment—broke the last of her restraint. The story poured out of her in broken sentences, punctuated by tears she could no longer control.
“They cast me out as if I were nothing to them,” she said, the words raw with pain. “My mother said I was an ungrateful child who deserved to starve in the hedgerows. My father said nothing at all, which was somehow worse.”
Mr. Darcy remained silent, but she could feel him listening in the darkness.
“Jane ran after the coach until she could barely breathe,” she continued, the memory fresh and agonizing. “Kitty and Lydia followed her, calling my name. Mary stood on the steps praying. My father did nothing, said nothing, and my mother didn’t even come outside to see me go. ”
She heard him shift beside her, felt the mattress dip as he moved closer. “Your family’s behavior is unconscionable,” he said, his voice tight with what sounded like anger. “No parent worthy of the name would treat their child so cruelly for exercising basic judgment about her future.”
“They believed I was being selfish,” Elizabeth said, wiping ineffectually at her tears. “That I was choosing my own happiness over the security of my family.”
“And were you not entitled to consider your own happiness?” he asked. “Were you obligated to sacrifice your entire future for their convenience?”
The question hung in the air between them. In truth, Elizabeth had asked herself the same thing repeatedly over the past two days. Had she been selfish? Had her refusal of Mr. Collins been an act of childish defiance rather than proper self-respect?
“I could not marry him,” she whispered. “I could not spend my life with a man I neither respect nor esteem. Even to save Longbourn.”
“Nor should you. No woman should be forced into marriage against her inclination, especially not to a man so manifestly unsuitable.”
His assessment of Mr. Collins surprised her, though she could not disagree with it. “You found him unsuitable as well?”
“Miss Bennet,” he said, a hint of his usual dryness returning to his voice, “Mr. Collins may be the most ridiculous man of my acquaintance, and I am acquainted with a great many ridiculous men.”
A startled laugh escaped her, unexpected amid her tears. “He is rather absurd,” she admitted, feeling a momentary lightening of her spirits at this shared understanding.
“He is entirely absurd,” Mr. Darcy corrected. “And wholly unworthy of you.”
The compliment, delivered so matter-of-factly, caught her off guard. Before she could respond, another violent gust of wind shook the inn, sending a fresh spray of rain through the window. Elizabeth shivered involuntarily.
“You are cold,” Mr. Darcy observed, his voice closer still.
She was. The chill had seeped into her bones, and despite the blankets, she couldn’t seem to get warm. “I am perfectly fine,” she insisted, a stubborn refusal to admit vulnerability that even she recognized as futile under the circumstances.
“Elizabeth,” he said, her given name soft in the darkness, “you are shivering. May I…” He hesitated, clearly weighing propriety against practicality. “Would it be permissible if I moved closer? For warmth only,” he added hastily.
The propriety she had been raised to value screamed in protest. The practical part of her that had kept five sisters fed and clothed on their father’s modest income whispered that hypothermia was a greater sin than impropriety.
Besides, they were already compromised beyond salvation.
Tomorrow, if all went according to Mr. Darcy’s sense of honor, they would be engaged to be married.
“Yes,” she whispered back. “For warmth.”
The mattress shifted as he moved closer. Slowly, with exquisite care, he placed an arm around her shoulders, drawing her against his side. Heat radiated from him, enveloping her in blessed warmth.
“Better?” he murmured, the word a rumble she could feel through his chest.
Elizabeth nodded, not trusting herself to speak.
This close, she could detect the faint spice of his shaving soap, the clean linen of his shirt, and the indefinable scent that was uniquely him.
It was… not unpleasant. Indeed, there was something alarmingly comforting about his solid presence beside her, as if he were a bulwark against the storm—both the literal one outside and the emotional tempest within.
“I am sorry,” he said after a long moment. “For all of this. For your family’s treatment, for the storm, for these… compromising circumstances. ”
“None of it is your doing,” she replied, finding her voice. “You have been uncommonly kind.”
He made a noncommittal sound. “Basic human decency is not kindness, Miss Bennet.”
“I misjudged you,” Elizabeth admitted, the darkness making her braver than she would have been in daylight. “In Hertfordshire. I thought you proud and disagreeable.”
A soft exhalation that might almost have been laughter. “I was proud and disagreeable. I am still proud, though I hope not quite so disagreeable.”
“You are not,” she assured him. “Disagreeable, that is. Tonight, you have been… quite the opposite.”
Silence fell again, but it was a different quality of silence—contemplative rather than awkward.
“May I ask you something?” he said after a while, his voice cautious in the darkness.
“You may.”
“Why did you refuse Mr. Collins? Beyond the obvious unsuitability of his character.”
Elizabeth considered the question carefully. “Because I believe marriage should be based on mutual respect and affection, not convenience or obligation. Because I would rather face an uncertain future than tie myself to a man I could never love.”
His arm tightened fractionally around her shoulders. “I admire your conviction.”
“My mother called it stubbornness and ingratitude,” she said, surprised by the bitterness in her voice.
“Your mother was wrong.”
Four words. Four simple words that somehow meant more than all the elaborate compliments Mr. Collins had heaped upon her. Your mother was wrong. As if her feelings mattered. As if she had value beyond her marriageability.
She turned slightly toward him, needing to see his face despite the darkness. A flash of lightning illuminated his features—strong jaw, straight nose, dark eyes intent on hers. For once, his expression was entirely unguarded, and what she saw there made her breath catch.
“Elizabeth,” he said, her name a question and a declaration all at once.
“Yes?” she whispered.
“I need you to know that you matter. Your happiness matters. Your choices matter.”
The simple statement undid her more thoroughly than the grandest declaration could have.
How long had it been since anyone had told her she mattered?
Her family viewed her as a burden, a problem to be solved through advantageous marriage.
Society valued her only for her potential as a wife and mother.
Yet here was Darcy—proud, aloof Mr. Darcy—telling her that she, Elizabeth Bennet, mattered as a person in her own right.
“Thank you,” she said, the words wholly inadequate for the emotion behind them.
He reached up, his fingers hovering near her cheek, not quite touching. “May I?”
She nodded, not entirely sure what she was agreeing to but trusting him in a way that would have seemed impossible merely a day before.
Gently, so gently it felt like the brush of a butterfly’s wing, he wiped away the moisture from her tears. His touch lingered, a whisper of connection in the darkness.
“You matter to me,” he said, the words barely audible over the storm.