Page 20 of One Night with Mr. Darcy

“Agreed to…?”

“You go,” she said. “Go away and never come back and forget about us.”

Us.He stared at her dully.I have a child,he thought.I am a father.But no, he didn’t and he wasn’t, not truly, not in any tangible way.

“Mr. Darcy, promise me.”

He didn’t say anything.

“Fitzwilliam.”

“Yes, all right.” It was only the ghost of his voice. “Elizabeth? Do you think you ever might…?”

“What?”

“Forgive me?”

She closed her eyes and shook her head, her entire countenance fixed in a tight expression. “Mr. Darcy, heavens, why you think that even matters, I don’t—”

“No, never mind. Foolish of me to ask.”

“I don’t need you to feel guilt,” she said. “Guilt does nothing for me.”

“No, I suppose not.” He licked his lips. “But if there was something I could do for you—”

“No!” Her voice was not strong. “Just go away. Go away and never return.”

“Right.” He swallowed once. “Right, then.”

He left.

He probably said some pleasantries and some various goodbye words. Maybe he didn’t. Maybe he walked out, white-faced and stiff, moving like an old man who could not stand upright.

He didn’t rightly recall that.

It was only later, days later, that he began to have other thoughts.

Thoughts like,I want to see him.

She’d hidden his face that time when he’d met him. He didn’t even have an image of the boy in his mind. This was his first child, a boy child, a son, and he found himself thinking about that more than he could bear. Aching in a way, a way he would have sworn he wouldn’t.

He had considered the idea before, obviously. After one of his dalliances in those strange and seedy places he sometimes frequented, he had been seized by terror of it, in fact. (Since that day, he made it his business not to spend inside women, something that had clearly gone straight out of the window when ruining Miss Elizabeth Bennet.) He had thought lots of things about it, what he would do, how he would handle it, what the honorable way to conduct himself might be.

But never once had he considered that he might feel a strong and sudden attachment to the child.

He’d never seen William Collins II, not really. The back of his skull, his tiny limbs, none of his features.

And yet, the first thing Mr. Darcy thought of every morning when he woke up was,I have a son.

And then it was pain. At first it was fresh and stinging. But it began to dull. He grew used to it. He deserved the pain. He had brought it on his own head.

He thought of his son at night, too, and he thought of things he could have done with him if he’d been able to be there with him. He thought of holding him and playing games with him. He thought of giving him a riding horse to play with, of conversing with his son about the games he played about the toys he made real by imagining them so.

His heart was sore.

Sometimes, his pillow was wet with tears.

But he didn’t do anything about it.