“I respect that.” He nodded, assuming she meant the book. “The privacy veil is drawn shut, okay?”
She smiled at his metaphor. “Veil? How about curtains? Yours are thicker than most, you know.”
“Excuse me?”
“Your privacy curtains,” Elizabeth said, sporting a distracted smile. “You’re quite good at drawing out other people about their lives and interests and possible legal issues. But here you are, best man to my future brother-in-law and host to a motley assortment of my family and his, and besides your good taste in music, sharp eye for infractions of the pirate code, and skill with an ice cream scoop, you give very little away.”
Darcy stood beside her, staring at the water and the white sails skimming along the waves far in the distance.
“I’m not always… I suppose you’re right. I am careful about what I ‘give away’ because I’m not always sure I can trust the recipient.” He cleared his throat, conscious of how stilted he sounded. “I don’t trust many people,” he added hurriedly.
“Good advice,” Elizabeth said ruefully. “I wish I’d followed it professionally.”
“Don’t beat yourself up.”
“But you trusted me. You told me things and I forgot them. And”—she raised her hand defensively as Darcy started to protest—“I can blame it on stupidity, on mixing Vicodin and alcohol, but that’s no excuse for anything I said later.” She hung her head. “I was awful.”
It took him a second or two to absorb that she had actually brought up Netherfield and the night he was supposed to forget.
“No, you weren’t,” he quickly insisted. “You were confusing and funny and endearing and clever. But never awful. Never stupid.”
“Hardly. And I was terribly rude at the Seaport.” She sighed. “I seem to be behaving quite stupidly lately. And this time it will cost me.”
“No, it won’t.”
“You don’t know everything, Fitzwilliam Darcy.”
“That is true.” He sighed, relieved that they were actually having a conversation and frustrated that it was yet again about blame and mistakes. She slowly turned back to him. “You’re right, Elizabeth. I often know very little. But I do know that you should not heap blame on yourself and shoulder all the responsibility when bad things happen. Other people are at fault as well.”
She stared up at him blankly. He gazed into her green eyes, eyes made brighter by the sun and the tears that sparkled in the corners,and lost his train of thought.She is so beautiful.He sighed heavily and reminded himself of the weighty matters Elizabeth was thinking about.Focus onher. Help her fix it.
Darcy reached out a finger and touched her wrist. “I’d wager George Wickham played a central role in creating this bloody mess.”
Elizabeth nodded and closed her eyes. “My boss asked if I knew, if I was aware of George’s involvement in the drugs.”
“Of course you weren’t,” Darcy said sharply. “Your boss should know you better than that.”
She looked up and met his eyes.
“Lizzy! Darcy!” Two small figures were running toward them.
“Wait, before we go back, I just want to…” Elizabeth took a deep breath. “I’m sorry about earlier…what Lydia said. She’s a spoiled, insensitive girl.”
He smiled softly and watched Ava and Alex stumble through the sand toward them. “Don’t give it a thought. She’s sixteen.”
“Come on, you guys!” cried Alex. “We gotta bury the clams! You gotta help!”
Ava grabbed Darcy’s hand and pulled him away. Elizabeth watched them go and wondered how he did it. He carried on a conversation about jellyfish stings and starfish and mermaids with a little girl who wasn’t much older than his sister had been when she’d died.Wasn’t it painful to walk on the sand with her and to be reminded of Georgiana?Elizabeth realized she had so many questions she’d like to ask him about his enigmatic mother, the father he’d left behind in England, and what Georgie had been like. And how he had managed to survive what had happened to his family and be so…so fascinatingly normal.
She turned away and stared at the sand, shaking as it all swept over her. She regretted him. She regretted that she hadn’t gotten to know him like a normal person would have done. That she was finally getting to know himaftershe’d stomped on his heart and taken advantage of his hospitality and cried on his sympathetic, but now emotionally detached, shoulder. Oh, she should have the Nobel Prize in Stupidity, an Oscar in Obtuseness.
Like the rest of her family, Elizabeth drank a little too much at dinner. Charles’s clams smelled delicious, as did the side dishes and desserts served up by the caterers, but her appetite was as dull as hermood. She did enjoy the endless toasts to Jane and Charles. The wines from the Darcy cellars softened her edginess and helped her stop thinking about what exactly she could do to explain herself to her bosses and fix the book. Inthreeweeks. She flopped into bed and slept restlessly.
By mid-morning, Elizabeth was on the back porch, pacing impatiently with her third cup of coffee, watching Darcy and Charles take the Gardiners, Caroline, and Barbara out on his sailboat. Or sloop. Whatever. The beautifully preserved family heirloom that skipped across the waves so gracefully deserved a better moniker than “sailboat.” She smiled at the name painted across the bow: “Yankee Girl.” Anne Fitzwilliam Darcy continued to intrigue her. She tamped down the growing realization that the son did too.
They were on the road before noon. When Darcy pulled up to the house in a Range Rover, she asked him whether the Mustang was once again road-ready. He nodded but said he never drove it more than five miles from the house. Charles laughed and theatrically stroked his chin. “Aha! A night out with the Mustang. There’s the bachelor party.”
Elizabeth hugged Jane and Charles goodbye and waved to the rest of her family, happily ensconced around the pool and beach. Caroline, still bristling from Darcy’s insistence that she wear “that gawdawful orange life jacket” if she wanted to be on his sailboat, stood apart and watched them. She’d complained bitterly to Louisa about being left behind with the Kowalski-Bennet family. From the bits Elizabeth had overheard, it appeared the Bingley twins had their own secret language.Poor Charles! Oh, poor Jane. As the Rover pulled away, Elizabeth could still feel Caroline’s evil eye boring through the tinted car windows. She felt a twinge of guilt abandoning Jane, but she was reassured when she remembered that Lydia and Mary were a formidable duo who loved a verbal battle.
