Page 117 of Pride, Prejudice, & Pretense

Fitzwilliam’s eyes were closed when Lizzy came in. His right hand was atop the blanket covering him, his little and ring fingers splinted. Lizzy ran her fingers through her disheveled hair and hated that she still wore her bloody dress and bloody shoes. She wished she could shower, change, and present herself to him looking more like the woman she wanted to be and less like the woman she had been.

He turned to her immediately. Once he smiled—as much of a smile as the swelling and stitches would permit—she forgot to worry about how she looked, forgot herself, and forgot the smiley face on the frosted door. She ran to him and put her head on his shoulder, her body across his. He pulled his other hand from beneath the covers and embraced her.

"I love you, Lizzy," he passionately whispered to her. "I love you."

She knew it already, but that did not keep the words from being the sweetest she had ever heard. Fitzwilliam had written the words to her, and she had read them, but now she heard them while in his arms.

He had more to tell her, she knew. But for now, this was so much more than enough.

Chapter Twenty-Nine: Wives and Daughters

They held each other for a long time in silence. The relief of being together and safe overwhelmed Lizzy. The burden of doubt and despair she had continued to carry as she waited for Fitzwilliam began to lighten as she lay against his chest.

She felt his hand on her back and then in her hair, soft caresses. Her eyes were closed, shutting out everything present but him?touch, sound, and scent?distancing herself from the past and feeling the future nearer than it had felt in…forever.

His chuckle registered, at first not as a sound but as a movement of his chest, and then she heard it. She lifted her head to look at him. He gave her his injured but intense smile. "The blonde is gone."

She boggled for a second, and then she understood. So preoccupied with worrying about him, applying for graduate school, humoring her mother, and helping her aunt, she wasn’t thinking much about herself. However, shehadgone to a beauty parlor and gotten her hair colored to an approximation of her natural brown, wanting to purge another remnant of her alias. When Fitzwilliam had seen her last, her hair still had been bright blonde.

For a moment she felt self-conscious, awkward. She touched her hair, wishing that she'd had time to wash and style it, as she wished she'd had time to shower and put on clean clothes.

Fumbling for a response, she finally smiled, but unsure. "The real me—or very nearly. What do you think?"

"Enough to tempt me," he said and leaned forward for a kiss, a surprisingly eager one, given his condition and what he had likely suffered in the past hours.

She returned the kiss with an eagerness of her own, allowing herself to rest more of her weight on him as she pushed herself up his chest, her chest pressing hard on his. She ended the kiss and pulled back, smirking at him even as her breath came fast. "Enough to temptyou, huh?"

He grimaced, partly in play. "Please don’t remind me of what I said." Pausing, he looked at her, gentleness in his eyes that she felt in the touch of his fingers against her cheek. "Haven't you figured out yet that I only said that because I already knew, at some unacknowledged level, that standing by and watching you seduce George Wickham would prove unbearable?"

She blushed with pleasure, understanding him and believing him, but she played dumb. "You knew how clumsy a seductress I would be?"

He scoffed, smiling again. "Ha! Hardly clumsy! Miraculously efficient, I say. You seduced two men at once, Lizzy Bennet,two—one with pretense and the other without even trying."

She looked around the otherwise empty hospital room, then let one coy eyebrow buoy. "Are you trying to seduceme, Fitzwilliam Darcy?"

He sighed in head-shaking resignation and sat back, letting his finger softly trail across her smiling lips. "The spirit is willing, Lizzy?so,sowilling?but the flesh is weak."

She kissed his lips quickly, carefully, and then she sighed. "I know. Mine, too, spirit and flesh. Soon," she promised.

He nodded his agreement. "It's a date."

A chair stood close to the bed. She pulled it closer and sat but reached out to hold his left hand, leaning toward him. "What happened to you, Fitzwilliam? How did you end up in that office building?"

He inhaled and then slowly exhaled. "Probably it’s best to tell you the whole story, although I'm not going to worry about the precise timeline or keeping it all straight. I'll just tell you as best I can…the major events and explanations as they come to me.

"I left Casper with a hunch. Calling it a hunch probably dignifies it too much. It—whatever it was—lodged in my brain after I realized that Wickham didn’t expect the two teams that showed up on the mountain, so he must not have called for them. Someone else sent them. If Wickham wasn’t suspicious enough to arrange it, it must have been someone else's suspicion.

“And—although I admit this was a leap—what ifit was not just a suspicion of you?What ifit was a suspicion of Wickham, too? I mean,worryabout him and what he might give away. Who had we interacted with who seemed concerned aboutyou and Wickham? The answer wasFather Robyn."

He stopped and licked his lips. "There was that strange, oily, officious visit he paid to Fanny in Chicago. It might have been priestly overstepping—not exactly a novelty among Episcopal priests, who often think they're God's right hand—but it stuck in my mind. Then I recalled the girl from UIC, Teresa Sanz. She’d said that Father Robyn introduced her to Lady Catherine.What ifthat had not been innocent?What ifit had been Collingwood procuring a plaything for Wickham?

“My head told me I was just guessing, but my experience told me that the priest wasoff. Then the whole Wicker Man name started to make sense to me, a perverse sense?the whole Christian vs. pagan thing, the idea of striking against Christendom from a place like St. James Church. Attack the enemy from the enemy's very heart."

He shifted in the bed, grimaced, and looked at his splinted fingers. "Working off that, I went back to Chicago. I gathered upsome things"?he gave Lizzy a look, and she thoughtour copy ofWives and Daughters?"and I moved into a hotel near both St. James and Rosings. I wore a disguise and started following Collingwood carefully. If I was right about him and he picked up on my tail, he would be gone, in the wind. Much as I wanted him, what I really wanted was the Wicker Man, to destroy the organization. I had to bide my time.

"While I was there, I also got to know Teresa Sanz much as Bingley did, by bumping into her on campus, pretending I was an English professor?pun intended. It took a couple of 'chance' encounters and some apparently casual questions for her to begin to refer to her time at Rosings. Her references were indirect, but it was obvious to me. It was also obvious that she was deeply ashamed of what she had done there.

"She got drawn into it before she quite understood what was happening to her. Drugs were almost certainly involved, and without her knowing." Fitzwilliam’s deep frown deepened more. "From a few things she said, it was clear that Collingwood introducing her to Lady Catherine had not been chance but had been orchestrated. Lady Catherine later let something slip, post-coital murmuring"? Fitzwilliam’s face pinched?"that suggested Catherine and Wickham had asked for the introduction. "

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