Page 47 of Pride, Prejudice, & Pretense

"He eventually took my advice and put all that on hold."

"Advice? He did?"

Darcy nodded but rotated back toward his bed, putting the pillow in place and spreading the blanket. "He did. He saw that it was a problem."

"Spies can't have attachments?"

Darcy stopped his work but did not turn toward Lizzy. "We already covered this, you and me, Agent Bennet, when we first talked about Bingley and his girlfriend." He plumped his pillow with a hint of unnecessary violence. "Themissionis what matters. Everything else has to be secondary. Attachments interfere with that."

"But we need to care for each other and about the feelings of others in our team," she said, not entirely sure why she was continuing, insisting.Partly it's Mom. My phone call.

Darcy straightened but continued to face away from her. "Yes, but caring about the mission is how we care for each other as integral parts of it." He faced her again. "If we just start…caring for each other independent of it,then the mission's likely to fail out of dysfunction. The mission has to come first."

His ultimatum to Jane had worked so well because of her past, the failed mission for which she had been an analyst. Jane lived in terror of bearing such responsibility again. Lizzy realized that Darcy, knowingly or unknowingly, had tapped into that terror.Which?“So if I have to choose between saving you and ending The Wicker Man, I should do the latter, no secondthoughts and no hesitation? And you would do the same if forced to choose between me and The Wicker Man."

Darcy's motions hitched for a second. "Checkers," he offered by way of answer as he leaned and tucked his blanket again with unneeded violence.

The whole bed-making scene was now frustrating Lizzy. The shift from Ned to Darcy, from restaurant to elevator to apartment brought back her annoyance. She had left the restaurant hand-in-hand with Ned, but now she was expected to talk spy shop with Darcy. She could not match the shift. Her current reactions were divided; part of her still lingered in the restaurant…Fanny lingering over the tiramisu, licking her spoon as Ned watched.

Lizzy stood up, needing movement, a change of posture. "All right. Well, I'm going to go to bed."

At first, it was as if he didn't hear her. He unbended and paused after finishing with his blanket, a tension visible in his shoulders as if he were silently arguing with himself.

"Goodnight, Fanny." His voice was soft, the words and tone surprising her as he turned to her again. It was a partial shift back to his manner at the restaurant despite the different accent. "The customers were right. Ned's a lucky man." The words were sincere?as sincere as they could be in context, anyway. And somehow they were…an apology.

Lizzy walked to her bedroom and closed the door.

Later, in her bed in the dark, Lizzy extended her hand up from the bed, catching a bit of pale streetlight from her bedroom window. She examined the diamond, rotating her left hand.

Imagining a wedding, or imagining who she would marry, had never been one of her pastimes. Even at Haverford, when she had fallen in love with a young man named Jim Haden, she had never really unlocked her imagination toward the future, toward a wedding or a life together. She had been vaguely afraidof what the future might hold and, she had to admit, more than vaguely afraid of marriage, commitment.

She had grown up inhaling the unhappiness of an unhappy marriage, and it had affected almost everything in her life. Lizzy had learned a brutal lesson in the subtleties of unhappiness. Her parents had never divorced despite being poorly matched, and living with them had led her to think of unhappiness as bearable, as a source of a carping dissatisfaction, efficacious enough to destroy true comfort but not efficacious enough to rouse anyone to address it. A slow-as-molasses misery. Thinking of unhappiness as bearable, Lizzy found, was somehow worse than thinking of it as unbearable.

The ring caught the pale light and glistened.

It had not been just her parent's marriage that had made her afraid of commitment. The foundation of her mother’s bridal gown business was marriage as a commercial enterprise, love reduced to the nonsense of dollars and cents. That hadn't helped her any, either.

Still, the whole scene in The Made Man,the whole pretended proposal, Darcy?it had shaken her…or shaken something loose in her, some secret cherished hope that she had kept secret even from herself.Love, marriage, a family.

Maybe she had hidden that hope to keep it from vying with remembrance of the unhappiness her parents had demonstrated. Maybe it was because she had believed what Darcy believed, that spies could not afford attachments. Few agents married, and the few who did almost never stayed married.

But the ring seemed meaningful to her…or it seemed as if it could be. With one last turn of her wrist in the light, she tucked her hand beneath her cover and rested it on her chest. A lingering, longing moment more, and she was asleep.

***

Tuesday, October 20

The next morning, she awoke from a dreamless sleep, slightly disoriented, the disorientation produced by Chianti and tiramisu and recollections. She stood, blinking, and then stumbled toward the bathroom.

Rubbing her eyes, she saw Darcy standing in it, door open, his back to her, wearing only boxers. He had taken a shower. The bathroom air still had wisps of steam. The mirror had steamed over, but Darcy had used a hand towel to wipe a small circle in the mirror and was leaning toward it, shaving.

Lizzy gaped, her eyes and mouth wide. His muscled back led down to a trim waist, a taut bottom, and strong, well-shaped legs. He was, head to toe, firm, manly.A man. There was a round scar from a bullet wound on his upper shoulder. A long, thin scar—from a knife?—ran down the other side of his back and around to his ribs. One calf carried a mottled blue scar, another bullet wound, a bad one or, more likely, shrapnel. Lizzy had her scars, too, an occupational hazard, but either she had none so severe or the CIA's plastic surgeons were better than MI-6's.

Darcy kept shaving, whistling a tune to himself.Sinatra?

She felt an immense pulse of heat, a solar flare of desire. Ducking back out of sight and into her bedroom, Lizzy closed the door softly and took a minute to collect herself. She fanned her face with her hand and then sat on the end of the bed, waiting until she heard Darcy finish and leave the bathroom. Only then did she reappear.

He was dressed, all but his shoes, and she said good morning. He smiled and returned the greeting, then sat down to put on his shoes.

---