Page 94 of Pride, Prejudice, & Pretense

A hospital room—for that was what it was, a hospital room—all white.

Blinding white.

White: less a color than a placeholder for color, and at the same time the most concrete of all the colors.

Her room was white. Her blankets white. The ceiling. The whirring, blinking, beeping machines colluded around her bed, crowding the bedside, blank of bedside manner but linked to her by wires—all white.

The whiteness was all.

Lizzy gasped and arched in the bed as memory, red-black, returned.

The present, in all its whiteness, faded.Dark. She was beneath Wickham…he was about to enter her…claim her…violate her. His hands squeezed her throat.

And then he was on top of her, dead. A shot to the head. Her name in Fitzwilliam’s voice.

All in the dark.

She shuddered, the shudder less a subjective reaction than a whole mode of being. She was a shudder.

Escaped. At the last moment, she had escaped Wickham's threat. He had not done what he planned. Wickham's dark intention. Not a promise of a promise but a threat of humiliation and death. He had seen what she never intended him to see, touched her where she never intended him to touch her and…like that…but he had not succeeded.

Now he was dead. She was sure of it. She touched her hair, expecting it to be matted by blood, Wickham's blood, red but black in the moonlight. But her hair was clean.

She was clean.

Slowly, she untensed. That memory retreated, jagged and raw, and it was replaced by another.

***

Fitzwilliam, standing surrounded by white, his handsome face enshadowed in regret and self-loathing, talking to her, repeating a whisperedSorry.

Finally, he spoke in sentences. "He's dead, Lizzy. Wickham. I killed him. Damn it, we should have given you a sat phone before you left, but we worried about hiding it from Wickham, especially at the security gate. And then the CIA plane from Chicago registered a mechanical problem before take-off, delaying us. Agent McDougal was outnumbered and outflanked…

"I failed you, Lizzy. Failed you. I should have stopped this as soon as I knew that I…that you…that we…I should have stopped this. Even before that, when I saw how much it was taking out of you."

She remembered tears but was unsure if they were hers or his or both.

Sad. It had all been so sad. Fitzwilliam had been so sad. So sorry. But so was I. So sorry.

She tried to tell him that she should never have accepted the mission, that she should have quit, that she should have walked away when she knew what she wanted, when she knew she no longer wanted to be Agent Bennet. When she knew she wanted him. Wanted another life.

Until this mission, I never knew myself.

But she had been afraid to tell him the truth, afraid he would not want what she wanted, to share that new life with her. She had chosen to stay, to stay undercover, and to continue the seduction of Wickham until that seduction had taken her to the breaking point.

The habits of her CIA life had been hard to break, harder than she realized. Deeply instilled, installed by training, and reinforced by danger after danger. Welded by stress. In Chicago, with Fitzwilliam, she had decided against her habits but had still been trapped by them.

The only way to break a habit is to acquire a new one. Changing a habit is not as simple as changing your mind, and even that's not always simple. Habits are more complicated.

Someone had said that to her at the Farm when she was being trained to abandon normal, civilian life behind and acquire the habits of an intelligence agent. Returning to it was going to take more from her than a change of heart. But her heart had changed—and her habits would change, were already changing.

She tried to tell Fitzwilliam all that—but she could not manage to get it out, to say the first few words that would summon all the others. Words are deeds, and sometimes words can be hard to say, deeds daunting.

Fitzwilliam had started again before Lizzy could start. "When you got here, they used…a rape kit. I told them…what happened…I haven't been told the test results, but the doctordid tell me that Wickham…hadn't…" He stared at her, agony and shame deep in his eyes, his face dark.

"No," she finally said, thickly, his self-recrimination making her heart hurt. "No, he hadn't…didn't. He dragged me into the moonlight, my…lingerie bunched up…either he did that or the dragging did it. He saw me…and he…it…touched me…there…but you stopped him…"

The humiliation she’d endured was not the kind Wickham most wanted.

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