Page 21 of Pride, Prejudice, & Pretense

He smiled at her. "A little sunrise shopping in the windy city. Couldn't sleep. Housewarming gifts. I'll show you when we finish."

"Okay." She started to mention the texts from the night before but stopped herself. She would let him mention it, if it was mentioned at all. Her bare feet, her toenails, were available as a conversation starter.

But Darcy kept his eyes on his food, eating with a real appetite. Lizzy ate, too, without talking. When he finished, he made a cross of his knife and fork on his plate and sat back, picking up his coffee and sipping it slowly as Lizzy finished.

He turned to her. "I thought I'd come by and keep you company this morning. Bingley seemed desperate to talk to his lady friend, up early to do so but also desperate for me not to be there. Something must have kept them from talking last night." He shook his head in disapproval. "So I took a walk. Lovely day, but cool."

"You don't seem happy for Charlie. He's a good man, sweet, gregarious?you know that. Why not be happy someone's making him so excited, so happy? It's sweet that he misses her and wants so much to talk to her."

Darcy looked at her as if her words might have a subtext, but she had intended none. Then he shook his head again. "I gather it's a novelty, a new thing. They haven't been together long. Given that, he should have put it on hold until we finished with this mission. What matters is Wickham, the Wicker Man,the network! We don't need Bingley distracted." He seemed especially adamant.

Lizzy paused to see if he was going to add anything else, but he just stared at his used silverware. "Look, Charlie’s our backup. Mostly, he's managing tech, doing behind-the-scenes work. It would be different if he were undercover himself and still trying to keep open communication with his girlfriend back in D.C., but he's not. Unless it becomes a problem, what's the use of making it one? He's a good agent. He knows his job."

Darcy seemed disposed to grumble. "I suppose, but if they want to keep their relationship a secret, why not take a break until he finishes here? The best kept secrets are those that are non-existent."

"Spoken like a man who has never been in love," she said as she rolled her eyes.

He looked up at her. "You judge me quickly and absolutely, Agent Bennet."

"Am I mistaken?" She steadily returned his gaze.

He stared back down at his utensils. "No. You're right. Not that it matters." His tone became professional as he faced her again, lecturing. "Spies ought not to fall in love. It creates misery all around. What we do and the life we lead melts every promise into a compromise. Or ruin. Best to leave all of that alone and simply do the job."

Despite the tightness in her throat, Lizzy swallowed. Although she had been in love once at Haverford, that had ended. She had not been in love since. Agent Bennet had reasoned with herself in terms similar to Darcy's on many lonely nights in deep cover. It wasn't clear that Agent Bennet had won those arguments with Lizzy, but they had inhibited Lizzy, making her slow to respond to male advances and even slower to initiate advances herself.

Darcy was right: promise melted into compromise. There had been a couple of flings, affairs,whatever, since college, but they had been short and, finally, unsatisfying. She was not the sort of woman who could separate sex from deep emotion, not effectively. And without emotion, sex became nothing more than companionate self-pleasure since the other person did not matter to her as he should. For Lizzy, sex should be a way of showing that you cared, not of finding out if you cared.

Other agents, different sorts of persons, rotated unfeeling bedfellows with no trouble or twinge of conscience. Lizzy wondered about them but never envied them. On her lonely nights, she wanted love, not simply sex. She was happy she acknowledged the difference, even if acknowledging it came at a steep cost to her.What's that line in King Lear? Edmund says, "I will teach you differences."

Strange that books are revisiting me now, on a mission.

"I understand your point," Lizzy said, "but he's not officially breaking any rules by staying in contact. I know you're running the mission, but can't you let him have this…her, whoever she is? Why cause friction between you…or between them? He'll be professional."

Darcy listened and nodded. "We'll see. I wish I hadn't found out. Ever since then, he’s felt like he was at liberty to tell me as much as he has. The professional thing would have been to hide the personal."

It was time to change the subject. "So! We didn't talk about Wickham specifically last night, other than to gauge…the first returns of my interaction with him. What did you make of him, up close?" Lizzy wasn't simply changing the subject; she'd been wondering about him and Wickham since she had seen Wickham's file on the plane.

Darcy's face darkened. "He's all he seemed to be through a camera or binoculars, only more loathsome. It's obviouswhy he's been able to do what he's done: he's handsome and he's charming." He glanced at Lizzy, but she kept her face expressionless, kept herself still. "In that white tuxedo coat, who would imagine him to be who he really is? He seems like a gentleman. But when you're near him for long, if you pay close attention, his gentlemanliness is a veneer. A true gentleman makes others comfortable; he does that by careful attention and an amiable manner, not by flattery or ingratiating himself."

Gentleman? Amiable?Lizzy asked herself.Does anyone still talk that way?She understood what Darcy meant, but he was allHouse of Lordsagain, especially with that British accent.

"What did you think?" he asked. He continued studying her face.

"Like you said, handsome and charming. Very charming. But thereissomething subtly manipulative about him. Talking to him was a little like sharing a scene with him, a theatrical scene in which he was acting, but a scene that he was also directing."

Darcy nodded once, emphatically. "Exactly."

"The file you gave us actually had surprisingly little on Wickham's history. Is there more that I can see to get a better idea of him?"

He glanced away. "Yes, there's more. But it won't help you much with the man. Until I identified him, we only had records of various incidents attributed to The Wicker Man. We now know he did them or orchestrated them, but we don't know any real details as to how."

"But why? Are his only motivations money and cruelty?"

Darcy shook his head at her. "Aren't those enough? Especially when you can combine them as he has?"

Lizzy felt like there was something in what he’d said, some slight revelation, but she was unsure what.

He went on, "I would've thought your time at the Agency would have shown you the reality that there are evil people. Wickham is one of them."

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