He pushed her bathrobe down to pool at her feet. Then, impatiently, he got rid of his. Looking into the mirror, he devoured her with his gaze, from her tiny belly button to the lush triangle at the apex of her thighs.

One of his hands left her breast and traced a hot path down her belly. “This is sweeter than last night. I didn’t get to look at your lovely body before you slipped out of the library,” Darcy signed.

Suddenly, he felt Elizabeth tremble. She turned and wriggled out of his touch.

“Damn! What are we doing here? Put your bathrobe back on!” she demanded breathlessly. Crouching down, she picked up her bathrobe, pulled it on and moved behind a chair.

“What’s wrong, Elizabeth?” Reluctantly, he also picked up his bathrobe and put it on.

“Everything is wrong!”

“Why?” Walking near her, he tried to take her hands. “I thought we had something really good going on here. I want you to move in with me after the competition.”

She stared. “You want me to move in with you?”

“Yes! I want us to get – ”

“You’re disgusting! You want to know what’s wrong? I’ll tell you what’s wrong! I gave my virginity last night to a womaniser who is arrogant and conceited. He cheated a childhood friend out of his multi-million dollar inheritance. He likes to look down his nose at family and friends whom I love a lot, even with all their faults. I just now nearly let him fuck me in a TV studio which may have cameras hidden somewhere. And now, he wants me as his live-in play thing!”

“Why are you so interested in George? He’s a low-life.”

“Oh yeah? Well, you’re high and mighty! I just hate rich men who use their power and position to strip away other people’s rights.”

“Rights? His rights? Why do I have to listen to this crap?” He walked to the door, unlocked it and was ready to storm out when Louisa burst in with three girls from the costume department.

“What have you two been doing? I told you, no messing up the hair and makeup!”

“We were … practicing our freestyle,” Elizabeth and Darcy replied in unison, then glared at each other.

***

It was 3 in the morning. Darcy watched Elizabeth leave the after-show party. He’d noticed that, like him, she hadn’t had much to drink, the whole night. He followed her at a discreet distance.

Luckily no one delayed his departure. She was heading towards the garden of the hotel, not back to her room. The garden was deserted, and she settled on a bench at the farthest end, behind some trees.

Summoning his determination, he approached and said quietly, “Miss Bennet, sorry to disturb you.”

She stiffened in surprise. “What do you want now?”

“You hurled some serious allegations at me, earlier. I would appreciate a chance to defend myself.”

“Allegations? They were the truth.”

“You have already listened to Wickham. Wouldn’t it be unfair not to listen to me, as well? I thought you were a defender of people’s rights.”

She glared at him, but she kept her silence. He took it as a sign to continue.

“Wickham is the son of my dad’s PA, and he’s a year older than me. My father was very fond of him, from the time he was born. When his father died suddenly when he was ten years old, their family was in a bad shape. Dad settled them in a cottage within Pemberley. George and I played together when we were young.

“My father paid for his education at a boarding school and later in university. When my father died, ten years ago, he left a piece of property in Brighton that Wickham would inherit when he turned twenty-five. Dad also left Wickham a senior position in our family business, Pemberley Finance, if he wanted to work for us.

“My Uncle Andrew was the executor of the will. Wickham approached him and said that he didn’t want to wait four more years for the property, nor did he want to work for us. Instead, he wanted to become an actor and move to Hollywood, and so Uncle Andrew settled with him the market value of the property and the equivalent of four years’ wages in the position he could have had in Pemberley Finance. All in all, George was handed more than five million dollars.

“He went to Hollywood then. Within a year, though, he’d spent all of the money. Then he came back and demanded more money and a job in Pemberley Finance. Uncle Andrew refused.

“It seems that my uncle learned that Wickham had been quite wild since his late teens, partying, drinking, doing drugs and gambling. My father and I didn’t know much about that, at the time. Wickham must have gone to great lengths to hide his bad habits from my father, during his lifetime. And since I had become obsessed with medicine by the time I turned thirteen, I didn’t know about George’s excesses, either.

“After Uncle Andrew refused his demands, Wickham disappeared from our lives…until last year. That’s when my younger sister went on a three-month cultural exchange program in Mumbai. She met Wickham there. Apparently he had gotten himself established in Bollywood.

“Georgiana, who was sixteen at that time, had been very fond of Wickham when she was young. She was soon persuaded to Wickham’s version of events, and she dated him for several weeks. One day, unannounced, I flew to Mumbai to surprise her. I arrived at her apartment and found that Wickham – that low life – had tied her to the bed, naked, with a camera rolling. He and a co-star were trying to…to force themselves on Georgiana.

“I’ve never felt so violent in my life. I nearly killed both Wickham and the other bastard. Only Georgiana’s crying stopped me. I smashed the camera and kicked them out. They hadn’t succeeded with their evil deed, but Georgiana felt utterly broken. She couldn’t sleep, couldn’t bear to go out of the house. She had hideous nightmares every night for over six months.”

“Oh my god! Did you report it to the police?”

“Georgiana couldn’t face it. She begged me to take her back to Pemberley immediately. She said she had already slept with Wickham a few times, and so she was afraid, if we reported it to the police, that Wickham would claim that she was just a rich, spoilt brat who wanted to capture a threesome on tape. She didn’t want to risk facing such humiliation.”

“How is she now?”

“These past six months, Georgiana has been doing much better. She has gone back to school and is spending the summer holiday with my cousin Richard.”

Elizabeth stared at him intently. “Then what George said about you being a womanizer…that must be lies, too!”

He could feel color suffusing himself, but he met her gaze as levelly as he could and answered, “I had never been with a woman, before last night. I didn’t even know how to tell whether you’d had an orgasm, that first time. I’m so awkward and stupid in these things...”

“What? Are you telling me that you were a thirty-year-old male virgin? That can’t be true! Not in this day and age!”

“I know I’m… weird.” He swallowed hard. “But I was… traumatised by Wickham when I was thirteen.”

“That bastard! What did he do to you?”

“I can’t… tell you. I’m sorry. It’s just too painful to talk about. But the result was that I swore off of girls and women during my teenage years, when I should have been lusting and chasing after them. Then I discovered my passion for research. My mom… died slowly of heart failure. I saw her fade away over a two-year period. I wanted so badly to find a way to replace her heart.

“Even now, I seldom go out to social functions except fund-raising events for the Heart Foundation and the annual dinners of Pemberley Finance. Uncle Andrew and Cousin Richard take care of the business. On those occasions, I ask my cousins Ann, Sophie, or Cassandra to go as my partner. I only agreed to this show because Charles said that I could use it to raise people’s awareness of heart disease by talking about it in front of millions of TV viewers, rather than burying myself in research.

“I’m uncomfortable around strangers, especially someone as… expressive as your mom and younger sisters. I did say to Charles that your mother was coarse and mercenary, and that I’d prefer not to spend too much time with them. I apologise for that. I now know that I should learn to be comfortable with your family, because I…I want to have a life with you.

“When I asked you to… move in with me, I was thinking of that as our next step towards marriage. After all, we didn’t use any protection. You could be… pregnant.”

“Marry me? Are you crazy? We haven’t even gone on a date!”

“True, but you said yourself that we had been seeing each other frequently for the past weeks. You always challenged and taunted me. And you gave your first time to me. I thought that meant that you loved me as I love you.”

“How can you love me? I’m just a nurse in a small-town hospital, a nurse who happens to love to dance. You’re a world-famous artificial-heart inventor, with money to burn.”

He shook his head in stubborn negation. “You’re witty, intelligent, loyal and hot, entirely different from the fake women in the old-money circle. I was… attracted to you almost from the very beginning.”

“But you said I only had a tolerable figure!”

“That was… before I had really looked at you. Not many days after I said that, I found that I was fantasising about your body. I had so many erotic dreams about you that I started to conduct some research…”

“Research? On what?”

“On how to tell whether a woman is interested in you,” he said, pausing a minute before he continued. “Anyway, it seems that the information I gathered from the Internet was wrong. I’m sorry that I misunderstood you. Thank you for listening to my explanation.”

Darcy stopped again. He wanted Elizabeth to refute him, but she didn’t say anything, continuing to scowl at him. He swallowed the lump in his throat and said, “Will you at least promise to tell me if you discover that you’re pregnant?”

“I’ve been on the pill for months, to control my irregular periods.”

His heart squeezed. He supposed he should be relieved, but he wasn’t. He found that he could barely mask his disappointment and sadness. There wouldn’t be a little boy or girl with his unruly hair and Elizabeth’s glittering eyes after all. “Oh! Well then, I won’t… take up any more of your time, then. Goodbye, Elizabeth. Thank you for coaching me for the past two weeks, and for choreographing two brilliant dances. I’ll treasure the memory of these two weeks forever.”

He turned and walked back to the hotel. He had hoped she would stop him but she just sat there, not even saying goodbye to him.

***

A week had passed: 7 days, 168 hours or 10,080 minutes without Elizabeth. Darcy shut himself in the library. He wasn’t doing any research. He was simply spending every possible minute on the couch. He wanted to breathe in the remains of her lavender smell. He wanted to relive the moments when he was enwrapped and squeezed hard.

He also watched the recording of their two dances together, over and over again. He loved the rumba because Elizabeth was willingly touching every inch of his body. He could still remember her breasts tracing a dangerous path from his chest down to his thighs. Then she had moved to his back, using her breasts to draw another zigzag path from his shoulder blades down to his bottom, sending shivers through him.

After that, it had been his turn to smooth his hands all over her body, from her shoulders down to her ripe bottom. Then, turning her around, his hands had smoothed their way up from her thighs to her taut belly to the sides of her breasts.

Afterwards, their bodies were pressed together, chest to chest. He pulled her right thigh up to his hip by bending her knee. It was strongly reminiscent of the position in which they made love. Afterwards, she’d wrapped her hands around his neck while he pulled her clinging form around the dance floor. It was an erotic, sensual dance, like the mating of a loving couple.

The freestyle had been entirely different. He now understood why Elizabeth had choreographed such a dance. It was a reflection of her dislike of him. It started with a tango and ended up with a samba. First, Darcy tried to court Elizabeth in a nightclub setting. She slapped him on the face and they engaged in a hot, high-tension tango well-suited to their true feelings at that time, for they had still been angry with each other about what had happened during the break. The fight in the tango was a furious exchange reflected in their eyes, facial expressions and body language. They tore their Latin costumes to pieces in the process.