“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.
Elizabeth was left in a samba bikini with glistening fringe, and he was in a tight, sleeveless T-shirt and shorts as the tango music faded, giving way to a samba rhythm.
Seemingly tired from their fight, he sat down on a chair. Elizabeth jumped onto the one opposite and shook her generous breasts, creating a waterfall with the fringe, taunting him. Every time he shook his body samba style on the chair and pretended to kiss her breasts, she moved just out of his reach.
Elizabeth jump up from the chair and danced around the perimeter of the dance floor. He chased after her in samba moves, then pretended to slip and laid half down on the floor, still shaking his body. She came back to him, placing her feet on either side of him, then shaking her body fiercely while she moved all the way past his thighs, his waist, his chest, until she stood over his head. Half-reclined on the floor, shaking samba style, he eyed her glittering body at close range…
Watching the video, he could still remember with exquisite precision how his body had shivered when he saw her sex passing so close above his mouth. He had longed to lick her. It was a raunchy moment of erotic tension between two stubborn lovers, each of whom wanted to win over the other.
Finally, he jumped up, chased her down, and scooped Elizabeth onto his shoulder, positioning her face-down, bottom-up. He was supposed to smack her lightly to end the dance but, a bit angry, he had smacked her bottom with more force than necessary. The music stopped. The dance was over.
With applause ringing in his ears, Darcy turned her away from the camera and gave her bottom a hard squeeze before he put her down. After he released her, she had glared at him the whole time as they received their scores and won their trophy.
He had just finished watching another round of the recording when he heard a knock at the door. He didn’t bother to get up from the couch. He simply called, “Come in.”
The door opened and Elizabeth, dressed in a long dark windbreaker and high heels, came in, shut the door and locked it.
“William, I…”
“Don’t say a word! Let me find my jeans and T-shirt first.” He hastily pulled on his clothes, tidied his hair with an unsteady hand, sat down behind the massive desk and gestured Elizabeth to sit in the chair in front of it. “Now, what can I do for you, Miss Bennet?”
Taking her time, she sat down. Then she squared her shoulders and said, “You were very unfair, the other night in the garden of the hotel.”
Darcy's heart fell. He’d held onto a tiny hope that she had come for another reason.
“Unfair? How?”
“I let you talk, uninterrupted. But then you walked away before I could say my piece.”
“You have more to say about my failings?”
She bit her lower lip. “Not yours, but…the low-life’s.”
“Did he do something bad to you, too? I should have killed the bastard in India, while I had the chance!” He jumped up from his chair, came around the desk, paced two steps towards Elizabeth and stopped. Then, with a sigh, he went back to sit down behind the desk. “Sorry, Miss Bennet. Please continue.”
“The gossip magazines were right.”
“But you didn’t sleep with him.”
“No, it wasn’t me. But he was sleeping with Lydia, my youngest sister. I introduced them, just two weeks into the show. He got her pregnant. I blamed myself, and I bought the pregnancy test and checked out the clinics for her.”
“But Lydia was only 15 years old. Did you report it to the police?”
“Lydia said no. She said she loved him. But the bastard denied responsibility and said he didn’t know how many men she might have slept with, before and during their time together. In the end, she miscarried.”
“That was why there was so much tension between you two, towards the end of the season.”
“Yes. I asked Jimmy Forester to let me pull out, to say I was ill or had a dying relative. Of course, I couldn’t tell him about Lydia. I just said flatly that I couldn’t dance with George anymore. Forester said he would think about it, and then he pulled the partner swap trick. I think he believed that the low-life was sexually harassing me, and
