His hands pushed the bathrobe aside and bared her shoulders and creamy breasts. His mouth reluctantly left her sweet lips and moved down to her delicious breasts. He laved and suckled one hardened nipple while his hand pinched the other one hard.

“Don’t!” He heard her moan.

“Too painful?”

“We shouldn’t be doing this. Someone may come in.”

“We have half an hour to ourselves. Louisa said so.” He stood up and turned away to lock the door.

When he turned back, he saw that Elizabeth risen, too, and turned her back to him. In the mirror on the wall, he saw that she had casually pulled her bathrobe up to cover her breasts, but not all the way up onto her shoulders.

“We shouldn’t be doing this,” he heard her whisper.

He walked back, wrapped his arms around her waist, pressed himself against her back and traced wet kisses from her earlobe to her neck and down to her bare shoulder. Then he untied the sash of her bathrobe. His hands cupped, weighing and rubbing her breasts eagerly.

He felt her shiver, and he looked into the mirror. His dark hands were a startling contrast to the snowy white skin of her breasts. Her lips were swollen by his kisses. Her eyes were heavy-lidded, half shut. The long hair piled on top of her head was in danger of falling down. This image of a sensually rumpled Elizabeth sent him into full arousal.

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.