Mr. Darcy Broke My Heart Page 13

He took my free hand in his, and once again I thought I might melt at his touch. It really wasn’t fair, this immediate and devastating effect he could perpetrate simply by holding my hand.

  “Claire, I admit that I panicked. I’m not used to meeting women like you.”

  I couldn’t even bring myself to ask what he meant by that, because I was pretty sure I knew. Women who weren’t sophisticated. Women who didn’t know the difference between flirtation and relationship. Women who wore their hearts pinned firmly to their sleeves.

  “Like I said, it’s not a big deal. And it definitely wasn’t worth getting up early just so you could stalk me at Starbucks.”

  His fingers squeezed mine. “I disagree.” He turned then, in the direction of Christ Church, but he kept my hand in his as he started walking. I had to start walking too, or risk being towed along behind him like a barge on the Thames. Thank goodness my mocha had a lid on it.

  “James—”

  “Just keep moving and listen,” he said.

  I would like to say that I resisted. That I told him where to get off, in polite terms of course, and then returned to Christ Church on my own. But I was walking hand in hand through the streets of Oxford with a man who was probably the closest living thing to Mr. Darcy I would ever find. Resistance was futile.

  “All right. Fine, then.” I tried to sound annoyed instead of thrilled.

  “You were right,” he said, still striding along so that I had to walk faster than normal to keep up with him. “I behaved like a jerk the other night. But you caught me off guard.”

  “I caught you off guard?” I wasn’t the one who had swooped in for a little unexpected lip lock.

  He scratched the back of his head with his free hand, the international symbol for male confusion. “When I met you… What I mean is, I didn’t expect.”

  For a well-educated man, he wasn’t displaying spectacular verbal skills. Then again, he was a man. And truth be told, I wasn’t attracted to him because of his verbal skills, whatever they might actually be.

  “It ’s okay, James. Really. You kissed me, you regretted it, I should regret it—”

  “Should regret it?” He stopped again and spun me to face him.

  I almost tripped and fell sideways, but he caught me by my upper arms. Hot liquid sloshed out of the little hole in the lid of my mocha and washed across the back of my hand.

  “Ouch.” Surprise, more than pain, goosed me, and I dropped the cup. It hit the pavement between us and exploded, brown arcs spraying both of us.

  James jumped back and I did too, but not before I was liberally coated with coffee from the waist down. Fortunately, my pants kept me from getting burned. I looked over at James, who was wiping away mocha from the knees of his jeans.

  “I’m so sorry,” I said and bent toward him to add my efforts to his own.

  As I swiped at his legs, I heard a funny kind of rumbling sound. It took me a moment to realize that it was coming from him. I looked up, and he was wearing an expression I’d never seen before. Amusement. Pure unadulterated amusement.

  “I’m okay,” he said, catching my wrist and pulling me upright.

  The coffee hadn’t really burned me, but I thought his fingers might. I wondered if it was possible to brand another person with a mere touch. It certainly felt like it.

  “I’d say I’m not usually such a klutz,” I said with a sigh, “but I’d be lying.”

  He released my wrist but twisted his hand so that his palm was somehow flat against mine. And then his fingers curled downward and he had me in his grip.

  “Claire—”

  He was looking at me with those intense dark eyes again, and the ferocity of his gaze would have kept me standing there, stock still, if twelve baristas had come up and doused me with mochas.

  “Yes?”

  I realized at that moment that we were standing just outside Tom Tower and the Porters’ Lodge. I’d hardly noticed how much ground we’d covered on our way back to Christ Church. I glanced around and hoped that none of the other seminar participants were out and about this early to see our strange display of affection. Or at least I thought it was affection.

  “I need to tell you something.” James’s other hand came up to cover where our fingers were joined.

  My stomach sank. In the heat of the moment—literally—I’d forgotten that I had some of my own explaining to do, but his words were like a bucket of cold water, reminding me that whatever I might feel for this man, it was based on at least one giant whopper of a lie.

  “I’ve got something to tell you too.”

  He frowned. “Do you want to go first or should I?”

  I knew the answer to that question in my heart, even if I didn’t want to admit that I did. Because I knew that I should tell him the truth on the spot, right then and there. But he was looking at me with those gorgeous eyes, and I felt like a movie star or a princess or.

  A complete and total fraud.

  Because that’s what I was, really. None of it was real. Not when it came to James.

  Apparently my mocha had contained at least one large lump, and it was now lodged in my throat. I drew a deep breath, thinking I would expel it by simply blurting out the truth. “James, I’m not—”

  “Claire?” Another man’s voice pierced my consciousness. It came from over my right shoulder. I turned to see who it was, because the voice was familiar. It was a voice from back home. It was—

  “Neil? What are you doing here?”

  He stood framed in the arch of the gate, half in the shadows of the Porters’ Lodge. The weight of James’s presence next to me pressed the air from my lungs. I wasn’t doing anything wrong, of course. Well, not at the moment. But had Neil seen us walking down the street toward Christ Church, talking so intently? My hand clasped in James’s?

  “Not exactly the welcome I was hoping for.” Neil stepped toward us and eyed James with a narrowed gaze that reminded me of a gunslinger from an old Western movie. His mouth formed a thin line instead of its usual easygoing smile.

  “Hello.” Stepping forward, he extended his hand. “I’m Neil. Claire’s boyfriend.”

  The blush that rose to my cheeks would have set the entire Midwestern prairie on fire.

  James dropped my hand, stiffened, and cast me a disbelieving look. “Boyfriend?”

  Neil’s gaze flew to me. That clucking noise rattling around in my head was clearly my chickens coming home to roost.

  In times of crisis, I had always relied on good manners to get me through. Greeting relatives and friends at the funeral home all those years ago. Meeting with the social workers who regularly checked up on me to make sure I was taking care of Missy. Keeping an entire practice of doctors, nurses, and support staff happy and far from each other’s throats. Good manners had always been my lifeline, and I reached for it now.

  “Neil,” I said, my voice wavering but clear, “this is James. James Beaufort. He’s one of the seminar participants.” The casual note in my voice practically scorched my tongue. “James, this is, um, Neil. As he said, he ’s my boyfriend.”

  I wanted to expire on the spot, and I only regretted there wasn’t a convenient manhole right outside Tom Tower that I could disappear down. But this situation…no, this disaster was of my own making. For years I’d preached to Missy that she had to clean up her own messes. Not that I’d actually made her clean them up, of course. I would simply scold her and then do it myself. But I’d preached that message long and loud, and now it was clear that the person I should have been preaching to was myself.

  James took Neil’s outstretched hand as if it were poison. “Welcome to Oxford.”

  Neil cast him a hard look. “If you don’t mind, I’d like to speak to Claire. If I’m not interrupting anything important.”

  I looked from one man to the other, completely at a loss for words. What was Neil doing here? And when had he developed Neanderthal-like qualities? I’d never seen him more than slightly annoyed, and now I could almost see steam shoo
ting from his ears.

  “We were just getting some coffee before our seminar begins,” James said. Neil’s gaze fell to the overturned cup at our feet. “Unfortunately, Claire had a bit of an accident.” To my surprise, James slid a hand around my elbow and cupped it as if he were personally taking charge of my safety.

  Neil actually bristled and took another step toward us. He was taller than James. I’d forgotten how tall he was. And where James was the sleek urban type, Neil was more homegrown and all-American.

  “I’ll take it from here,” Neil said, his eyes locked on James.

  I would be lying if I didn’t say that a little thrill shot through me as I stood there, the two of them looking at each other like boxers sizing up an opponent. Fortunately at that moment, reality burst over me. The only reason the two of them were glowering at each other was because of the lies I had told. That reminder doused any flame of feminine vanity that their male posturing had lit.

  James looked from Neil to me. “Claire?” The question encompassed a lot more than just my name. His hand still cupped my elbow, but I could see the confusion in his eyes. “Is it true? Are you involved with him?”

  The night my parents were killed, when the police came to the door, I had experienced the same feeling of unreality—although this situation was a tragedy only in the romantic sense, and it was of my own making. But at that moment, I felt that same strange phenomenon I’d experienced all those years before, when time seemed to stand still and I felt as though I were standing outside of myself, watching what was happening to me.

  “Yes.” I felt the blood drain from my face, and his hand released its grip on my elbow. “Yes, it’s true. Neil’s my boyfriend.”

  James’s expression, never very open even under the best of circumstances, closed like blinds pulled against the glare of the sun. I felt rather than saw Neil’s shoulders drop into a more relaxed posture. As for me, I felt as if I might vomit. Thank goodness I hadn’t made any serious inroads on that mocha before I’d dropped it.

  “Excuse me.” James stepped back and then pivoted on one heel before striding away toward the Porters’ Lodge. He moved so quickly, there was no chance of stopping him, of trying to explain. I watched him disappear through Tom Gate, and tears of frustration stung my eyes.

  “Claire, what’s going on?”

  Neil’s soft question might as well have been shouted at the top of his lungs, because it had the same effect. I turned to look at him, so familiar, so normal, and yet so very out of place in this setting.

  Or maybe I was the one who was out of place.

  “I can explain,” I said, knowing even as I said the words that I really couldn’t. How could I ever make Neil understand why I’d tried to be someone I wasn’t, when I didn’t even really understand it myself?

  “Were you with that guy?” Neil’s eyes were wide with disbelief. He ran a hand through his hair, and the short-cropped brown strands stood on end. And then the question I’d been dreading the most. “Didn’t you tell him about us?”

  “Neil—”

  But he held up a hand to stop me. “Never mind. I don’t think I want to know.”

  Before I could say anything else, he, too, turned on one heel and walked away with long, swift strides.

  “Neil!” I started following him, but after twenty feet and calling his name repeatedly, I realized he wasn’t going to stop. I was left standing on the pavement outside Tom Gate, watching him growing smaller and smaller as he headed toward the center of town. Above my head, the bell in the tower began to chime the hour. And in my heart, it felt like a death knell.

  I had no idea where to look for Neil, but I did know where to find James. The bell chiming in Tom Tower should have reminded me, if nothing else. Eleanor would be calling the seminar to order, and it was James’s day to present his paper. I would rather have faced a firing squad, but since that wasn’t an option, I set off instead across the quad toward Eleanor Gibbons’s lair, my pants covered with coffee and my mind in turmoil.

  This time, I was the last one to take my seat. The rest of the group chatted quietly, and James sat next to Eleanor, talking with her in low, urgent tones. He glanced up when I entered the room, but his expression never changed, and he didn’t acknowledge my presence.

  I sat down between Martin and Olga and tried not to cry.

  “Good morning again, everyone.” Eleanor called the group to order with her usual brisk efficiency. “Let’s begin right away, shall we?” She turned to James. “I’m sure you’ve some intriguing new point of view on our novel for us to consider.”

  “Possibly.” He opened a monogrammed leather portfolio and looked around the room without actually looking at me. “I’m a businessman, not an academic, so take that into consideration.”

  Martin chuckled in sympathy, Rosie and Louise made their usual soothing noises, and the cardiologist simply looked bored. Olga looked entranced, but maybe she was just enjoying looking at James.

  “And what’s your paper entitled?” Eleanor asked.

  The corners of his mouth tightened. “Love and Deception: What’s the Difference?”

  I could see the words in my mind as they must have been typed on the page he held in his hand, and I cringed.

  “Do begin,” Eleanor said encouragingly. She shot me a look that I couldn’t quite decipher, but I thought she might have had a gleam of triumph in her eye.

  I wouldn’t have been surprised if she knew about James and me spending so much time together. I also wouldn’t have been surprised to know she’d drawn her own conclusions from that information and the fact that James was clearly ignoring me.

  “In Pride and Prejudice,” James was saying, “Austen manipulates her characters for the purposes of her own satisfaction, not to portray the truth about love.”

  There were a few low, questioning murmurs, and I tried to look politely interested but not overly involved. Certainly not as if I was hanging on every word that came out of his mouth.

  “Elizabeth Bennet justifies her change in feelings for Mr. Darcy because he saves her sister Lydia. Certainly she would have been grateful, but if he had been poor or unattractive, she would not have imagined herself in love with him.” James’s voice burned like fire now. At least it seemed that way to me. The members of the group were nodding, some intently and others looking as if they were in danger of nodding off. “Austen constructs a scenario where Elizabeth can justify her selfish choice of Darcy with the illusion of love.”

  Illusion? Who in the history of English literature had ever read any of Austen’s novels and come to the conclusion that she ’d really been engaged in a monumental fakeout of her readers? Well, given what little I knew about true academic scholarship, someone probably had. The important question was, why had James come to that conclusion even before the scene outside the Porters’ Lodge?

  Embarrassment still stained my cheeks, and I was distinctly uncomfortable whenever his gaze happened to move over me. But as he continued to expound on his theory, I realized something. He had to have written this paper long before he even met me, whatever he might have told me earlier. No, these sentiments were not the result of my duplicity or Neil’s unexpected arrival. James had taken issue with Austen’s version of love long before I ever entered the picture.

  I glanced around the circle and caught Eleanor’s eye. She was looking at me with both contempt and pleasure. I quickly shifted my gaze elsewhere, but no matter where I focused, I couldn’t escape my own thoughts. Or my own guilt. Somewhere beyond the walls of Christ Church, Neil was wandering the same streets that I had wandered, trying to figure out why he’d ever asked me out in the first place. And right in this very room, I was trying to figure out the same thing.

  Who had I become in the past few days? Or was the question more serious than that? Perhaps the real puzzle was, who had I become in the years since my parents’ death?

  For the second time that morning, I felt as if I might vomit. I lurched to my feet, stumbling over Martin
’s sensible professor-type shoes, and headed toward the door.

  “I’m sorry. Excuse me.” By the time I made it outside the circle, I was seeing stars. I could only pray that I wouldn’t trip on the stairs or otherwise land in a heap before I could escape.

  Almost on instinct, I made my way to the river. I collapsed on the grass and took in deep gulps of air. At midmorning, the path along the bank was largely deserted, and only the occasional punt glided past. I’d observed the flat-bottom boats on the little stretch of river and decided they looked deceptively innocent, like Missy just before she asked me for a gigantic favor. Even the laughing young college students seemed to find them hard to maneuver, the unwieldy length of the pole often slipping from their hands and leaving them stranded midstream. I had witnessed one young man take a headfirst tumble into the river while attempting to impress his girlfriend.

  I sighed and closed my eyes in an effort to find some measure of calm.

  “Ahoy, landlubber.”

  My eyes popped open at the sound of that deep, familiar voice.

  The last sight I’d ever expected to see was Neil standing on the back of a punt, poling the little boat along. He drew the punt up to the bank and brought it to a stop a few feet from where I sat on the grass.

  “Hey.” I didn’t know what to say.

  “Can I give you a lift?” His enigmatic expression gave me no clue as to what he was thinking.

  “I’m not sure why you’d want to.” I still felt the sting of shame that had struck me earlier that morning. That continued, even now, to burn.

  He looked serious, his jaw tense, but at least he’d stopped when he saw me.

  “We need to talk, Claire.”

  I nodded, but it took all the courage I could muster not to turn and run back toward Christ Church.

  “I’m supposed to be at Harriet’s soon.” Which was true, but it was a while before she ’d be expecting me.

  “I have no idea who Harriet is,” Neil said with a frown. “I’m thinking of abandoning ship whenever I find a pub.” He reached out a hand. “You’re welcome to come along.”