The Auction: Lot Seven: Steamy Pride and Prejudice Variation (Steamy Pride and Prejudice Variations)

"Your mother arranged it. Same thing." The woman advanced with the rouge. "Two daughters, she said. The plain one's already been prepared. You're the difficult one. She warned us about that."

Elizabeth Bennet had been purchased by Fitzwilliam Darcy for one thousand pounds, and she would never forgive him for it.

"The society monitors its assets. You are recorded in their ledger as my property. If you appear on the street without my escort, they will assume you have escaped, and they will collect you. Not to return you to me. They will sell you again, to someone less concerned with your welfare."

"Why did you bid on me?" He had known this question was coming. He had rehearsed answers — reasonable, careful answers about the investigation, about protecting assets, about maintaining his cover. None of them were true. He said none of it. "Because it was you." The words left him before he could catch them. The truest thing he had ever said, and the most dangerous. He knew even as they escaped that they could not be unsaid, that they would change whatever came after the way a key changes a lock — irrevocably, in one direction only.

"I saw you on the block," he said, and his voice was rough, the composure gone. "And nothing else in that room existed. Not the investigation. Not the evidence. Not the careful, methodical plan I have spent three months building. You were standing there in that gown, and you were fighting them, and all I could think was that if anyone else in that room purchased you, I would burn the building down with them inside it."

as though she were the answer to a question he had not known he was asking.

"I want you. I have wanted you since Hertfordshire. But I would rather lose you entirely than discover, in a month or a year, that this was gratitude, or proximity, or fear dressed up as something else."

Twenty-seven buyers. Fourteen procurers. Three members of Parliament, two barristers, and a man who had once dined at Carlton House. Six of the procurers fled the country before warrants could be served; the rest were taken in their homes, most still in their nightclothes.

She thought about what it meant to let a parent go. Not the dramatic severance of a quarrel. The quiet, exhausted recognition that the person you needed your mother to be had never existed.

"I hear you." "I am not staying because I am grateful or because I have nowhere else to go or because this house has become familiar. I am staying because—" She stopped. Drew a breath. "Because I know you. Because I have seen you at your worst and your best and I choose this. I choose you."