Tears trickled down Tom’s face. “Today the doctors told us they think she is out of the woods.” Applause. “So please forgive me if I can’t deliver a longer speech. All I can say is that I advise you to go home and hold those you love very close because you never know how much time you have with them. Thank you and good night.”
As the lights rose, conversation burst out all over the auditorium. From the shocked expressions on most of the faces, the news of the accident had not been widely known. For a vertiginous moment, Darcy wondered if Elizabeth had been in the car as well.
Charlie had been frantically googling on his phone for information about the crash. “I think I found an article about it. It doesn’t identify Lydia by name, but the age and the timeframe are right.”
Darcy peered at Charlie’s screen, skimming through the article. Single car accident with a telephone pole. Female passenger, 19, in critical condition taken to Presbyterian Hospital. Unidentified male driver fled the scene before police arrived. DUI is suspected. It was right before Darcy would have departed for Vietnam. No wonder Elizabeth hadn’t responded to his texts or voice-mails. But at least she hadn’t been involved.
Oh God, what a nightmare for Elizabeth and her family. He wished he could go back in time and be there in the hospital to hold her hand while they awaited news about her sister. If he had known, he never would have left for Vietnam; screw the shooting schedule.
But there was no reason Elizabeth would have called Darcy with such news. He was just the blowhard who insulted her and gave her unwelcome kisses. He was irrelevant in her life. No, worse than irrelevant. Unwelcome.
He hadn’t thought it was possible to feel worse about himself. He had been wrong.
Maybe Elizabeth missed the premiere to stay with Lydia at the hospital? That would be like her. Darcy burned with the need to talk with her, but his needs seemed a lot less important than ten minutes ago. Elizabeth probably wouldn’t want to see him anyway, and he could hardly present his abject apology over her sister’s broken body.
Darcy suddenly felt claustrophobic, as if all the people, talking, laughing, speculating, were crowding in on him, enclosing him, trapping him. It was too much. If one more person wanted to shake his hand, he thought he might scream.
“I have to get out of here,” he muttered to Charlie.
Charlie took one look at his face. “Go. Take the limo. I can grab a cab.”
“If you talk to Jane, ask her where Elizabeth is.”
Charlie nodded.
Fortunately, Darcy was familiar with this theater. Keeping his head down, he slipped on a pair of sunglasses from his breast pocket and wove his way through the crowds, arriving at a side door that opened onto a nearly vacant hallway.
He could breathe more easily here. The hallway led to a lobby, which had a bar on this side, tucked away in the corner. A drink. A drink was what he needed.
There were only a few people seated at the bar when Darcy arrived. An older couple sat at one end, talking softly to each other. A paunchy man near the middle of the bar stared morosely into a beer. And at the other end was…
Elizabeth.
Chapter Thirteen
Darcy hadn’t even recognized her at first glance. The slim-fitting black gown revealed more of her skin than he had ever seen before, and her blue-green eyes sparkled. But everything else about her was just…wrong. Her normally impeccable hair was disheveled, with a few strands hanging into her eyes, and her face was flushed.
Unease prickled along his scalp. Something was terribly wrong.
His first impulse was to leave her alone in her distress; she wouldn’t want him to see her like this. He would be intruding. And now obviously wasn’t the time to ask for her forgiveness. But she was sitting at the end of a bar, swathed in shadows and completely isolated. Maybe he could help her somehow.
Of course, he didn’t know how. He didn’t know why she was out here when the rest of her family was in the theater. And he’d never been much good at this sort of thing. He never knew the right thing to say—not without someone to write him the lines, anyway. Still, he simply couldn’t leave her here on her own.
“Elizabeth?” he said tentatively as he approached her stool.
She regarded him with a glassy-eyed stare. “Darcy. Will. Will Darcy. Hello.” She raised her champagne flute in a toast and then took a big swig. Had she been at the bar for the entire premiere? Had she missed the first showing of the movie she’d believed in and fought for?
He settled on the stool beside hers. “I was sorry to hear about your sister’s accident. But I’m glad she’s on the mend.”
Elizabeth nodded slowly and solemnly. “She’s going to live; that’s what the doctors say. Lydia will live!” She held up her glass in a mockery of a toast and finished off the champagne.
“How many of those have you had?”
“I don’t know.” She pushed the glass toward the bartender so he could fill it up again. “I lost count, but I definitely need another one.”
He touched her wrist gently. “I don’t think so.”
“You’re not the boss of me!” She scowled at him. “I’m still upright, and I can see straight. Obviously, I need another one.”
Darcy stifled a groan. She wanted to get drunk? How long had this been going on? She was usually so controlled that it was all the more disturbing to see her trying to flee her demons so frantically. “Maybe you should have coffee instead.”
“If I wanted to be sober, I’d be having milkshakes or something!” she said indignantly. “If that’s your goal, you can just-just skedaddle.” She made a shooing motion. “Go.”
Darcy had just found Elizabeth; he wasn’t about to lose her again for any reason. He held up his hands in surrender. “Okay, you’re right. I’m not the boss of you.” She subsided with a grumble.
He watched helplessly as the bartender, a skinny guy with a dark brown mustache, poured her another glass of champagne. She took it, staring in fascination. “See the way the bubbles move?” She pointed. “Up, up, up and then pop!” Giggles punctuated her words.
“Fascinating,” he agreed dryly.
A long silence followed. Elizabeth alternated between watching the bubbles in her glass as if hypnotized and drinking the amber liquid in small sips.
Darcy considered various neutral topics of conversation. “Why champagne?” he asked finally.
“We’re celebrating!” she said unnecessarily loudly.
Darcy took in the dark circles under her eyes, her bedraggled hair, and the fact that she was wearing only one shoe (the other was under her stool). “Celebrating what?”
She took another long sip and burped. “The success of the movie!” she said as if it should be obvious. “And my sister is going to live.”
“Those are both reasons to celebrate.” Darcy refrained from observing that he’d seen happier people at funerals.
She shoved her glass at the bartender for another refill. Darcy took the opportunity to look around for someone to help. A family member. A friend. Anyone. She so clearly needed help, and Darcy was wholly unqualified to offer it. However, the only people in the lobby were strangers.
Elizabeth grabbed the stem of the champagne flute in her fist. “You want to know a secret?” She bent her head toward Darcy’s.
“Okay.”
“I nearly killed my sister.”
Damn. Had she been driving the car—? No, the newspaper article said the driver was a man. And Elizabeth wouldn’t leave her injured sister behind, no matter how drunk she was.
“What do you mean?” he asked carefully.
“She could have died!” She slammed her fist on the bar, startling the paunchy guy into spilling his beer. “Because I thought Wickham was a good guy. When you told me the story about your family…you did warn me…” Tears collected in her eyes. “I told Lydia what you had said. I told her to stay away from him, but I should have done more…”
A piece of the puzzle fell into place. “Wickham was d
riving the car.” The bottom fell out of Darcy’s stomach. He was in free fall. Oh God, he needed a drink of his own—and it wouldn’t be champagne.
But that wouldn’t do Elizabeth any good.
Elizabeth nodded slowly. “We don’t know who else could have been driving. Whoever it was fled the scene before the police arrived—leaving Lydia behind in a wrecked car, with coke and opioids in her system. She coded twice in the ambulance.” The last word ended on a sob.
What a horrible story. Guilt threatened to make Darcy vomit, but he pushed it away to focus his attention on Elizabeth. She was what mattered. “That’s not your fault.”
“Why didn’t I guess that he was a con man and a fraud? All the evidence was there—right in front of me. You even warned me when we were out in the hall during his audition. You warned me, but I didn’t listen.” She pounded her fist on the bar again. “If I’d believed you then I might have been able to stop him from getting to Lydia.”
“It’s not your fault,” Darcy said in his gentlest voice. Desperate to comfort her, he tried to gather her against his chest.
“It is!” Elizabeth grabbed Darcy’s tuxedo shirt with both hands. “It is my fault. I should have believed what you told me, but I didn’t. I chose to believe him and not you.”
Karma really was a bitch. Everything he’d said about Elizabeth and the Bennet family was coming back to haunt him in ways he never would have anticipated. He swallowed, knowing what he had to say. “Of course you didn’t believe me. Because I was rude…and I said terrible things about you. It’s my fault. This whole thing is my fault. I…I apologize.”
She stared at him for a moment—was she struck dumb with surprise at his words?
Maybe she needed more explanation. “I should have done more to warn your family, warn everyone on the set about Wickham…”
She squinted at him as if it were hard to see through the waves of inebriation. “Don’t be ridiculous. It’s not your fault. You were protecting your sister—something I am apparently incapable of.” Tears spilled down her cheeks.
“Wickham’s actions are not your fault.”
“But I could have prevented it if I’d been a little quicker or little less gullible. Hell, if I’d just done a thorough Google search on the guy!” She slammed the empty champagne flute on the bar so forcefully that Darcy feared it would shatter. “Or maybe if I’d tried harder to convince Lydia to stay away—or told my parents about the drug dealing…”
She folded her arms on the bar and laid her head on them. Her next words were rather muffled. “I took good care of Lydia when she was little. I watched her when my parents went out, when they were working. I helped administer her asthma treatments, and I liked taking care of her. It’s one of the reasons I wanted to be a doctor. And then—when she needed me the most—I failed her!”
“Lydia got into a car with a guy who was drunk or high. That’s on her. At that age you feel indestructible,” Darcy observed.
“But she’s not indestructible.” Elizabeth grabbed the lapels of Darcy’s jacket as though it would force him to understand. “He almost destructed…destroyed her.”
Darcy hated to see her like this, but at the same time, she was closer to him than she had been in months. He couldn’t help inhaling her scent or admiring the ever-changing blue-green of her eyes. Even drunk, she was magnificent. “But he didn’t, right? She’s going to be okay?”
“Okay.” Elizabeth said the word bitterly. “Yeah. There isn’t permanent brain damage, and she’ll be able to walk eventually. But there will be scars, and she’ll probably limp. Do you know anyone who’s hiring actresses with a limp?” She swallowed a sob.
Darcy hadn’t known it was possible for his heart to ache so much for another person. “You couldn’t know this would happen.”
“It wouldn’t have been that hard to guess. How can I be a doctor when I have such bad judgment?”
It hurt to hear her talk about herself that way, particularly when she had been so optimistic. “You wanted to see the good in George Wickham. There’s nothing wrong with that. Aren’t you the one who told me that everyone has worth? Isn’t that what it says in the In the Shadows screenplay?”
“The screenplay is wrong.”
She might as well have punched him in the stomach. Until that moment he hadn’t realized how heavily invested he had become in her worldview. Maybe he didn’t completely subscribe to it himself, but somehow it had become comforting to know that she believed in the goodness of people. And now that rug had been yanked out from under his feet.
“The screenplay is wrong, and the movie doesn’t know what it’s talking about.” She shoved at a bowl of toothpicks, sending them skittering all over the bar. Apparently unsatisfied with this chaos, she did the same to a pile of napkins.
“Elizabeth.” Darcy put his hand on her arm before she caused more destruction. She didn’t resist but folded into herself, pulling her hands into her lap.
She doesn’t mean it; it’s the alcohol talking, he told himself.
“What I need is another glass of champagne,” Elizabeth announced loudly.
Darcy caught the bartender’s eye and shook his head. “Sorry, miss,” the man said. “I’m closing up for the night.” The other patrons were already shuffling toward the lobby.
Darcy wanted to put his arm around Elizabeth, take her home, hide her away from the world, and never let her go. And it hurt—with a burning pain in his gut—that he really couldn’t protect her like that. He took her hand in his. “Maybe it’s time to go home,” he murmured gently into her ear.
“Don’ wanna go home,” she said peevishly.
“Jane might still be here.” Darcy peered hopefully into the lobby. “You could go home with her.”
“Not Jane!” Elizabeth yanked her hand from his grasp. “I don’ wanna go back to the apartment.”
What was that about? Elizabeth was very close to her older sister. But now that Darcy thought about it, he wondered why none of her family had come to check on her. It was all rather odd.
“How about your parents’ house, then?”
She pushed Darcy away so forcefully that he nearly pitched off the stool. “No!” Heads turned in their direction from as far away as the lobby.
“Okay. Okay.” He took her hands, speaking soothingly. “We won’t go anywhere you don’t want to go.”
“Good. Good.” In the next instant, she slumped bonelessly against Darcy, forcing him to hold her against his chest so she wouldn’t slide off her stool. He tried to ignore the way it affected him; now was not the time for those kinds of thoughts. “I told them I wasn’t coming to the premiere, and then I came and watched from the back of the theater,” she mumbled into his chest.
What a hollow, lonely experience that must have been. “Why? Why not sit with them?”
“They blame me, you know,” she told him in a low voice.
“Who?”
“My parents, Kitty, Mary. They blame me for Lydia’s accident.”
“I’m sure that’s not true.”
She pulled away from him with a bitter laugh. “My mother told me that I’m the reason Lydia nearly died, and my father said it would be best if I stayed away from the rest of the family for a while.”
If Tom Bennet had been standing in front of Darcy at that minute, he would have slugged the man. How could they say such things to Elizabeth? Didn’t they realize how lucky they were to have such a wonderful daughter? Darcy’s arms came up, and he pulled Elizabeth against his chest again, tucking her head under his chin. “I’m so sorry. They’re wrong, you know. It’s not your fault.”
When she didn’t respond, Darcy was dreadfully afraid that she might actually believe what her family said about her.
Elizabeth pulled herself from his arms, staring morosely at the bar. “She was always the golden child, you know? The prettiest, the most outgoing, the one my mother thought was destined to be a big movie star.”
Darcy heard all the things that Elizabeth did
n’t say about Tom and Franny Bennet’s regard for their second oldest daughter, and anger throbbed through his veins again. That must have made it doubly painful to be blamed for Lydia’s accident. He wanted to enfold her in his arms and kiss her pain away.
Elizabeth choked back a sob. “I can’t go home. I can’t face any of them.”
“At least I can help with that.” He stood and helped Elizabeth off her barstool, holding her upright while she slid her shoe back onto her foot. “All right, let’s go.” Pointing her toward the back entrance, he slipped an arm around her waist to steady her.
“I don’t want to go home,” she said very precisely.
“I’m not taking you to your home,” he promised. “I’m taking you to mine.”
It was a tribute to how trashed she was that she didn’t object.
He texted his chauffeur to meet him at the building’s back exit. Hopefully Darcy would be long gone before the paparazzi realized he wouldn’t depart via the red carpet. But he couldn’t let them snap pictures of Elizabeth in her current state.
Fortunately, Elizabeth cooperated, only grumbling about having to move while her head was spinning. They gathered some strange looks as he navigated her toward the staff-only exit, but nobody questioned them.
The alley behind the theater was blissfully empty except for Raoul waiting with the limo. With minimal fuss, Darcy helped Elizabeth down a short flight of steps and toward the car. Instantly grasping the situation, Raoul hopped out of the driver’s seat and helped maneuver Elizabeth into the backseat.
Raoul kept the snarky comments to himself until the limo was underway. “You know, sir, you’re an international movie star and not half bad looking. You don’t need to get them drunk beforehand. They’d probably do it sober.”
“Ha, ha.” Darcy was too worried about Elizabeth to formulate a witty comeback. He settled for raising the divider between the front and back seats.
Darcy in Hollywood Page 19