And for fear of pity you will turn away love?

When the party from Netherfield sweeps into the Meryton assembly rooms, Elizabeth Bennet has more pressing concerns than eligible newcomers. Her father is dying, the entail looms like a storm on the horizon, and the burden of securing her family's future has fallen squarely on her shoulders.

Captain Fitzwilliam Darcy has prize money enough to make every matchmaking mama in Hertfordshire abandon all pretence of subtlety. Taciturn, abrupt, and unsettlingly difficult to read, he has come to Hertfordshire to escape…and the last thing he wishes for is an entanglement with a clever young lady with impertinence and wit, who calls him out without vanity and makes him laugh without trying. He has navigated storms that would break lesser men. He is wholly unprepared for Elizabeth Bennet.

When Darcy arrives unannounced at Netherfield in the small hours with his young sister and a secret he is not yet ready to share, Elizabeth finds herself drawn deeper into the mystery of a man who is at once admirable and baffling. Between nursing Jane through a fever, fending off Mr.Collins, and managing her mother's increasingly spectacular schemes, she has little time to examine why the Darcy’s rare moments of warmth should matter to her quite so much.