Darcy’s Legacy Tortoise by Rachelle Ayala
What if Darcy regrets separating Jane from Bingley and brings a tortoise to Cheapside? The children are delighted, Jane is bemused, and Elizabeth? All bets are off.
Fitzwilliam Darcy did a terrible thing. He looked at Jane Bennet’s calm face and decided she did not love his friend—and he talked Bingley out of the only woman who ever made him happy. Then Darcy watched Jane turned away from a London door, and his certainty cracked straight down the middle.
He means to fix it. Quietly. Before anyone learns it was his to fix.
A proud man cannot simply call on a household in Cheapside that has every reason to despise him. So he brings Old Bertram, a tortoise, now languishing in a bachelor’s establishment. The Gardiner children want a pet. Darcy wants a door. Nobody, after all, can object to a tortoise.
He doesn’t expect Elizabeth in London, fiercely defending her wounded sister. She means to shut the door on him. But Darcy keeps coming back—for Jane, for the children, the tortoise, but mostly for Elizabeth.
And Elizabeth makes a terrible discovery. The man she has sworn to hate notices what she needs before she names it. He endures her temper, kneels in the dirt, and indulges the children’s tortoise games. Even more infuriating, Jane forgives him, the Gardiners are charmed, and her opinions are… disregarded.
She does not yet know what he did. She only knows she is softening. And when the truth comes—will it break her pride or her heart?
A sweet Pride and Prejudice variation with no Hunsford, no presumptuous proposal, and no faster road to forever than the slowest, steadiest creature in England.
Features: He falls first • Pet-matchmaker tortoise • A legacy from his late father • Darcy quietly atoning • No Hunsford, no presumptuous proposal • Elizabeth in London defending Jane • The Gardiner children love Darcy • Caroline Bingley scheming • Enemies-to-lovers • Forced-proximity by tortoise • Found-family warmth • Slow burn romance • Dual POV • Clean & wholesome Regency • Guaranteed slow-and-steady HEA
A sweet Regency novella, ~35,000 words.
