Mr Bennet walks away from Longbourn one morning with a travelling bag and no explanation, leaving Elizabeth Bennet a month later still ignorant of where he has gone.
Fitzwilliam Darcy does not mean to insult the young woman he finds in a field discussing the harvest, yet the shilling he tosses her as he rides off lands as a grave affront once he learns at the Meryton assembly that she is a gentleman's daughter.
Elizabeth is clever and determined, but her father's absence grows harder to dismiss, and her mother presents a settled match with Mr Collins, the next heir under the entail.
With no father to intervene, Elizabeth means to save herself—until Darcy finds her about to board the stage for London and offers a plan of protection he will not allow her to refuse.
The proud man from Derbyshire is nothing like the uncaring stranger she first judged, and Elizabeth cannot yet see that he may be the only one to whom she can give her heart when her family needs him most.
