A/N: I don't own Pride and Prejudice. But I love my reviewers. You guys are awesome and make writing this story worthwhile. I'm also really glad that you guys like Kyle so much. And I'm sorry this took me longer than usual to write and post. I've been busy with classes and work. I don't even really have time to sleep these days.

Chapter Nineteen: Let Love In

Lizzie's POV

School had started again and Steve and Becca's wedding was the Saturday before Labor Day. Trying to maintain a long-distance relationship with Will while teaching and helping Becca plan the wedding, my life was ridiculously insane. Charlie was in Meryton pretty much 24/7 and he and Jane were pretty much madly in love. They saw each other daily while Will and I were lucky if we could talk on the phone daily. We did email daily but we were both so busy that sometimes actually vocal conversation had to take a backseat to our careers. He was in the midst of a court case and I was dealing with the drama of starting a new school year. For the first time in my teaching career, I wasn't teaching any of my sisters and I didn't even have any sisters attending Lakeview. It was a weird feeling but my life was changing a lot this year.

I was working more than I had the past few years because more students wanted to take Spanish than in the past especially now that they needed three years of foreign language to graduate. The state of Michigan was requiring public school students to have at least two years of education in a foreign language. I was working more than usual and with the wedding coming up soon, I was busy and I wasn't sleeping much. Thankfully, due to a law in the state of Michigan, we didn't have school the Friday before Labor Day so I would be able to spend that day working on grading homework, helping Becca with her wedding, and sleeping. Also, Will was arriving in Meryton Thursday night and we were planning to spend time together on Friday. I'd be busy with everything wedding-related, including the rehearsal dinner that night, but I'd have him around. I missed him and I was looking forward to seeing him.

My lack of sleep was giving me dark circles under my eyes and while my students didn't seem to notice my exhaustion, my friends and family were. Thursday afternoon when I got back from eating my lunch with some students in the cafeteria, I found an envelope on my desk. When I opened it, I found a picture that Kyle had taken of me during my sophomore year of college. I'd been having a rough week and my health hadn't been the greatest that year. One Sunday afternoon, I had fallen asleep while sitting in my living room with my laptop doing homework. Kyle had been in the house at the time with a camera and had taken a picture of me sleeping on top of my books and laptop. He'd given me that picture with a note that said, "Don't push yourself too far" and some chocolate. I laughed and smiled. Kyle was a great brother; if he'd had any sisters they would have known how much they were loved. But he didn't have any sisters and I didn't have any brothers, so we filled that role in each other's lives.

I knew that Will wasn't jealous of the things that Kyle did for me. While Kyle might have asked me out a few weeks earlier, we weren't meant to be together. There were another girl out there for him and I had a few ideas as to that lucky lady might be. I wanted to see him happy.

"Senorita Bennett, I need to talk to you," a freshman in my Spanish II class said to me after my last class on Thursday afternoon.

I looked at the girl and nodded. Her name was Grace Taylor and she seemed to a bit shy. "What's up, Grace?"

"How did you know that you wanted to be a teacher?"

"What do you mean?"

"How did you know that you were supposed to be a teacher? Did you decide when you were in high school or did you always know or what?"

"Sit down," I told her. After we were seated next to each other, I began to explain to her. "I knew that I wanted to help people and I love the Spanish language. When I was a sophomore I started taking extension classes at Meryton Community College and exploring what I wanted to do with my life."

"So how did you realize that you wanted to teach?"

I paused for a minute. She was fourteen years old and she had just started high school a few days earlier. I hadn't decided that I wanted to be a teacher until I was seventeen or eighteen, but I wasn't really thinking about that. I was thinking about why she was asking me all of this. "Grace," I said slowly. "Why are you so worried about your career? You're only a freshman; you have plenty of time to make these decisions."

"My dad says I have to figure all of this out now," she said. "He wants me to go to Harvard or Yale, so I have to get figure out what I want to do with my life so I can start taking the right classes and get my life on the right track."

"Does your father realize that you are fourteen years old and you just started your freshman year of high school?"

She shrugged. "I'm not sure. I think he just wants me to get out of Michigan and be a better person than he is."

"Pushing you like this is not going to help either one of you," I told her. I was sick of parents trying to push their children into Ivy League schools when that wasn't actually what their children wanted. I also didn't like it when parents made up their children's minds for them. People need to let kids have time to be kids and grow up normally. Not everyone is meant for Harvard or Yale. Some of us are meant for places like Grand Valley State University. It might never be on par with the Ivy League but it's a good school.

"Where did you go to school, Miss Bennett?"

"Grand Valley," I replied.

"Why did you go there?"

"I loved the campus, they have a good education program, and they gave me a scholarship." Between scholarships and the money my grandparents gave me, I didn't have to pay for college at all.

"That's cool. Where else did you apply?"

"Places with good education programs," I replied. "So I applied to GVSU, Michigan State, and Eastern Michigan. And all of them accepted them and I liked GVSU the best."

"My dad says that GVSU is a school for people who aren't smart enough to get into Michigan."

"He's wrong," Kyle said walking into the room. "I hate to interrupt but I need to give something to Miss Bennett."

He handed me a file folder full of things for National Honor Society; we were co-moderators of the club. As I took it from him, Grace asked, "Why do you say that my dad is wrong?"

"I went to Grand Valley but I was also accepted to the University of Michigan. I chose Grand Valley over Michigan because I wanted to be a teacher and in my opinion, GV had the better education program."

"Oh, that's a good point," she said. "I never thought about that kind of stuff."

"You're a freshman," Kyle told her. "It's too early for you to really start worrying about that stuff. Oh and Miss Bennett, there's a Mr. Darcy waiting for you in the main office."

I smiled and based on the look on Kyle's face, I was probably grinning from ear to ear. "Do you need to get going?" Grace asked me.

"I should probably go see this Mr. Darcy that Mr. Kilpatrick mentioned. And you should probably go get ready for cross country practice. Richard will be mad if you're late. And Mr. Kilpatrick should get himself off to tennis practice. It would look bad if the coach were late."

"Thanks for talking to me, Miss Bennett," Grace said as she ran out of the room.

"And I have to go to practice too?" Kyle said.

"Yep, you have to leave so I can go see this Mr. Darcy character."

"He makes you so happy," he said. "I'm glad you guys finally got your timing right."

"I hope you find that someone special sometime soon," I told him.

"Don't worry about me, Lizzie-belle; I can take care of myself."

"I know," I replied. "I just want to see you happy."

"I'm happy," he said. "I really am happy being single."

I hurried upstairs to the main office from my basement classroom. Will was standing by the secretary's desk and I just jumped into his arms on impulse. He kissed my cheek and swung me around. "I've missed you, Lizzie-Lou," he said after putting me down.

"I've missed you too," I said. "Do you want to see my classroom?"

"Of course I do," he replied. "Is Kyle still around?"

"You just missed him. He's off to tennis practice. But I'm sure you'll see him around this weekend. And you'll get to meet his twin brother at the wedding. Kyle is going to be one of the lectors at the Mass and they're going to be co-Masters of Ceremonies at the reception."

"Will they be entertaining?"

I smiled. "Of course, have you met Kyle?"

"Yeah, is his brother like him?"

"Pretty much, they're both insane and they're both good friends with Steve." We walked into my classroom. "And this is my classroom. Mis estudiantes creen que estoy loca pero sabes que no estoy loca."

He smiled. "You're nuts, but I still think you're fantastic."

"Aw, thanks, Will; I think you're pretty great yourself."

He sat down on my desk and looked around the room. "So this is where the magic happens?"

I nodded. "This is where I try to influence the future."

He looked at the whiteboard and read, "If you could talk to any three people, living or dead, who would you pick? Also, what would you ask them?" He turned back to me. "So what's that about?"

"I have a database of questions like that and I ask my Spanish 3 and 4 students those questions every day. They write the answers in their journals and my goal to get them to develop their vocabulary and their writing skills."

"What's your answer?" he asked.

"To the question?" I asked and he nodded. I shrugged. "I'd probably say Jesus Christ, my great-grandmother who died before I was born, and someone like St. Augustine or Martin Luther King Jr."

"Good choices," he replied. "What kind of answers do you get from the kids?"

"All over the map," I told him as I gathered up my things so we could head back to my place. "I've had kids say Brad Pitt and Tyra Banks and I've had kids pick people like Socrates and Martin Luther King Jr."

He shook his head. "Ready to go?"

I nodded. "Did you drive here or do you want to come with me?"

"Jane dropped me off," he replied. "She figured that we'd want some alone time."

I laughed. "She's such a romantic."

"Let's just go spend some time together. I have a feeling you're going to be pretty busy this weekend."

Will's POV

Lizzie did have a busy weekend. She spent Friday morning grading papers and relaxing while we watched Beauty and the Beast and Friday afternoon, she was helping Becca get ready for the wedding. Friday night, we went to the rehearsal dinner. After everyone practiced walking down the aisle and all of that wedding stuff, we went to La Riviera for the rehearsal dinner. Lizzie looked wonderful. She was wearing a white sundress with black flowers and black straps. She was wearing her hair up in the same fancy style it had been in the night I met her. She did this thing where she would take her when it was wet and put mousse in it and then she'd pin it all to her head to create this cascading curl look. It was fantastic.

Becca and Steve were great together. She was a calm, sweet girl and he was always energetic, never sitting still. He was a kindergarten teacher, which might have struck some people as odd, but if you ask me, Steve would be a great kindergarten teacher. At one point during the dinner, he was playing with Becca's niece and nephew who were going to be the flower girl and ring bearer. Abby was five and Jonathan was four and they loved the attention they were getting from their aunt's fiancé. But they were such cute kids and Steve loved little kids, so it was perfect for him. He was in his element and it made me look forward to the days when my niece would old enough to play games like that. "Steve is ready to be a dad," Lizzie whispered in my ear as he swung Abby around in circles.

"I think you might have to wait about nine months for that happen."

She smiled. "I can wait; I just want to be the godmother."

"Like a fairy godmother?" I teased.

She nodded and spun around in a circle. Her skirt was perfect for spinning and twirling and she knew it. "I'm going to be Cinderella's fairy godmother. All I need is a crazy hood and an ugly cloak. Then I'll be the perfect frumpy fairy godmother."

"You could never be frumpy, darling girl. You're my bella principesca."

Lizzie's smile could have lit up the room. I knew she'd had some really tough experiences with guys in the past and I really just wanted her to know that she was loved and beautiful. I thought she was amazing but I knew she'd had a lot of guys tell her otherwise. She leaned against me and I wrapped my arm around her. She was my girlfriend. It was so weird to think about that. I'd fallen for her back in November or December and I'd waited for her until now. And now I had her.

"Do you know that you're irresistible?" she whispered in my ear.

"What do you want to do?"

She grinned. "I'm a good Catholic girl so we're going to keep all of this G-rated. Plus there are little kids around here and I have a feeling we'd get in trouble if we didn't anything in front of Jonathan and Abby."

"So you're being a bad girl?" I teased.

She laughed. "Mr. Darcy, we are in public; we must behave."

I had my arms around her and she was pressed up against my chest. I was looking down into her deep brown eyes and I was drowning. "If you insist, Miss Bennett, we shall be the perfect picture of decorum."

Her face lit up and she laughed. "Dude, you're ridiculous."

"I have to keep up with you," I replied.

The next day, I got to the church around twelve-thirty. I was sitting with Jane and Charlie. As it happened, we ended up sitting with Kyle and his brother, Alex as well. Alex looked almost exactly like Kyle except they had very different noses. "He broke his back when he broke the car in college," Kyle explained to me.

"We resurrected the truck," Alex snapped. "It wasn't like when Char completely totaled Lizzie's car. That was just bad."

Jane shook her head and Kyle smiled. "Will, I'll tell you the story after the wedding. It's a great story."

"I can't believe Lizzie mentioned it in her toast at Char's wedding."

"I'm not surprised," Alex remarked. "Lizzie was really pissed at Char about that one."

"You had better explain this to me after the wedding," I said. I really wanted to know what had happened, but I knew I had to wait until after the wedding to find out.

The wedding was amazing. Lizzie was a gorgeous maid of honor in her black dress with the dark green sash. Her dress was what Jane described as tea-length; it had spaghetti straps and a full skirt. "She was probably twirling around in the bride's room before the wedding," Kyle whispered in my ear.

I nodded. "I can almost guarantee you she was."

Her hair was professionally styled; it had been pulled up and was hanging in cascading curls. She was wearing strappy dark green stilettos and she looked wonderful. And the emerald pendant and matching earrings completed everything. She looked amazing. And she was my gorgeous girlfriend.

Jonathan and Abby followed Adam Caldwell and Lizzie down the aisle. They were so adorable. He was wearing a tux with a green vest and tie like the groomsmen and she was wearing a white dress with a green sash. And then Becca started walking down the aisle with her dad. She was gorgeous. Her dark brown hair was in some sort of braided bun and then she was wearing a strapless white dress with a hunter green sash that flowed down to the end of the train. She looked amazing but I happened to think that the maid of honor was prettier. But that was my personal opinion and I'm positive that Steve would have fought me to the death over that one. He was looking at Becca like she was the most beautiful woman ever born and he'd never seen anything that looked like her before his life.

She was gorgeous and the whole wedding was wonderful. It was a very formal Catholic wedding service complete with a Mass and everything. Becca started crying during the service. And Lizzie didn't quite look like her eyes were going to stay dry either. Steve couldn't stop smiling. I didn't blame him. If I was finally marrying the girl of my dreams, I would smile like an idiot and not care what other people thought of me.

After the ceremony was over and the photographers had taken a million pictures, I finally got to spend a few minutes alone with Lizzie. The first thing she did was to take off her shoes and lean her head against my shoulder. "I'm tired, my feet hurt, and my back aches. This takes me back to when I was a waitress in college. I would work these insanely long shifts and come home completely dead."

"And now you teach high school."

"Where I'm still on my feet all day long and come home completely dead at the end of the day."

"But you don't have to deal with stupid customers you secretly hate anymore."

She smiled. "I knew I graduated from college for a reason."

As I wrapped my arm around her shoulders, she leaned into me and I rested my head on hers. "You look beautiful today."

"Thank you," she replied. "You look pretty nice yourself."

I was wearing a black suit with a light blue dress shirt and a black tie. Lizzie and I didn't match very well but I didn't mind. She was gorgeous and she thought I looked good too. Of course I was no match for her in that department. She was naturally gorgeous and I was a guy who had a big nose and ears that stuck out from his head. But Lizzie didn't seem to mind those things about me. She seemed to like me, warts and all.

Some women were interested in me because of the size of my bank account, but I knew that wasn't Lizzie. She just wasn't that kind of a girl. She didn't care about money or material possessions the way girls like Caroline do. She's much more herself.

The reception was at Lizzie's dad's hotel, The Longbourn. The place was decorated in white, black, and shades of green. The tables had black tablecloths and green glass vases with white roses inside. "Why did they pick MSU's colors as their wedding colors?" Kyle moaned as we sat down at our table. I was sitting with Jane, Charlie, Kyle, Alex, and a few of their other friends. Alex was dating Hannah King and Kyle was Jenny Putnam's date to the wedding. They weren't dating but they were both single and they figured it would be fun to spend time together dancing.

"Steve is a Michigan fan and he wasn't crazy about the color scheme but black and green are Becca's favorite colors," Jane said. "And her mom thought that would be too dark so she made them add white in to break things up a little and put some light on the subject."

"When I get married, we're just not going to have green in the color scheme to avoid such an atrocity," Alex remarked. "And there will definitely also be no mixing of scarlet and gray in my wedding."

"Same here," Kyle said. "Blue and gold, we can do that, but there will be no mentions of the Ohio State University or of Michigan State in my wedding."

"And the wedding party will be small," Alex added. "None of this having ten or twelve people; we're going to keep it simple. When I get married, I just want to have Kyle and Connor on my side and then she can have a maid of honor and one bridesmaid."

"And you wonder why you aren't married yet," Jane sighed.

"No, I know why I'm not married yet," Alex replied. "It's this little thing called medical school. It kind of takes a lot out of you, especially out of the wallet area of your life. I can't afford a wife or a family right now."

"But you're almost done," Jane pointed out. "And then you can go out on a search for the new Mrs. Alex Michael Kilpatrick."

"The new Mrs. Alex Kilpatrick?" Kyle repeated. "Are you saying that there was an old one? Did my brother get married without me knowing about it?"

"No," she said slowly as she realized what she had said.

"So, who wants to help me tell Will about the time when Char totaled Lizzie's car?" Alex inserted.

"That's a great story," Kyle said. "And I think I should tell it since I was actually there."

"Go for it," his twin replied. "After all, it just means I get to tell the story about when I totaled the purple pick-up."

"Okay, so the story about Char and Lizzie's car is one of the greatest comedic tragedies of our time," began the storyteller. "The summer before her sophomore year of college, Lizzie bought a new car; it was a blue Saturn of some sort. And it was her baby; its name was Rodrigo."

"She was in her 'Rodrigo' phase that year," Jane inserted. "She named everything and anything that needed a name 'Rodrigo' or 'Rodriguez.'"

"So she had this blue Saturn named Rodrigo and she loved it. The first semester of her junior year of college, she was studying in Spain and so the purple pick-up truck moved to Ann Arbor to be with Alex while I had Lizzie's Saturn. So I drove Rodrigo for a semester and then the plan had been for me to reclaim the purple truck when Lizzie came back stateside but then, the incident occurred. Char somehow thought that I had just gotten a new car over the summer and didn't recognize Rodrigo, the poor car. So one day she comes over to my apartment while I was taking a shower and yells something at the bathroom and apparently I replied positively, so she grabbed 'my' car keys off the kitchen table and left with 'my' car. An hour later, I'm wondering where my car is when I get a phone call from Char saying that she was driving my car back to my apartment when she crashed into the car in front of her. So I called Steve who drove me out to where she was and I had to break the bad news to her. She had totaled Lizzie's car, not mine."

"What did she do?" I asked.

"Char cried," Kyle replied. "Lizzie swore up a storm when I told her what had happened. I had to email her and tell her. She was one mad girl that day."

I smiled. "She and Char seem to have survived that one and are still friends."

"Yeah, well that one took work," Jane said. "When Lizzie got back from Spain, Char was afraid of her and Lizzie wanted to kill Char."

"But it all worked out in the end and no one was seriously injured other than Rodrigo," Kyle said. "That was much better than when my genius brother broke his nose and the purple pick-up truck."

"It was an accident and it wasn't even my fault," Alex protested.

"Sure it wasn't," Kyle retaliated. "Next you're going to tell me that it was just because old women are crappy drivers."

Just then, Lizzie came up behind them to tell them that their services as Masters of Ceremonies. And then they took off towards the microphone set up next to the head table and began their bantering about the incoming wedding party.

After an amazing dinner and watching my girlfriend dance with her ex-boyfriend's younger brother, I finally got to dance with my Lizzie. Steve's best man, Adam Caldwell, was the younger brother of a guy Lizzie had dated late in her college career. Andrew Caldwell, whom I'd heard about from Steve, Alex, Jane, and Kyle, was supposed to be a great guy but not the one for Lizzie. "She has that with a lot of guys," Kyle told me as we watched the girls dance together later in the evening. "We can be her friends, her brothers, anything except her lovers." He looked at me sternly and then out at Jenny, Hannah, Lizzie, Jane, Becca, and a few other girls including Char on the dance floor. "Don't hurt her. We'll kill you."

I nodded. "I understand." Lizzie had a few very close male friends who didn't have any biological sisters so they'd adopted her. These guys would protect their sister/princess to the death and I knew she loved them for it.

"Do you love her?" Steve asked as he came up next to me.

I looked at him. "What do you want to hear?"

"That you'll love her and protect her forever," he replied.

"I'll do that to the best of my ability," I told him firmly as I watched her spinning around the dance floor to "Girls Just Wanna Have Fun."

"Don't let us down," Steve said, firmly grasping my arm. "And more importantly, don't let her down."

"I won't," I promised him. For one thing, I really respected Lizzie and for another thing, Steve was bigger than me and the Kilpatrick twins just plain scared me.

A/N: I know it took a while to get up but please read and review. I hope you enjoy it.