Persuasion (The Wild and Wanton Edition) (11 page)

He stalked closer, paying no regard to her supplicating position or the fact that she backed further away from him, matching every one of his broad steps with a stumbling one of her own.

“
Anne
.” The word was a whisper and may as well have been a stroke of his hand across her stomach for how it quivered.

A whimper fell from her lips as he backed her out of her nephew’s sick room and into the hall.

“Anne, I have perished for you,” he said in a rumble, “every day for the last eight years.”

Anne’s back met the wall, and still, he kept coming. The heat from his body pressed into hers just before he stopped moving. He stood toe-to-toe with her and raised a broad hand to her face where he cradled her cheek within his palm.

Anne’s breath left her in a sound akin to a sob.

“Shhh.” He stepped even closer, pressing them hip-to-hip and breasts to chest. “All is well now.” His thumb swept over her bottom lip. “I am here.”

Her lips parted beneath his touch, and his thumb caressed the inside arch of her upper lip. He stared intently at her lips.

Something within Anne broke, and her need unleashed itself. She threw caution and to-morrow’s consequences to the wind. “
Kiss me,
” she begged in a voice she barely recognised.

Fire flashed in his ocean-coloured eyes just before he lowered his head and replaced his thumb with an open-mouthed kiss.

Anne’s gasp sucked his sigh into her lungs, and the silky slide of his lips against hers went straight to her head, rendering her dizzy.

He moaned harshly, and then pressed into her even further, crowding her into the wall. Every glorious inch of his body strained against hers. His flagrant arousal ground into her belly as he thrust his tongue into her mouth and wound his fingers into her hair.

She echoed his moan and dug her fingers into his coat, pulling him impossibly closer and rotating her hips so that she moved against his length.

“
Yes
,” he whispered into their kiss. “That’s my Anne.” He shoved a hand between the wall and her bottom and hauled her lower half so close it lay almost in between his thighs, whereupon he began thrusting against her in earnest.

Anne realized she was making a desperate mewling sound just as she felt air caress her bottom. The back of her skirts were raised. His fingers slid inside her drawers and down one rounded cheek before seeking the drenched area between her thighs. His forearm rippled across her bottom as he slipped two fingers into her sheath.

Anne cried out and thrust back into his hold, her slick body taking his fingers even further. Bliss spiraled up from his touch and straight to her heart. “Frederick,” she half-sobbed, half-moaned into his dinner coat.

He leaned his head down to press kisses to her neck as he moved his fingers in and out of her body. He continued to thrust himself against her belly, and his breathing was becoming broken and now ended with a harsh whisper of her name on each exhale.

“Anne,” he groaned desperately as he began to shake within her arms. “Oh,
Anne
.” His body stiffened, and she could feel a spread of warmth against her stomach.

Her peak rose up suddenly and crashed down upon her. Her lips parted as she cried out, and her eyes shot open —

“Anne!” Mary cried as she shook her roughly. “Wake up, for heaven’s sake. You must be having the worst night terror I have ever heard.”

Anne sucked in an unsteady breath as her body struggled to discern reality. She blinked several times to discover that she was sitting in the chair beside her nephew’s bed. Her sheath was still clenching and releasing around phantom fingers, and the shaking she had thought was Frederick’s orgasm ceased when Mary released her and stepped back.

Anne only just prevented herself from clapping a hand over her mouth in mortification. Good heavens. What had she said in her sleep? Had she cried out as loudly as she thought she had?

“It is okay now,” Mary said, looking at Anne with the barest modicum of concern. “We are here. No need to fear something from a dream.”

Over Mary’s shoulder, Anne’s eyes found Charles’s where he stood in the door to the sick room. One look at his raised brows and open mouth, and Anne realized Charles knew exactly what state Anne’s body had been in when Mary woke her. The blood already staining Anne’s cheeks grew even hotter, and she sought some way to direct attention away from herself. “H-how was your evening?” Even Anne could hear the husky quality to her voice, but Mary simply smiled broadly and launched into a rapid fall of words. After a slight hesitation and one more aghast perusal of Anne, Charles joined in.

Her brother and sister came back delighted with their new acquaintance, and their visit in general. There had been music, singing, talking, laughing, all that was most agreeable; charming manners in Captain Wentworth, no shyness or reserve; they seemed all to know each other perfectly, and he was coming the very next morning to shoot with Charles. Mary overlooked Anne’s gasp completely, while Charles gazed sharply at her for a moment. When Anne waved Mary on, she continued. He was to come to breakfast, but not at the Cottage, though that had been proposed at first; but then he had been pressed to come to the Great House instead, and he seemed afraid of being in Mrs. Charles Musgrove’s way, on account of the child, and therefore, somehow, they hardly knew how, it ended in Charles’s being to meet him to breakfast at his father’s.

Anne understood it. He wished to avoid seeing her. He had inquired after her, she found, slightly, as might suit a former slight acquaintance, seeming to acknowledge such as she had acknowledged, actuated, perhaps, by the same view of escaping introduction when they were to meet. Anne could not help but wonder how her name had sounded upon his lips. Had his voice deepened as he said her name as it used to when they were young? Had he called her Anne or Miss Elliot? Sorrow stabbed deeply as she realized that of course he would have called her Miss Elliot.

The morning hours of the Cottage were always later than those of the other house, and on the morrow the difference was so great that Mary and Anne were not more than beginning breakfast when Charles came in to say that they were just setting off, that he was come for his dogs, that his sisters were following with Captain Wentworth; his sisters meaning to visit Mary and the child, and Captain Wentworth proposing also to wait on her for a few minutes if not inconvenient; and though Charles had answered for the child’s being in no such state as could make it inconvenient, Captain Wentworth would not be satisfied without his running on to give notice.

Mary, very much gratified by this attention, was delighted to receive him, while a thousand feelings rushed on Anne, of which this was the most consoling, that it would soon be over. And it was soon over. In two minutes after Charles’s preparation, the others appeared; they were in the drawing-room. It took all of Anne’s fortitude not to make some noise of dismay. Her Frederick — her sweet, slender, young Frederick — was gone. In his absence was a colossal man. As he stopped in the doorway to the drawing-room, his shoulders filled the space of the frame completely.

He was speaking to Mary, and while his attention was otherwise occupied, Anne felt it safe to quickly peruse how greatly his physique had changed in eight years. Not only were his shoulders broader than they had been, but the sleeves of his jacket strained around the bulge of his arms. His chest was enormous, swelling far out past his chin in great plains of muscle. The bigger dimensions of his shoulders and chest only served to emphasize how narrowly his stomach and hips tapered. His waistcoat hugged his body tightly, and Anne felt her mouth go dry at the powerful body such a cut of cloth only served to accentuate. His thighs bulged within his breeches, and rippled as he moved slightly in his conversation with Anne’s sister. Suddenly, Henrietta and Louisa’s description yesterday of his great strength and stature made a good deal more sense in the light of the evidence before her eyes.

He was much changed. And every fibre of Anne’s body appreciated each and every glorious adjustment. He seemed to brace himself, and then he began to turn toward her. Anne quickly pulled her vision up from her unforgiveable scrutiny of his form to look at an area just over his shoulder. Her eye half met Captain Wentworth’s, and the jolt to her system as those same blue-green eyes met hers was severe. Anne at once knew that, though his body had changed, he was still her Frederick. Anne corrected herself — not
her
Frederick at all. This was Captain Wentworth. His face remained passive. A bow, a curtsey passed; such trivial niceties that she could scarcely breathe without screaming. She stared at the wall as she tried to get a hold of her rioting emotions. She heard his voice; he talked to Mary, said all that was right, said something to the Miss Musgroves, enough to mark an easy footing; the room seemed full, full of persons and voices, but a few minutes ended it. Charles shewed himself at the window, all was ready, their visitor had bowed and was gone, never speaking a word to Anne and leaving the image of his well-muscled back flaring in Anne’s memory. The Miss Musgroves were gone too, suddenly resolving to walk to the end of the village with the sportsmen: the room was cleared, and Anne might finish her breakfast as she could, which, as it turned out, was not at all. The food upon her plate grew cold.

“It is over! it is over!” she repeated to herself again and again, in nervous gratitude. “The worst is over!”

Mary talked, but she could not attend. She had seen him. They had met. They had been once more in the same room.

Soon, however, she began to reason with herself, and try to be feeling less. Eight years, almost eight years had passed, since all had been given up. How absurd to be resuming the agitation which such an interval had banished into distance and indistinctness! What might not eight years do? Events of every description, changes, alienations, removals — all, all must be comprised in it, and oblivion of the past — how natural, how certain too! It included nearly a third part of her own life.

Alas! with all her reasoning, she found, that to retentive feelings eight years may be little more than nothing.

Now, how were his sentiments to be read? Was this like wishing to avoid her? And the next moment she was hating herself for the folly which asked the question.

On one other question which perhaps her utmost wisdom might not have prevented, she was soon spared all suspense; for, after the Miss Musgroves had returned and finished their visit at the Cottage she had this spontaneous information from Mary: —

“Captain Wentworth is not very gallant by you, Anne, though he was so attentive to me. Henrietta asked him what he thought of you, when they went away, and he said, ‘You were so altered he should not have known you again.’”

Anne’s stomach heaved as though she would lose what little breakfast she had been able to manage. She covered her mouth with one hand and turned her face aside so that her sister would not see the glimmer of tears that now stung Anne’s eyes. Mary had no feelings to make her respect her sister’s in a common way, but she was perfectly unsuspicious of being inflicting any peculiar wound.

“Altered beyond his knowledge.” Anne fully submitted, in silent, deep mortification. Shame burned hotly, and Anne remembered her reflection from the mirror this morning with despair: the tired shadows that bruised the hallows of her eyes, the lack of luster to her skin and hair, her drab clothing. She had barely been pretty before; she shuddered to think what she must be now. Was she —
ugly
? Doubtless it was so, and she could take no revenge, for he was enhanced, not altered for the worse. She had already acknowledged it to herself, and she could not think differently, let him think of her as he would. No: the years which had destroyed her youth and bloom had only given him a more glowing, manly, open look, in no respect lessening his personal advantages. Though his body had been different, she had seen the same Frederick Wentworth.

“So altered that he should not have known her again!” These were words which could not but dwell with her. Yet she soon began to rejoice that she had heard them. They were of sobering tendency; they allayed agitation; they composed, and consequently must make her happier. She, in her ugliness, was not worthy of such a handsome man, and the sooner she reconciled herself to that, the sooner the sting of his presence would lessen.

Frederick Wentworth had used such words, or something like them, but without an idea that they would be carried round to her. He had thought her wretchedly altered, and in the first moment of appeal, had spoken as he felt. The deep brown eyes that he had lost himself in many an afternoon in his youth were dull and lifeless. The hair that had shone in the sun, the hair that he had wrapt around his wrist so he could pull her head back and kiss her neck — that hair was pulled back severely, revealing every feature he had memorized and recalled over the years. Now those features were harsh and tired. And yet, the moment he had allowed himself to look at her, he had needed to stifle the flare of affection that surged through his body. His breeches had grown tight, of all things, to the point that he had had to shift restlessly while talking to Anne’s sister to hide the evidence of burgeoning arousal. It was merely a habit of his body to react that way toward Anne. Soon enough, after enough discipline in her presence, Frederick was certain that his body would no longer betray him so.

Even though his body was confused, his mind was not. One thing was certain: He had not forgiven Anne Elliot. She had used him ill, deserted and disappointed him; Frederick shuddered to think of how long it took him to get over losing his virginity to a woman who had immediately abandoned him. He was half wounded, even still, and half appalled that such a thing actually mattered to him. He was more than aware that men gladly tossed away their virginity and cared little for how the lady regarded them afterwards. That Frederick’s soul had been mortally hurt by Anne’s careless handling of something that Frederick had valued so greatly was both debilitating and embarrassing, and one of his most closely guarded secrets. Her actions were unforgiveable and worse. She had shewn a feebleness of character in doing so horrible a thing, which his own decided, confident temper could not endure. She had given him up to oblige others. It had been the effect of over-persuasion. It had been weakness and timidity.