Page 26 of Under Such Circumstances (Desperately Seeking Elizabeth #1)

ELIZABETH WAS LOVESICK .

She’d read about the condition, seen it depicted in plays, and she’d always thought it some fantastical concoction that people only experienced in fiction, but now it was actually happening to her and it was dreadful.

She thought of Colonel Fitzwilliam nearly constantly.

The thoughts, however, were not always pleasant. Sometimes they were, of course, overwhelmingly pleasant. She thought of the way he had kissed her, the way he had touched her, the way he had brought her to her peak…

She found ways to be alone so that she could think of that again, and touch herself and bring herself, and to imagine that it was his mouth there, his voice telling her that she had a very pretty cunny, a pretty, filthy little cunny that tasted of strawberries.

Just thinking of his words made things surge within her, like the coming of her pleasure, and she was overcome.

However, sometimes, she thought about the way he was as he rushed from her bedchamber, about the way he had covered her body, the way he hadn’t looked at her very much as he was leaving the room, the way he kept insisting she must marry Mr. Darcy, the rejection of it.

She wished that she’d actually been ruined by Mr. Wickham.

If she had not been a virgin, the colonel would have had her for himself, would have claimed her, and she didn’t even know what that meant, only that it involved her…

er, cunny, and that it must involve his prick, and covering it in a French letter, and…

Anyway, he hadn’t done it.

She was as yet still unclaimed.

But she had fallen for the colonel. How could she not fall for a man who had pursued her in such a fashion, who had told her he’d been yearning to put his mouth on her there, who had played her pleasure like she was some sort of stringed instrument belonging only to him?

She wished to belong to him.

She ached to belong to him.

And she knew she didn’t, and that felt like the worst pain she’d ever felt.

Lovesick.

She knew it for what it was.

It was agony.

She did wretched things.

She sent letters with servants to him to meet her at Weythorn. She would have gone to wait for him there, of course, but he always sent back letters telling her he would not see her and that she must stop this.

She sent letters saying that if he did not come, she was going to compose her next missive to Mr. Darcy and tell him everything, and these were met with stern written responses that he had burned her letters and that she was only hurting herself if she did something like that.

And, crucially, the colonel did not come to her again.

She was not hiding this affliction she felt very well, but no one was paying her very much mind, it seemed.

Her father had quit Gracechurch Street after she had said, one day, that she was not certain if she would move into Weythorn on her own or not.

After securing a promise from her that she would do nothing rash, her father had left, and that took his eyes and his judgment from her.

Jane was occupied with Mr. Bingley, which meant she was too busy to be thinking overmuch about what Elizabeth was up to.

And her aunt and uncle, the Gardiners, had their own business to see to, so they were occupied.

When they did speak, at dinner or tea, it was Jane who filled in the details of her days and activities, and Jane spoke enough that no one noticed Elizabeth’s silence.

No one noticed if she found her own way to Weythorn either, it seemed.

The house was not so far away from London that it was prohibitive to take a hired coach, and if she was noticeable as a woman alone, no one in the carriage seemed to be well-connected enough to carry tales of her impropriety.

She went, sometimes hoping that the colonel would come to her, even though he had claimed he would not.

She went, sometimes simply to be there. She had servants now, and there was nothing stopping her from moving in, nothing except the knowledge that she wasn’t ruined and that she was in love with the colonel and she wished to be his wife.

It was foolish, perhaps.

She had not been this enamored with the colonel before, it was true.

She knew not if it were simply because of their intimacy, skin on skin, the way he had probed her secret places, or if it were something else, something more perverse, simply that he didn’t seem to want her back.

For some reason, that drove her because of its double-edged sword of pain and pleasure.

Wanting him felt so good; not being wanted in return smote her.

She spent so much time thinking about the colonel, she didn’t contemplate well enough the fact she was not ruined.

She did not think enough about waiting for her bleeding for no reason at all, because Mr. Wickham had told her tales.

She did not think about how much suffering had been visited upon her already, and how she should likely hate the colonel for visiting this suffering on her on top of everything.

Sometimes, in the night, when she felt very hopeless, she would remember that she had thought that experience made him more appealing and less, and she knew this was the cost of such things.

To her, he was her one and only. To him, she was the last in succession.

He had put his mouth on a number of women there . It meant nothing to him.

This would hurt so very, very much that she would wish to cry, but her chest would only tighten and heave—no tears would come.

She should have ceased to send letters to the colonel. She did not. She supposed she thought that eventually she would simply, she didn’t know, annoy him so much he’d come to see her, and certainly, if they were together and alone, something would change.

One day, a man came to Weythorn with one of her letters in hand, but it was not Colonel Fitzwilliam.

It was Mr. Darcy.