Table of Contents
Title Page
Chapter One
Chapter Two
Chapter Three
Chapter Four
Chapter Five
Chapter Six
Chapter Seven
Chapter Eight
Chapter Nine
Chapter Ten
Chapter Eleven
Chapter Twelve
Chapter Thirteen
Chapter Fourteen
Chapter Fifteen
Chapter Sixteen
Chapter Seventeen
Chapter Eighteen
Chapter Nineteen
Chapter Twenty
Chapter Twenty-one
Chapter Twenty-two
Chapter Twenty-three
Chapter Twenty-four
Persuaded
Rachel Schurig
Copyright © 2015 Rachel Schurig
All rights reserved.
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This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents are either the product of the author’s imagination or used fictitiously. Any similarity to real persons, living or dead, is coincidental and not intended by the author.
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ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
Huge thanks to Shelley Holloway for your help, advice, and patience.
www.hollowayhouse.me
Thanks once again to Scarlett Rugers for a beautiful cover.
www.scarlettrugers.com
Thank you to Andrea for your help with the manuscript and for the best Persuasion themed scarf a girl could ever wish for.
And to Miss Austen for countless happy hours lost in the pages of your books.
For my dad.
Chapter One
“I could stay right here forever.”
I smiled, beyond content, loving the feel of the sun beating down on my arms, the breeze off the lake just strong enough to keep us cool. More than that, though, I loved the feel of Rick’s fingers tracing a lazy pattern across my stomach.
“Me too,” I agreed, eyes still firmly closed. “But I have a feeling we’d get hungry.”
Rick’s laughter rumbled across my skin before he placed a single, soft kiss against my collarbone. I shivered in delight. “I bet I could rustle up some food in the forest. Hunting game is a national pastime for we Brits.”
I snorted. “Oh, of course. Fredrick Wentworth of Kensington London, hunter-gatherer extraordinaire.”
“It’s not Kensington,” he growled. “I’ll have you know, I’m from Cheswick.”
I finally opened my eyes and was rewarded with his expression of mock-offense. His deep brown eyes twinkled merrily, the sun behind him lighting up his hair in a halo so bright, it almost hurt to look at.
I wanted to kiss him. It was a feeling that I battled with constantly—pretty much every minute we spent together. I took a deep breath and forced myself to continue with the banter rather than, you know, sticking my tongue down his throat. “Do a lot of hunting in Cheswick, do you?”
He grinned. “Okay, not so much. But I’d find a way to manage for you.”
Just like that, he took my breath away. He was always doing that—taking the simplest line or task or look and turning it into something more. Something that told me exactly how he felt, better than a thousand I love you’s could do.
Emma—my best friend—would mock me mercilessly if she heard me going on and on about my boyfriend being breathtaking. I could just see the look of derision on her face, the way she would arch one perfectly sculpted eyebrow at the exact angle to make a person feel like the silliest little twit on earth. It was a gift, that eyebrow arch, capable of expressing a hundred judgments in a split second. And I was definitely deserving of its censure, the way I was carrying on about Rick.
But I didn’t care.
I pushed the thoughts of Emma from my mind, the way I always did when I was with Rick. I knew that someday I would have to reconcile the two halves of my life, but today was not that day. With any luck, I could put it off for ages. As long as Emma stayed with her family in the Hamptons until the end of the summer. As long as Rick’s plans went ahead as scheduled…
“Tell me again about Madrid,” I whispered, suddenly desperate to cease my current train of thought.
Rick chuckled, kissing my collarbone once again. I breathed in deep, catching the scent of his hair so close to my face. I immediately felt calmed. We were going to be all right. We could do this. I could do this.
“Why don’t you tell me?” he asked. “You’re the one who’s been there.”
I frowned. “That doesn’t count.” Two nights at the Hotel Ritz, the most luxurious hotel in Madrid, with Emma’s family was hardly what I would call experiencing Spain. A brief stop over on our way to Barcelona and then Cannes, two longs days spent shopping and dining in the finest restaurants. I’d wanted to see the Plaza de Mayor, but I knew from long experience that traveling with the Russells rarely included the kind of sight-seeing that I craved.
Rick nodded seriously, his face taking on that expression it sometimes got—the one that said he felt sorry for me. I hated that expression. “We’ll find a hostel close to Gran Via,” he said, resting his cheek on my stomach so he could look up at me. “And we’ll walk all the way down, from the Victory Arch to del Prado.”
“Where will we stop?” I asked, feeling the first stirrings of excitement.
“Wherever we want.”
“Plaza Mayor?”
“Of course.”
“And Parque del Buen Retiro.”
“Absolutely.”
I closed my eyes again, trying to picture it. We had driven briefly down the Gran Via in the Russell’s sleek, hired car, but we had only stopped briefly at Corte de Ingles, the department store. Most of my memories of Madrid were like that—stolen glances from the window as I tried hard not to press my face against the glass.
Rick shifted slightly, bringing his face up to rest against my shoulder so he was whispering in my ear now. “We’ll eat tapas and drink sangria until well into the night. Then we’ll crawl home to our little hostel room and make love until morning.”
I shivered again. The image he painted, the rasp of his voice, that damn, irresistible accent. It was too much for a mere mortal girl to withstand. I opened my eyes and grasped his face with both hands, pulling it up to mine, kissing him firmly on the mouth.
“Mmm,” he murmured against my lips. “Yes, I can see you’ve got the gist of it.”
I laughed, pushing him away. “And we’ll go to Toledo?” I asked hopefully.
He rolled his eyes. “Yes. We’ll go to Toledo, and you can see all of the antique swords your nerdy little heart desires.”
I punched his shoulder lightly, and he groaned, rolling off of me, clutching the spot as if I really hurt him. Before I could tease him for being a baby, he grabbed me by the arms and spun me over, pulling me into his chest. I immediately burrowed into the little spot below his neck where my head fit so perfectly, all thoughts of teasing gone.
“And after Madrid,” he whispered, “we’ll get on the train and go wherever you want.”
“Wherever I want?”
He nodded above my head. “Wherever. Barcelona. Paris. Rome.”
I closed my eyes, letting the promises wash over me. A little voice in the back of my head told me not to get carried away. I kne
w better than most the importance of money, how essential it was to travel—to survival. The problem was, Rick and I didn’t have much of it.
“We’ll find work in hostels and restaurants,” he whispered, as if reading my mind. “Or head out to the country and work in a vineyard. Help a farmer with his harvest.”
It sounded so idyllic, when he talked about it like that. “Or work in a mechanic’s shop?” I asked, hating the sharpish note in my voice.
Rick only laughed. “Hey, taking that job in a mechanic’s shop is the best thing that ever happened to me. How else would I have met you?”
I twisted up to look at him, not sure if he was teasing. The look in his eyes told me that he was dead serious. “Come on,” I murmured. “You can’t seriously tell me that this is how you saw your time in America turning out.”
Rick had worked his ass off in university for years. When he came away with his degree in architecture, he realized he had a big problem. He had all the technical knowledge necessary to design the buildings he had always dreamed of—but he no longer dreamed of buildings. He had no ideas, no creativity. No inspiration. He had worked so hard to prove himself that he’d lost all of the drive that had inspired him to go into architecture in the first place. “The idea of going to work in an office made my skin crawl,” he confessed to me over coffee in the break room at my father’s shop in those first heady weeks when I would make any excuse to hear him talk. “I knew I had to get the hell out of there or I’d be destined to design crappy cement block buildings for the rest of my life—or have a midlife crisis before turning twenty-five.”
So he’d taken all of his savings and bought a plane ticket to the States, the first stop on his round-the-world tour. He barely had enough money to get back to Europe at the end of the summer and would need to work his way around the country if he wanted to see any of it before leaving. What possessed him to choose Detroit, of all places, as the second stop on his trip (after arriving in New York), I couldn’t understand.
“Detroit is a great base for exploring the natural elements of the Midwest,” he had told me when I asked. “You’re right in the middle of the Great Lakes. And fifty three percent of the state is forest. Not to mention the Sand Dunes on the west coast and the Pictured Rocks in the Upper Peninsula.”
I had stared at him blankly. I had lived here my entire life, minus the three years I’d been at college, and had never so much as set foot in one of the Great Lakes. And he had found them important enough to choose this city as his second stop.
“Of course,” he said sheepishly, “it did help that Croft lives here.”
I pointed my finger at him triumphantly. “Aha! I knew no one in his right mind would come here before Chicago or Los Angeles. You just wanted a free bed with your old college friend.”
He shook his head sadly. “You’re so quick to put your hometown down. I think it’s great—you have so much history and character here.”
I shifted, uncomfortably. Somehow his words sounded like a criticism, and I desperately did not want to be criticized by Rick Wentworth. “But I thought you were touring to see architecture.”
“Detroit has fantastic art deco and neo-gothic architecture.” He seemed genuinely shocked that I wasn’t familiar with any of it.
“Yeah, but isn’t lots of it falling down?” Granted, I hadn’t spent much time in the city itself. My group of friends took great pride in living in the northern suburbs, only deigning to go downtown when a concert or club opening made it a necessity.
“The stuff that’s falling down is even more of a reason to explore here,” he had told me, his eyes alight. “There’s something so beautiful about it. These once proud and grand buildings—the icons of industry and capitalism—crumbling but not fallen. The fact that they’re still standing at all! That they carry on, in spite of neglect and decay—that’s a sign of true design. They just don’t make buildings like that anymore.”
I had absolutely no idea what he was talking about, but there was something about his words, about the excited glint in his eyes, that grabbed me and pulled me right in. I immediately agreed to go with him to tour some of the buildings on his list. At the end of the tour, I actually agreed with him that there was a certain beauty to the resilient buildings, their facades virtually untouched even as their insides were gutted and crumbling.
By the time we got home that night, I was head over heels in love.
“It isn’t at all how I saw my time in America turning out,” he said now, pulling me from my thoughts of that first non-date. “I expected I would stay in Michigan just long enough to explore a little and make enough money to travel on to Chicago.”
I felt a sinking feeling in my stomach at his words, but he continued on. “And that’s the wonderful thing about travel,” he said. “You never know when your plans will change for the better.”
“And was this for the better?” I asked skeptically. “Spending your entire time in America working in my dad’s shop?”
He pulled me up into a sitting position so he could peer directly into my face. “Of course it’s for the better,” he said, looking at me like I had three heads. “I met you. This is the best thing that could have happened to me. This is the best thing that has happened to me.”
I blushed and looked away, my heart pounding at the intensity of his words, but Rick wouldn’t let me. He placed a gentle finger under my chin and brought my face back in line with his. “I love you, Annabelle. You know that right?”
I nodded, my gaze trapped in his. I felt like I couldn’t breathe, like all the air on the little lakeside beach was pressing down into my chest. It was terrifying and painful, and I never wanted it to stop.
“I love you, too,” I whispered.
His face broke out into a dazzling, wide grin. “Then stop arguing with me about whether or not I should feel bad about a decision that’s made me the happiest I’ve ever been. Okay?”
I nodded quickly, leaning forward to kiss him. As my lips melted against his, I couldn’t help but agree—this was the best thing that had ever happened to me, too.
If you’d asked me to choose the best event in my life only a few short months ago, my answer would have been vastly different. Getting the scholarship to Cranbrook probably would have been at the top of my list. Being able to attend the private boarding school—which I would have had no hope of without the scholarship—had entirely changed the trajectory of my life. There was no way I would have gotten into Brown from a crappy public school, where I risked becoming one more victim of the high teen-pregnancy and drop-out rates in my neighborhood. And I certainly would have never met the Russells or experienced any of the myriad benefits that came along with that connection.
Yet none of those things—not my scholarship, not graduating at the top of my class, not joining the Russells on their travels to the most exclusive locations in the US and abroad, not even their generous gift of university tuition payment—had ever made me feel the way I felt sitting next to Rick on my grandmother’s faded quilt at the side of a weed infested, muddy, shallow little lake in mid-Michigan.
I was, for the first time in my life, completely and truly happy.
Happy enough to give it all up? That same little voice in my head whispered.
Because that’s what this choice would entail. Joining Rick on his world tour would mean giving up everything I had worked toward for the past seven years—hell, for my whole life. Emma would be furious with me for leaving her. Her parents would be disappointed that I’d chosen to postpone my last year of college. I felt a little squirm of guilt course through me as I thought of everything they had done for me. And my own father…
I pulled away from the kiss so I could rest my forehead against Rick’s chest.
“What is it?” he asked, using his thumbs to brush hair from my forehead. “You’re distracted today.” He gave a brief, unnatural-sounding laugh. “Not having second thoughts, are you?”
“No,” I said, too quickly. I took a deep bre
ath, forcing control into my voice. “No. I’m just…thinking about my dad.”
“You still haven’t told him?”
I shook my head and Rick sighed. “I like your dad, Annabelle. He’s been good to me, giving me that job. I don’t want to lie to him. I don’t want to keep this from him.”
“I know.” I shook my head. “I just… He’s going to be so disappointed.”
“How will you know if you don’t tell him?”
I didn’t know how to explain it—especially not to Rick who, though decidedly middle class, had grandparents who were able to pay for his expensive schooling. His parents, if slightly uninvolved in his life, had been able to provide a fairly comfortable home life for him—a nice house in a nice London neighborhood. His grandparents gave him the gift of excellent schools. Excellent opportunities. How could I make him see what it had been like for us, how different it had been? The way my dad had always pushed me so hard, first to get good grades, then to go for the scholarship to private school, spending a healthy chunk of his meager earnings to make sure I played soccer and took piano lessons, whatever he could do to prove I was a well-rounded young lady worthy of the generosity of the scholarship committee. He’d been so proud when I got it, prouder still when Emma took me under her wing and started introducing me to the finer things in life. From my dad’s perspective, I was well on my way to the life he had always wanted for me—a life free from hunger and want, a life brimming with possibilities and successes. The life he could never provide me.
And here I was, ready to throw all of that away to go tramping around the world, sleeping in grungy hostels and working God knows where, just to be with my boyfriend.
Was I crazy? It didn’t feel crazy. It felt more right than anything I could remember.
“What do you want?” Rick whispered against my hair. He asked me that simple question often. My answer was always the same, “I want this. I want you.” I meant it, with every fiber in my being. For Rick, that was the only answer that mattered. He didn’t care about what my dad wanted. Didn’t care about what Emma or her parents wanted. It was a consideration I had rarely been given—singular concern for my own desires. I didn’t get that concern from my dad or my teachers or the Russells. I rarely got it from my friends. But this odd, passionate, adventurous boy from London, this boy who had left home alone and traveled the world just to look at crumbling buildings—he alone had given me that gift without question or expectation. Rick Wentworth, a stranger only three months ago, only cared about what I wanted.
Persuaded Page 1
