Maybe I'm misunderstanding you and maybe I'm wrong, but as far as I know .. doesn't return $. -- for example:

my @letters = qw(a b c d e); #'a'..'e' also works,
                             #but I didn't want to add
                             #a red herring ;-)
print '  $_ |  $r |  $.'."\n";

for (@letters) {
    if(my $r = /a/../e/) {
        printf "%4s |%4s |%4s\n", $_, $r, $.;
    }

    $.++;    # ok, this is silly
        # but I'm making a point ;-)
}
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The output is the following:

  $_ |  $r |  $.
   a |   1 |
   b |   2 |   1
   c |   3 |   2
   d |   4 |   3
   e | 5E0 |   4
[download]

You're thread is pretty infomative, perhaps you meant something other than you wrote?