“All right then,” Beth announced, seeming to gather her resolve, and then she began to step down the stairs once again.
Adam watched Fanton looking up at them as they came into view. Fanton’s gaze latched onto Beth with a serpentine look of gloating, while he slowly walked around Lady Ariel. Lady Ariel’s creamy shoulders were bare in a sparkling, lavender-colored ball gown, while Fanton’s hand lingered about her waist. Fanton whispered something to her, which made her blush and laugh. However, Fanton’s slate-colored gaze stayed drilled onto Beth, sweeping her cleavage as she hurried down the stairs.
“Lady Ariel, you should not be here!” Beth exclaimed. Adam knew his sister wouldn’t sound as harsh were she not so upset.
Adam stepped beside Beth when they reached the marbled floor and he saw Lady Ariel’s pretty mouth turn into a pout as her body leaned closer to Fanton’s stocky but strong figure.
“Your stepbrother, Lord Rothschild, invited me inside,” Lady Ariel informed them with an edge to her voice. “Lady Beth, he has invited both of us to a glass of sherry before our events.” Lady Ariel smiled a pretty offering to Fanton, who rounded her figure again. Like a wolf circling its prey, Adam thought.
“A harmless invitation, really,” Lady Ariel continued with a dipping of her eyelashes. “And I might convince him to attend the Valtimer’s ball with us.”
Beth blanched. She could hardly revile Fanton to his face. He would make her pay dearly if she tried. Fanton’s stalking gaze told her he had her pinned just where he wanted her, and the impossible red glints in his irises strobed once, then disappeared. For the thousandth time, Beth wondered why no one else could see the red glints when they appeared, not even Adam, as she forcibly quelled the trembling trying to overtake her body.
“Come, Beth, my sweet pigeon. Come drink sherry with us,” Fanton drawled with a heavy-lidded gaze that made her wish for a stout coat to cover her bare shoulders away from his leer. Fanton was not as a brother should be to a sister, and he never had been.
Beth saw Ariel’s gaze sharpen because of Fanton’s illicitly inflected words, just as Fanton added, “No need for you to stay, little brother.” Fanton stopped his circuitous route around Ariel with his hand too intimately holding her waist.
Beth wanted to snatch that hand away and shout at him to leave her only friend alone. Instead, she nodded her head with forced but demure manners, saying, “A glass of sherry would be welcome, my lord. Adam, please do not let us keep you from your friends.”
Adam’s handsome face and buff gray eyes unveiled a stubborn look Beth had seen quite often. She balanced on a fine line between Adam and Fanton. Adam wanted to defend her, while Fanton could easily crush him.
“I’m in the mood to dance tonight,” Adam said, then he bowed to Ariel, straightened, and he held out his arm. “Please, let me escort you to the sherry, Lady Ariel.”
Oh no
, Beth thought, trying to keep the distress she felt from her features. It was a very bad thing for Adam to try to come between Fanton and what he’d set his sights on. Beth knew Adam was trying to help her, by perhaps trying to court Ariel’s attentions away from their stepbrother Fanton, whose eyes blazed darkly.
Ariel appeared instantly flattered. Adam was fit, tall, and handsome … any woman’s desire. So, enticed, Ariel glided forward in her lavender silk gown with lace embellishments. She took Adam’s arm with a delighted laugh, leaving Fanton’s hand to fall free from her waist as the couple relocated to the parlor.
Belatedly, Beth thought to move. To flee from Fanton’s reach. However, she’d delayed a bit too long and as she tried to follow Adam and Ariel, a dauntless hand grasped her forearm, stopping her.
“You’ll do,” Fanton drawled, tugging her off balance and up against his hard body clad in impeccable black and white evening attire. “You will always do, my shy, plump pet.”
Beth’s gaze darted to Fanton’s blackened hunter’s gaze and she thought to protest, loudly. But his musty breath slid tendrils across her face, and a moment later she swayed toward him.
Fanton gazed down his stepsister’s ample cleavage. It appeared to him as if her big tits wanted to leap from the gown she was wearing. Quicker than a man could see, he reached forward and squeezed one of her fat breasts, and then he dropped his hand to the indent of her waist. Too late, Beth’s hand lifted to brush across where he’d groped, but his hand was long gone.
There was always Beth, so malleable
, he thought. Yet she was a feast he dared only nibble at. Not because they were related, as they weren’t related in any biblical sense, and not because they were a contrived family. That was a lie.
No
, he thought, looking down at Beth’s face as she pushed with weakened resolve against his chest trying to escape his strength. The reason he didn’t devour her was that Lady Beth Winslow, his stepsister, looked very much like the one portrait he had of his mother.
“Yet,” he uttered, closing his other hand to squeeze Beth’s waist between both his large hands. “My mother would
never
act as slutty as you do.” Beth whimpered at the cruel clutch of his hands and her warm breath fanned his face. “But that other one, your friend,” he drawled, looking up toward the parlor doors, then back down at his slutty sister swaying before him. “She looks nothing like Mother.” That one was all blond with her tits barely covered like his sister’s.
“You do it to
tempt
men,” Fanton bit out as Beth clawed at the front of his black evening jacket. “Worse than whores in the streets.” His voice lowered into a hissing sound.
“Lord Fanton? Beth? Are you coming for sherry?” Adam’s voice called from within the parlor.
Fanton sneered, releasing Beth and she stumbled backward several paces. He adjusted his facial features into as pleasant as he could arrange them. Then he looked over at Adam, who had appeared at the parlor entrance, as he said, “Our sister wants to monopolize me, little brother. I will tear her away though.”
“Come on, Beth,” Adam called.
Beth’s multi-colored eyes blinked and she looked quite confused as Fanton sneered and walked past her toward Adam, and then around him into the parlor. He arrived in the parlor alone with the blond slut for a brief moment, and she instantly dipped her bare cleavage at him with a whore’s tempting gaze fluttering his way. How quickly she forgot her other admirer, Fanton thought. He was intrigued because she was a high society piece and not a lower east-end whore.
“Lord Fanton, you must come to the ball and dance with me,” she said, with husky temptations in her voice. He smiled as he circled the room, circling closer to her.
He began to wonder how fast she could run … then he wondered whether she could really scream well. In some far corner of his mind that acknowledged such things, he was surprised. The urge was rising again so quickly. He reassured himself it was simply the irresistible temptation of a noble bitch flaunting herself at him. He’d never tried one of those before.
And, she was offering …
Chapter Three
“A
riel, please stay away from Fanton,” Beth remembered pleading with her only friend. Then she’d declared aloud to Ariel, damned the consequences should anyone overhear and it get back to Fanton, “He is
not
a good man.”
That had been thirty minutes ago, and Ariel had gaily laughed and patted her hand, declaring everything would be all right. Ariel had danced off with Adam, and Beth had thought she was safe. However, Beth discovered now she was gone, leaving Adam holding two glasses of punch Ariel had asked him to fetch.
“I’ve been around the room once, Beth, and she’s not in the ballroom,” Adam declared, setting the punch glasses down on a nearby table. He turned back to her, while swiping a thatch of sandy brown hair out of his eyes. “Damn,” he cussed lowly.
“I am so tired of trying to warn her away from him, Adam. And she will not listen and simply take my word for it,” Beth said with frustration heating her words.
“I know,” Adam replied, looking down on her. “There comes a time when we should just…”
Beth gazed up at him as he left the sentence hanging and in her mind, she finished it.
Give up and she will do what she will do.
But instead she said, “I will look for her in the ladies’ retiring room.”
“And I will circulate through the upstairs,” Adam offered.
Beth touched Adam’s arm. “We will meet back here. One of us will drag her back here if we have to.”
Beth watched Adam’s smile as he started away, saying back to her, “We will find her.”
She watched Adam with a worried gaze as he climbed the elegant staircase at the Valtimer mansion. Immediately she decided she couldn’t keep putting Adam in the middle of the situation she had with Fanton. She turned toward the conclave of ladies’ lower-level retiring rooms.
“After I find you, Ariel, I shall break off our friendship this very night,” she muttered. She would do something she’d not considered for a very long time. She would give up her doomed search for a husband and she would apply to teach at a school for girls.
“That will take me out of your reach, Fanton,” she continued beneath her breath. It would leave her brother, so full of potential, an unfettered life to live to his desires and not be worrying about her constantly.
***
“Come, Lady Ariel, walk with me in the gardens under the full moon,” Fanton drawled, massaging the lady’s slender neck from behind, with wisps of her blond hair curling over his moving hand.
“But he is such a gentleman, and he’s gone to fetch me punch. I really should wait.”
Fanton thought she spoke without any true conviction as his fingers tightened on her neck and he felt her begin to pull away from his hardened grasp.
No, no, noble slut.
“Wait,” he called. “There is a new game gentlemen and ladies play who are courting that I want to teach you,” he offered quickly, forcing a touch of teasing into his voice.
He felt his lady-prize stop withdrawing as she leaned closer to him. “Courting game?” she asked, now nearly breathless. He was so brilliant and she was such a slut, he thought, as his sharp gaze traversed the ballroom. No one would notice them. A moonlit walk was normal among these weak society fools.
“Come, I will show you.”
Then, as easy as that, he had a high-society whore out in the deserted gardens at night … all alone. He could feel no one else walked the gardens but he and the woman of such low virtue beside him.
“The game is you shall run ahead and I stay to count, until I reach twenty, then I will come to catch you and if I’m able to catch you, you must forfeit a kiss to me.”
“A courting game, Lord Fanton?” she questioned with such hope in her voice, he nearly chuckled.
“Of course, my savory treat. You and I …” He left the rest hanging for the blond slut to pick up, as he knew she would.
“For a kiss then,” she said brightly. “If you can catch me!”
He told himself he would only play for a little while … this time. He would simply show himself how easy it was. Nothing more. He looked at the large glass-paneled doors to the ballroom. They were closed, but light spilled out onto the stone patio. He could hear the music and laughter as his gaze turned to the pale, moonlit gardens and beyond into the dark woods.
How easy this was. He’d never realized.
“I am counting,” he declared. “One. Two.”
“Oh, Lord Fanton!” she exclaimed. “Don’t start yet. I am going. Oh! Don’t look which way I go.”
Fanton turned his back as if he were a dutiful courting puppy and he heard the swishing skirts of his prize as she skipped away. He looked up at a sliver of the full moon trying to peek though the fog, counting aloud for the twit’s benefit as he wished the bobbing slut were Beth instead.
His mind began to fixate on how he would adore chasing his plump Beth deep into the dark woods, while he rolled his shoulders, shedding his evening jacket. Better yet, he would strip Beth of the fancy silk she wore, ripping the material from her lush curving figure, before he let her loose. Then he would stalk her pale, naked body. His cravat came loose and he tugged at the collar of his pristine white shirt. He would watch Beth’s fat breasts and wide hips as she would try to run from him. But no. She was not fast enough to escape his power … his strength. He would run her down. His Beth would try. Oh, she would struggle so hard trying to stop him. She would attempt to fight him with her frail limbs against his powerful strength. She would try to leave him. Yet he would never …
ever
let Beth leave him again!
Shrill sounds suddenly pierced Fanton’s hearing. He snarled on the edges of a manic roar, looking down at the blood washing his hands. His body shook as he wildly looked around. What had he done? How had he come to this? Again!
So
soon.
***
Beth heard a blood-curdling scream split the night air. It seemed to come from the woods behind the Valtimer mansion.
“Ariel!” she cried, lifting her skirts to begin running down the patio steps into the garden and beyond toward the woods. She’d lost her, and then she’d lost Adam too. He’d never returned to their rendezvous spot inside. She’d considered the gardens outside. It was the only place she hadn’t searched.
“Ariel, where are you?” Beth cried, darting her gaze back to the closed ballroom doors. No one would hear her cries with the music and the doors closed. She would be all alone. “But I cannot ignore her need!” Her gaze returned to the hag-shaped woods as she ran toward them. Did she really intend to go in there?
A wrenching scream split the cold night air in front of her from deep within the haunted woods, and her steps faltered. “Adam, oh God, Adam, I wish you were here.”
Beth clutched the small pearls on the necklace at her collarbone as she tried not to cry out in fear. On the scream’s heels came a more frightening sound. It was like no sound she’d ever heard, and it brought her rushing steps to a halt right at the edge of the eerie, blackened woods. She couldn’t tell the direction of the sound that was either terrible agony or heart-wrenching terror. Could it be an animal? She didn’t know of any animal that could possibly sound like it had.