Winterset Read online

  Anna let out a shaky breath. Her mind was a blank. She knew she should say something, end the moment, but she could not make herself turn away. Her heart was thudding in her chest, and she knew that all she wanted at this moment was for him to kiss her.

  As if he had heard her thoughts, Reed leaned down, his face looming closer, and then his lips were on hers and all other thoughts fled from Anna’s head. She trembled, her hands going up to his chest as if to ward him off, then sliding instead around his neck. His lips were soft and seeking, the pressure gradually increasing as passion flared up inside him. Reed’s arms went around her tightly, pulling her up and into him, as his mouth pressed harder against hers.

  Anna let out a soft sound of pleasure, clinging to him, her head whirling. It had been so long since she had tasted his lips; she thought she had forgotten how it felt, but the memories flooded back to her now, hot and fierce. Desire thrummed in her, as though the years between had only made it stronger. She wanted the world to go away, wanted the kiss never to stop.

  His hands roamed up and down her back, caressing her shoulders and back and hips, and he lifted his mouth briefly from hers only to change the angle of their kiss. Reed’s skin was searing where he touched her bare back and shoulders; his heat enveloped her. One arm curled around her back, supporting her, and his other hand moved slowly up her side from her hips, curving around to the front and coming to rest on the underside of her breast.

  Anna shuddered, heat lancing straight down through her abdomen and exploding in her loins. No one had ever touched her like this, not even Reed three years ago, and the sensation was both shocking and intensely exciting. She had never before experienced the hot flowering of yearning between her legs or the sudden fullness of her breasts, the tightening of her nipples. Hungrily, she pressed herself even more tightly against him, her arms locking around his neck.

  He kissed his way across her cheek to her ear, and his teeth and tongue worried at the sensitive lobe, sending wild darts of sensation shooting through her. His hand tightened on her breast, his thumb stroking across her nipple, and even through the material of her dress, her nipple responded, hardening and pointing.

  “Anna, Anna…” He breathed her name as his lips trailed down her neck, nibbling and kissing until at last they reached the pillowy softness of her breast.

  She gasped, rocked by pleasure, and somehow the very intensity of the pleasure brought her out of the haze in which she had been floating. Anna straightened, pulling sharply away from Reed, her hand going to her mouth. For a long moment they simply stared at each other, too stunned to speak or even move. Then, with a low cry, Anna turned and hurried away.

  “Anna!” Reed called her name in a hoarse whisper, but she did not turn around.

  She paused at the open doors, looking into the lighted room. She straightened her dress and patted her hair, then took a deep breath and slipped inside. No one seemed to notice her entrance.

  Anna glanced around the room, looking for her brother. At last she spotted him at the other end of the room, talking to Kyria and Rosemary, and she began to make her way around the edge of the dancers toward him. She hated to tear Kit away from the party, which he was so obviously enjoying, but she did not think she could bear to remain here any longer. She would plead a headache and tell him that she had to leave, but would send the carriage back for him.

  She cast a look back toward the outer doors as she moved up the room. Reed had reentered, as well, but was making his way toward the opposite end.

  The music came to a stop, the dancers left the floor, and Anna started directly across the room toward her brother. Then there was a stir at the door leading out into the hall, and Anna turned her head to see the constable, Carl Wright, standing in the doorway, looking ill at ease and twisting his cap in his hand. As she watched, Reed strode through the other partygoers to the constable and bent to say something to the man.

  By now, almost all the heads in the room were turned toward the door, watching curiously. Reed raised his head and glanced around the room, and his gaze fell upon Dr. Felton. He gestured to the doctor, and Felton slipped through the other guests to join the knot at the door. A murmur rose from the those nearest the three men, moving back through the room.

  “A body…”

  “They’ve found a body….”

  Anna stiffened, her hands clenching at her sides. Estelle!

  CHAPTER SIX

  Anna was not sure why she was so certain that the body they were speaking of was the maid Estelle, but she was. She felt suddenly weak in the knees, and her concerns of a few moments earlier fled her mind. Turning, she hurried over to where her brother stood with Lady Kyria and Miss Farrington, and slipped her hand through his arm. He glanced down at her, his hand going protectively over hers.

  “Do you know what’s happening?” Anna asked Kyria, who shook her head.

  “I just heard someone say they’d found a body.”

  At that moment Rafe McIntyre came up beside his wife, sliding a supporting hand around her waist. She leaned into him a little, casting him a grateful glance. “Who is that man?” Kyria asked, nodding toward Reed and the others.

  “The constable,” Anna replied. “I think he must have come to fetch Dr. Felton.”

  “Oh, dear, how awful,” Rosemary Farrington gasped, looking pale.

  “What if it’s Estelle?” Anna asked her brother.

  “Who?” Kyria asked. “Who is Estelle?”

  “We don’t know that it is she,” Kit protested. “It could be anybody.”

  “She is one of our maids,” Anna explained to the others. “She has been missing the past few days. Everyone thought she had run away with a man, but…”

  Anna cast another look toward the door. Dr. Felton and the constable were no longer there, and Reed was walking toward his sister, the rest of the party falling around him, clamoring with questions. When he reached his sister, he said quietly, “I am sorry to spoil your party, my dear.”

  “Never mind that,” Kyria said, shaking her head impatiently. “What is going on?”

  “Apparently a body has been found.”

  “Where was it?” Anna asked, her mind going again to the woods and the strange feeling she had had there the other day—though surely the body could not have been found there, for she had seen nothing.

  Reed shook his head. “I’m not sure. I believe the constable said something like Hutchins’ farm. I think a farmer found her.”

  “Sam Hutchins?” Kit supplied. “He is one of our tenants. I mean, one of my uncle’s tenants.”

  “Yes, I got the impression it was on de Winter land.”

  “Do they know who it is?” Kit asked, and Reed shook his head.

  “He did not say. Only that they needed the doctor to examine the body.”

  “Miss Holcomb is afraid that it might be one of their servant girls,” Kyria explained.

  “Estelle Akins. She left the house several days ago. We thought she had gone off with someone.” Distress filled Anna’s voice. “We should have looked harder. Done something more.”

  “Now, Anna, you don’t know that the body is Estelle’s,” Kit pointed out. “Nor do we have any idea what happened. And how could we have known? She obviously left the house on her own.”

  “I know. It’s just—” Anna thought again of her feeling in the woods that day. She had known something was wrong; she had felt it strongly. No one would have believed her, she supposed; she scarcely believed it herself. But she could have pushed the issue, she thought; she could have sent the men out searching farther afield than she had.

  Yet even as those thoughts went through her head, she knew that she would not have thought to send the men as far away as Hutchins’ farm, where the body had been found. The “vision” she had seen—or felt, or whatever one called it—had been in the woods.

  Anna looked at Reed and asked, “What happened?”

  Again Reed shook his head. “I’m not sure.”

  “Ther
e were claw marks,” said the squire from behind them. “I heard Wright say there were claw marks on the body.”

  Anna’s eyes widened, and her mind went immediately to the dog that the twins had found, its side slashed. Her eyes went to her brother. There were gasps from several of the guests, and the vicar’s wife said in a horrified whisper, “The Beast!”

  “Now, my dear…” the vicar began in a soothing tone.

  “The beast?” Kyria repeated, glancing around. “What beast? What are you talking about?”

  “The Beast of Craydon Tor,” Mrs. Bennett said in tones of awe.

  “It’s nothing,” Anna said flatly. “Just a local legend.”

  “My dear, how can you say that?” the vicar’s wife admonished her.

  “The area is full of legends,” Kit said. “All of them apocryphal, I’m sure.”

  “I told you one of them,” Reed said to his sister. “How the staghounds on the columns at the gate come to life at the full moon and follow their dead master as he races on his phantom horse through the countryside.”

  “Yes, you did,” Kyria said with a dramatic shudder, “and it gave me the shivers, I can tell you. But is that what they call the beast?”

  “The Beast is something altogether different,” the squire’s wife said.

  “Long, long ago,” piped up Felicity Bennett, in the tone of one telling a fairy tale, “there was an important nobleman—one of the de Winters, perhaps, but it was so long ago, no one knows who. He had a beautiful young daughter, and he betrothed her to another lord. But the daughter had already fallen in love with a local lad, and when her father told her that she was to marry the lord, she refused. He locked her in her room, but the local lad helped her escape and they fled into the forest. Lord de Winter and his men hunted them down and killed the girl’s lover right in front of her. He took her back to the castle, and that very night, the girl, crazed with grief, flung herself to her death in the castle courtyard.”

  “A rather typical legend,” Mr. Norton, the solicitor said, somewhat pompously.

  “I don’t understand,” Rosemary Farrington said. “It’s very sad, but what does it have to do with a beast?”

  “That’s the next part.” Felicity picked up the story. “The boy the nobleman killed was the son of a witch, and she was furious. She went to the nobleman and put a curse on him for having killed her son, and for causing his own daughter’s death, as well. She changed him into a beast, part man, part animal, and doomed him to roam the earth forever, reviled by everyone.” She stopped with a pleased look on her face.

  “A lot you know about it,” her brother put in scornfully.

  “Oh, and I suppose you know better?” Felicity pouted, putting her hands on her hips.

  “There are other variations of the story,” the solicitor said. “That every seven years the present Lord de Winter turns into the Beast, or that every generation a de Winter is born a beast. But Miss Bennett’s version is the most popular.”

  “They call him the Beast of Craydon Tor,” Reed went on. “I was told all about it when I bought Winterset. The Beast supposedly lives in the woods around Craydon Tor.”

  “It’s all nonsense,” Anna said. “Just a bogeyman to frighten children.”

  “But he’s been seen!” Mrs. Burroughs protested. “Many, many times. I read about it in a book Dr. Felton lent me.”

  “There have been stories that he has been sighted,” Anna replied. “But none of them have ever described him in the same way, have they?”

  “No,” her brother agreed. “Some have said it was a dark animal, like a panther. Others have said it walked upright and had a head like a lion. And then there are those who said it looked like a man, but with claws and hair all around his face and long, sharp teeth.”

  “Besides,” Mr. Norton, clearly a skeptic, put in, “it’s nothing but hearsay—some priest recounting legends of beasts, or a newspaper story full of things like ‘a local farmer said.’”

  “But what about those killings?” the squire asked. “Those were the work of the Beast. I was just a baby when they happened, but I remember everyone talking about them when I was young.”

  “Killings?” Kyria asked, her eyes wide. Beside her Reed looked almost as surprised.

  “Oh, yes,” the squire nodded, looking important. “It was nigh on fifty years ago when it happened. Four years or so before Lord and Lady de Winter died in that fire—” He turned toward Anna and Kit, adding, “Your grandparents, your uncle’s parents. Terrible tragedy, that.” He gave a sigh and a lugubrious shake of his head, then went on. “But a few years before that, the Beast killed two people.”

  “Really?” Kyria looked amazed.

  “I never heard about this,” Reed commented.

  “There were killings at that time,” Mr. Norton said, in the carefully precise way he spoke.

  “The victims were clawed,” Mrs. Burroughs said, much more firmly than was her wont. “That is what everyone says. One of them had his throat ripped out.”

  Her words seemed to hang in the silence, harsh and terrible.

  “Did they find who did it?” Rafe McIntyre asked.

  Several people shook their heads. The solicitor was the first to speak. “A number of people didn’t think it was a person. They thought it was this ‘Beast.’”

  “One can hardly believe that a person would do such things,” the vicar added.

  “People were scared about it for years afterward,” put in the squire. “I remember my nurse used to tell me about how people would bar their doors and windows, even in the heat of the summer, afraid of the Beast.”

  Even disbelieving as she was, Anna could not help but feel a little shiver run down her back at his words.

  * * *

  The party broke up shortly after that. There seemed little more to say, and the natural inclination for most was to seek the shelter of their own homes.

  When their guests had gone, Rafe slid his arm around his wife, pulling her against his side, and Kyria laid her head gratefully on his shoulder.

  “Sorry about your party, darlin’,” Rafe said, kissing her gently on the temple.

  Kyria shrugged. “I don’t mind that…. It’s that poor girl.”

  “Do you think it’s the Holcombs’ maid?” Rosemary asked, frowning in concern.

  “It seems likely, given the fact that she is missing,” Reed commented. “I did hear the constable say that the body was that of a woman.”

  Miss Farrington shuddered and said in a subdued voice that she was going up to bed. Reed cast a look at his sister and Rafe, saying, “Join me for a drink in the study?”

  “I think a bit of brandy is exactly what we need,” Rafe agreed, and the three of them strolled down the hall into Reed’s study. A large, comfortable room, it was still furnished with the large leather chairs that had been there when Reed bought the place, all well worn into a buttery softness.

  Reed walked over to a cabinet against the wall and took out a decanter of brandy, pouring a healthy dollop of cognac into three small balloon glasses.

  Kyria sighed as she sat down on the sofa. “It’s so awful. Poor Anna. She looked white as a sheet. Did you notice?”

  Rafe nodded as he sat down beside her. He linked his hand through hers and brought it up to his lips, kissing it tenderly. Kyria smiled at him and snuggled up against him.

  Reed, pouring the drinks, turned at his sister’s words, his eyes narrowing. “I wasn’t with you when she heard. Was she much distressed?”

  “I would say so,” Kyria said. “She was quite pale. Of course, she assumed it was their servant. That is much worse than just hearing that a stranger has died.”

  “I wonder…” Reed murmured, staring down at the glasses without really seeing them, the decanter still in his hand.

  Rafe and Kyria exchanged a glance. “Wonder what?” Rafe asked bluntly. “Did you know this servant girl, or whoever it was that was found?”

  Reed shook his head. “No. But…” He set do
wn the decanter, then picked up two of the drinks and brought them over to Rafe and Kyria. “You will probably think me mad. I told Theo about it, and I’m fairly certain that he did.”

  Kyria raised her eyebrow. “Told Theo what? How is Theo involved in this? He’s in London.”

  “He’s not involved. But I told him why I was coming here.”

  Kyria stared at him. “I thought you were coming to put the house in order so that you could sell it. That is why Rafe and I came along, to look at the house in case we wanted to buy it. Is that not why you came here?”

  “Not entirely, no.”

  Rafe and Kyria exchanged a glance, then looked back at Reed. “Reed…what are you saying? Are you not planning to sell Winterset?”

  “I don’t know. I—I had thought I might.” He sighed. “I don’t use the place. And it seemed like a reasonable excuse to come.”

  “Excuse?” Rafe picked up on the word. “Why would you need an excuse to visit your own house?”

  “Because it has been three years. Because…I thought it would stifle any awkward questions.”

  “From the family?” Kyria asked.

  Reed nodded. “Yes. And from everyone here. I thought it would seem a trifle odd to go off for three years and then come running back.”

  “The odd thing was buying it and then leaving it in a few months and never going back,” Kyria said shrewdly. “That is what I have always wondered about.” She paused, then said, “Why did you really come to Winterset? Is it because of Anna Holcomb?”

  Reed looked at her sharply. “How did you know?”

  Kyria grimaced. “I’m not blind, you know. I saw you this evening—you scarcely took your eyes off her all night. And the other day, when she came back here with the twins, it was the same. Then you insisted on escorting her back to her home, when it would have been enough simply to have sent her home in the carriage. And when you came back, you were in such a terrible temper, I didn’t dare talk to you.”