Beastly Beauty

Fifty-Five

Arabella had kissed him.

She’d stood close to him, so close. And then she’d asked him, and he’d answered yes. And her lips had felt like everything he’d never known he wanted. And her body, pressed to his, felt like home.

And then she’d tried to kill him.

Beau could feel his own blood now, wet and warm, soaking through the napkin into his sleeve. He needed a real bandage. A fire. Shelter. He needed to return to the castle before he froze to death. But he would not, not until he found her.

Tearing winds drove snow into his face, forcing his head down. Deepening drifts clutched at his legs. It was all he could do to keep the struggling flame of his lantern alive.

And yet, he trudged on, driven by a white-hot fury that no snowstorm could cool.

The wind whirled around him, taunting him with her words. There are things, Beau … things it’s better you do not know …

“You’re a liar, Arabella!” he yelled back.

What he didn’t know had gotten him three ragged slashes across his arm. He was all done with not knowing things.

Was Arabella a flesh-and-blood woman? A stalking beast? Was she the contained, icy girl he’d first met, a girl who could draw blood with a word or a glance? Or the girl he’d danced with, a girl with fire in her lips?

Beau was going to find her, and beast or girl, she was going to tell him the truth.

As he walked on, deeper into the dark woods, the wind died little by little and the snow lightened enough that he no longer needed to shield his eyes against it. He shook his hood off and looked around, raising his lantern high.

“Arabella!” he shouted. “It’s me, Beau!”

There was no reply. Beau ventured farther, scanning the white drifts for tracks.

“Arabella, come out! I want to talk to you!”

As the words left his lips, he glimpsed it—a dark blur flashing through a stand of pines.

Beau’s guts tightened with fear. His calls had summoned a creature, but not the one he wanted.

A black wolf emerged from the trees and stopped a few yards from him, head lowered, eyes glinting. It was joined by five more.

They were real beasts, not enchanted ones.

But every bit as dangerous.