I didn’t know why I was taunting her. Maybe because of what she’d said about Javier at The Club. But I knew now, the way her breath shallowed, the way her fingertips danced around her neck, I knew she’d lied about him and the damn closet.
She looked up at me and nodded. “Of course.”
Liar.
“Of course,” I purred. And I had to resist hard the urge to trace the skin along her neck where she continued to touch herself.
“You’ve…you’ve done it then?”
“Yes,” I admitted. “This past summer. She was older. Twenty. I met her at fundraising event my family attended. The daughter of some actor who I won’t name drop. We hung out for a few weeks before she had to go back to college. She taught me how to fuck, how to make her come. It was quite an education.”
Beth swallowed. “Well, good for you.”
“I had to know how to do it, Beth. I had to learn. I couldn’t be…”
“No. Of course you couldn’t. Fitz Darcy. Excellent in all things.”
There was a sharpness in her voice.
“You can’t possibly be angry.”
She laughed. “You’re right. I can’t possibly be. I have to get back to the twins.”
“Will you help me? Will you help me find who put this list together and is taking the bets? If for no other reason than to spare us and anyone else on that damn list the humiliation.”
“I don’t know if I can save them from themselves,” Beth said solemnly, but then she nodded. “But I’ll try.”
It was only then I realized, we both realized, I’d had my hand around her arm this entire time. She had to pull on it because my grip was still tight. Almost like I was reluctant to let her go.
I watched her march toward her sisters, her back straight. She was of average height, slim build but she carried herself like a queen. I could always spot her in the crowd. Always. Even on a football field with a stadium filled with people, I could always find Bennet.
We would do this thing together then.
For the first time not as enemies.
6
Beth
Sitting in the bathtub filled with hot water and suds, ear buds in my ears, I wasn’t really listening to the music. I thought it would relax me, but that was impossible.
How could I relax when my brain was filled with things I couldn’t push out of it?
Fitz thinking we shouldn’t be enemies this year. Fitz wanting to work together to stop whoever was targeting our sisters for humiliation.
Fitz fucking.
“You can’t possibly be mad.”
Why had he said that? Had I sounded mad at the time? Because he was absolutely right. There was no reason to be mad. We weren’t friends. We certainly weren’t in a relationship. I told him as often as I had the chance that I loathed him. That I wished to beat him at any challenge in which I could compete.
I didn’t care about some twenty-year-old girl. I didn’t. Maybe I cared only that he got to do the thing before I did. I’d specifically wanted to wait until I was seventeen—what I’d considered the appropriate age. He’d turned seventeen in June. Don’t ask me how I knew his birthday, I just did. So it made sense he had the same thought. But now that he’d done it and I hadn’t, he had one up on me.
He knew how to make a woman come. He’d been taught. He would know what he was doing the next time he was with someone, while I would be a fumbling idiot virgin.
Furious, I splashed the water with my hand.
“Damn it!”
