Free Fray (The Ruin Saga Book 3) by Harry Manners Page B

clipped the top of her cheek, a tiny pinprick of fire under her left eye. Something warm trickled down towards her chin.
    He groaned, a heady sensual noise that made her gorge rise. “I think I’ll have you sit on my face tonight, girly,” he whispered.
    “Go suck peaches,” she spat.
    He laughed and drew back, his wicked eyes looking her up and down. Yet underneath his ugly veneer, she was satisfied to see the same frustration she had always seen. The kind of frustration that could only come from a lifetime of gawping at what one can’t have. Every time she had looked at the rotund, old mayor, she saw a shadow of somebody else—a young gawky, snivelling weed, riddled with acne, jealous, supercilious, and mean. She could sense the rejections he had suffered in every hungry pry of his fingers; all the women who had looked down their noses at the eager, leg-humping fat boy and laughed.
    “You like this, don’t you?” he said, biting his lip. “I know you do. You can’t help yourself, like a bitch in heat.”
    In his drunkenness he had grown more volatile with each swing of the bottle. Since she had been tied to the chair, he had got through a whole bottle and a half of hard liquor, and he looked as though he meant to go on. The sheer volume of the great beach ball of a man would soak up a lot of it—any ordinary man would have been stretched out on the ground by now—but everyone had a limit.
    Once he passed that, there would be no room for error. Malverston was turning into a bomb before her eyes, one she knew she couldn’t help but set off. She refused to lay down for him, to become a sheep and submit. Even if it meant he carved her face off and capered about wearing it like a mask, she’d kick and fight to the last breath.
    Beth didn’t move one inch, her face contorted into what she hoped was a disgusted grimace as Malverston’s tongue snaked out and tickled her cheek.
    “I know you always loved that,” Malverston whispered. “Every time you lay in my bed, you pretended you didn’t, but you did. Women are all the same. Pretend you don’t want it, but deep down you’re looking for a reason to spread ’em, especially for big, powerful men.”
    She tittered harshly into his face. “Like you?”
    His expression flashed between surprise and confusion behind his drunken hunger. “I hold every scrap of land between here and Dorset, little girl. There’s no bigger pair in all the land.”
    Ready, Beth licked her lips, glancing down below his belt to the pathetic protuberance stretching into view. “Oh, I’m sorry, mayor. I didn’t know we were talking about raisins.”
    Her stared at her deadpan for a moment, then the half-filled bottle came up from out of view and collided with her temple.
    Beth lurched sideways in the chair and recoiled against her restraints. The world span and for a moment she was certain she would vomit. Then she was panting, and Malverston had turned his back, pacing the room.
    She gritted her teeth, fighting tears welling up behind her eyes, biting down on her lip. She screamed, “Why am I here?”
    “I realised my mistake as soon as I sent you to Cain and his foolish friends. Your place is here.”
    “I’ll never sit by your side, mayor.”
    “Oh, that ship has sailed.” His brow darkened. “Your place is here so you can receive your just desserts. I am the mayor of Newquay’s Moon, and I will not be embarrassed by some rosy-cheeked harlot.”
    Staggering from table to table, Malverston inspected the copious piles of trinkets given as tribute by farmers and homesteads across the Cornwall peninsula. One by one he inspected tarnished pieces of silver, precious stones, inoperable Old World curiosities, casting them aside without a care for which returned to the table or broke on the floor.
    The town hall had vacated in the wake of Malverston’s drunken roaring. Even his personal entourage had stepped outside to give, as the mayor himself had put it, a spot of lover’s