Her Spite: A Reverse Harem Bully Romance (The Forgotten Elites Book 2) Eden Beck (best book club books TXT) 📖

“God,” she says as she lifts her hand from her hip and waves it around in the air as if she is trying to swat a swarm of flies away. “I was kidding. As if anyone would ever want to date Aubrey.”

She looks back over at Sterling and stares at him for a minute uncomfortably until he finally looks at her. Then she turns back to me and carries on about the shirt again.

“Look, I didn’t borrow your shirt,” I say. “The only clothes I have been wearing are the ones that you gave me.”

“Liar,” she says.

Except that I’m not lying. Why would I need to steal her clothes when she already gave me a bigger wardrobe of designer clothes than I have ever owned in my entire life?

I narrow my eyes at her and give her another, more careful once over. This is some kind of power play, but I don’t know why. Is she trying to tell me she’s not afraid anymore?

It just serves to reinforce what I was thinking before.

Time to start pushing back again.

But not, it seems, before Bridget does a little of her own first.

“Watch out boys,” she says as she pushes past us, knocking me on the shoulder as she goes. “She’ll steal your stuff if you’re not careful.”

I shake my head and huff at her retreating figure.

“She is so obnoxious,” I say under my breath after she leaves.

“Don’t let her get to you,” Sterling says. “She feeds off the controversy and drama that she creates. Trust me when I say that ignoring her is always the best choice.”

“I don’t know about that. It doesn’t seem to go over too well when you ignore her.”

Sterling shrugs. “What else am I supposed to do?”

I don’t have anything to tell him, because I keep asking myself the same question.

Chapter Nineteen

Love is such a strange concept.

When you think about it, it’s so closely related to other really strong emotions like fear, and hate, and maybe even the idea of survival. I wonder if the guys were ever put into a position where they had to choose just one, whether they would choose love or something else entirely.

I wonder which one I would choose.

I also wonder if any of us really knows what love is. Normally I don’t really think about stuff like this so deeply, but it still truly perplexes me how quickly I went from hating Sterling, Chase, and Warren—to not. All of a sudden, I now find myself thinking about all three of them constantly and wanting to be with them all the time.

And I think that maybe the strangest part about all of it, is how I see them as being completely different people than I initially thought that they were.

Well, maybe not all of them. Warren is still an asshole.

He’s just … also more than that.

Last semester, I would have staked my life on having the three guys all pegged as conceited, cruel, conniving jerks that were all too happy to bully anyone that inconvenienced them in even the smallest way. I thought that Chase was just some brainless jock that followed Warren and Sterling around like a puppy—despite the fact that I knew even then that he’s probably smarter than the rest of us combined.

But now I know that he has a reason for being under Warren’s thumb, and that he actually works a lot harder at school and on his scholarship than I had ever thought to give him credit for.

Sterling isn’t as cold or as much of a “bad boy” as I had thought him to be. He’s just trying his best to keep a wall around him to prevent him from getting hurt again—from what little I can only piece together of what he’s told me.

And then there’s Warren. I thought he was the worst of the bunch—and he is, I suppose, still. He’s just a lot easier to handle when he isn’t working alongside his sister to make my life a personal hell.

Last term it always seemed like he was trying to get out of doing his classwork or his volunteer shifts, and that he and his sister were always scheming something that was bound to be trouble. But it turns out that he was just simply trying to keep a family secret that was imposed on him and catch up with his schoolwork while working against a learning disability.

Who wouldn’t lash out in his situation?

I couldn’t have been more wrong when I misjudged them all.

“This is nice,” Warren says as I lie in his arms in his dorm room. “Like really nice.”

I smile in agreement. Lying in bed with him, kissing, and cuddling while the afternoon sun spills in through the dorm room window is very nice.

With a little help from the other guys, we were able to sneak me into his shared dorm and pay off the resident advisor on the floor to make sure that no one came into his room. Again—it must be nice to have enough money to literally buy whatever and whomever you want. I imagine that Warren must feel a bit like a king sometimes, just being able to order people around.

I also wonder if that feeling is worth it.

I mean, at some point I would imagine that changes who you are a bit. My family may have always had some money, like we were never destitute, but I was never allowed to be in complete control of anything. My parents had kept what we had—including me—on a tight leash, making sure that they saw every expense I made and every dollar I earned.

Compared to these boys, with Chase being the new exception of course, I was more like a prisoner than a queen. It doesn’t matter now anyways since all of that has been taken away. And to be honest, I like it better this way.

The loss of my freedom was the thing