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

Since Bridget didn’t have time to warn Sterling about canceling their date, and I’m pretty sure that she’s too furious and distracted on her drive home right now; I go to meet him instead.

This is going to be a good chance for me to start getting into the boys’ little circle too. It’s easier to deal with them one at a time, than when all three of them are together. When Warren, Chase, and Sterling are all together, they seem to feed off of each other’s egos and act three times as horribly.

That, I blame entirely on Warren, though Sterling is no angel either.

If I can get them alone, it should at least make it easier for me to get under their skin. I don’t have the same kind of leverage over them that I do Bridget.

It isn’t the first time Sterling is surprised to see me.

“Where’s Bridget?” Sterling asks when he sees me walking up to him. His head swivels to either side, as if expecting some kind of ambush from behind. I’m pretty sure he knows that I wouldn’t walk up to him at all unless I had a message to give … or some darker alternative.

“She had to go home for some reason,” I say, flippantly. “She asked me to fill in for her.”

“Fill in?” he asks with a raised eyebrow.

“Yeah, on the date that you guys had scheduled for tonight.”

He blinks at me in shock, an expression that makes my heart beat just a little bit faster. I’m not sure I’ve ever seen Sterling in shock.

Just as quickly, the expression fades from his face, however. It’s replaced with a wary look instead.

“That doesn’t sound like Bridget at all. She’s too much of the jealous type to ask another girl to fill in on a date. Besides, doesn’t she hate you?” he says. “You’re the last person on Earth she would ask to fill in for her.”

She’s also, apparently, not the most thoughtful if she didn’t even bother to cancel this so-called date. I half expected him not to show up.

But then again, she was a little busy getting her driver to bring the car back before he drove too far away from the school, what with the house mother looking over her shoulder the whole time she was on the shared phone over at Mason House. Maybe she didn’t have time to think about getting her burner phone to text Sterling after.

Or maybe, like all things Bridget, he doesn’t really matter to her at all.

It’s a similar train of thought that I see play across Sterling’s face. He’s not usually so easy to read, but then again, he’s probably not used to getting stood up.

Still, I need to be careful before he gets too suspicious and I ruin any chance of getting get him alone. I shrug my shoulders as if I have no idea what could possibly be running through Bridget’s head, nor do I care.

“No idea,” I say. “It’s no skin off my nose if you don’t want to hang out with me. I have schoolwork to do anyway. I was just trying to do her a favor, and no—she doesn’t hate me, not anymore at least.”

Sterling seems to be mulling it over in his head. At least this is somewhat believable. If anyone has a bad habit of flip-flopping on friends, it’s Bridget. One moment, you think you’re in her good graces … the next she’s blackmailing you to sleep with a teacher so she can get into an ethics class.

“Alright,” he says cavalierly. “I suppose your company is better than none.”

“Gee thanks,” I mumble under my breath.

He laughs when he hears me and throws an arm around my shoulder as if we’re suddenly old friends. It’s offsetting for a moment until I remember why I’m doing this—to get information, anything that I can use to take these guys down.

This isn’t a date, I remind myself. This is reconnaissance.

Sterling and I walk across the campus and end up going to the school bookstore. There’s a little coffee shop inside of it where we sit and talk about nothing in particular. I think it’s the first time we’ve done this—talked casually about anything. Last term most of our conversations ended with him storming off or staring blatantly at my ass while I was bending down to put away art supplies.

It’s strange to see him in this new light. For just a few minutes, an hour at most, he’s just another normal boy. One with strikingly attractive features—a nose that slopes upward just so, dark brows that knit together expressively, dimples that appear on either side of his mouth when he accidentally smiles—but normal, nonetheless. At least, compared to how he normally is.

And normally, he’s a massive pain in the ass.

But even I can’t deny he really is handsome. He has the whole ‘brooding bad boy’ vibe down perfectly.

After we finish our coffee and several segue ways of random conversation topics, we decide to take another walk. By the time it starts getting dark, we end up sitting on one of the benches on campus grounds, enjoying the cool weather, and laughing about one of the teachers that can never seem to pronounce anyone’s name correctly.

It would be deceiving for any stranger that walked by and saw us sitting there. We look like close friends enjoying a nice evening together while Sterling tries to explain a funny story, talking with his hands about a surprisingly innocent incident that the guys all had over the break. We’re even sitting so closely together on the bench that our thighs are touching.

I’m so keenly aware of the fact that I almost miss what he says.

“—and then he threatened to send me to Brown of all places if I didn’t shape up. All that for sticking a fucking whoopie cushion under his seat. And he called me the childish one.”

I nearly choke. “Hold up. Wait. Your dad …”

He eyes me warily all of