Defiant Princess (Boys of Oak Park Prep #2) - Callie Rose Page 0,3

turned to ask her what she meant, it wasn’t my mom standing next to me anymore. It was Jacqueline, flanked by the Princes and Philip and several other faces I didn’t recognize. And she never answered my question.

Instead, she put a hand on my chest and pushed, and I tumbled backward through space, hurtling over the edge of the cliff toward the ground below.

My stomach churned with nausea at the memory of the dream, and I flopped back on the mattress, curling up in a ball on my side as I took several deep breaths.

At least that dream was better than the ones where I did forget. Where I dreamt of four boys who looked out for me, protected me, who held a piece of my heart in their open palms—and only remembered when I woke up how they’d curled their fingers into fists and squeezed those pieces of my heart until they bled.

When my heart rate was under control again, I stumbled out of bed, chucked my Big Daddy’s uniform in my bag, and threw on a pair of jeans and a ratty old t-shirt. I was scheduled to work at the gas station before my shift at the restaurant today, but I still had time before both to go to the library.

I headed out at 8:30 so I could get there when they opened at nine. If you were looking for a good book to read, the Sand Valley Public Library was the wrong place to go. They didn’t have a large selection, and anything new or halfway decent was usually stolen. But they had a bank of old computers in the back that were free to use, so I’d become a regular fixture there over the summer.

The librarian on duty gave me a bored look as I headed toward the back, then returned to staring at her own computer.

Mason, Finn, Elijah, and Cole all had more of an internet presence than I did. Beyond social media, their names just popped up in more places—probably because they were the sons of the elite, the next generation of American royalty destined to take over their family legacies. What they did mattered to people more than what a nobody from Idaho did.

I hoped someday I could use that to my advantage.

If I played my cards right, they’d never see the nobody from Idaho coming. Not until it was too late.

My previous searches had unearthed several pictures of Elijah and his younger brother and sister. I had always thought Elijah looked like he was born to wear suits, that the Oak Park uniform fit him like a second skin, but it was even more obvious when I saw him next to his younger siblings. He looked so different than them, all his rough edges polished and smoothed down like one of the stones I’d picked up on the beach behind my grandparents’ house.

I’d also found several pictures of Penny, Cole’s eight-year-old sister. She looked sweet, with black hair just like her brother and a round, open face. I didn’t print those pictures though, because even if there was some way I could hurt him through her, I wouldn’t do it. I probably could—he’d beat that kid Preston to a pulp because Preston had talked shit about his sister—but I refused to sink to that level. She hadn’t meant to have a walking cock for a brother, and she didn’t deserve to suffer for it.

Today, I picked up where my last research session had ended and typed “Element Investments” into the search bar. Philip had told me my mom and the Princes’ parents used to be close friends, that they’d even started a company together after college.

There wasn’t a lot of information about the company itself available online, although maybe that shouldn’t have been too surprising considering it only seemed to have been around for a year or so. I found several articles discussing the inception of the company, but almost nothing chronicling its end. It seemed to have just sort of fizzled out, dying quietly and sinking out of the public eye.

I found a few pictures of the group of them—my mom and her college friends—from right before the company got off the ground, and I unconsciously leaned closer to the screen to stare at the images. My mom was young, just a few years out of college, and she looked so much like me it was almost like peering into a mirror. The Princes’ parents resembled their sons too—Cole’s father,