Defiant Princess (Boys of Oak Park Prep #2) - Callie Rose Page 0,24

caught him staring.

He chuckled. “You look nice.”

“Oh. Thanks.” I was just wearing a t-shirt and dark denim skirt—I’d thrown both on at the last minute. It seemed like he was making an effort, and I kept trying to make one too, but my heart wasn’t really in it.

He drove us to a restaurant near the water, and we ate seafood pasta as we watched the sun set and listened to gulls call in the distance. I found out Oliver was from the Bay Area originally, but his family had moved down here after the housing market crashed. I’d been right that he was lower tier in the social hierarchy of Oak Park and Roseland in general. Probably about the same level as Leah was, although unlike Leah, Oliver didn’t seem to have a sense of humor about it.

“My family used to be richer than the fucking Prescotts,” he muttered at one point, and I wondered if that was part of his beef with the Princes—the fact that he should’ve been higher ranked than them.

But I let the comment slide right by. The last thing I wanted to do was talk or even think about the Princes. I had thought coming back here, seeing them all face-to-face, would make the memories of last year fade away like bitter dreams. But it hadn’t.

Vivid memories still overtook me like flashbacks, still popped into my head while I was asleep, taunting me with beautiful lies.

After we finished dinner, Oliver and I walked along the beach for a while. He put his arm around my waist, and I leaned my head against his shoulder, willing myself to fall in love with a nice boy for once. When he dropped me back off at my dorm, he threaded his fingers through the back of my hair and kissed me.

His tongue swept inside my mouth, and I grabbed fistfuls of his shirt as I pressed myself against him, trying to feel… anything.

Oliver wasn’t a bad kisser. His cologne was too strong but not terrible. And he’d taken me on the nicest date I’d been on in years.

So why don’t I feel anything?

The answer to that sat in my heart like a poisoned blade, twisting and twisting until it shredded the fragile organ.

My body—and even my shredded heart—still craved four awful, evil, irredeemable boys.

When I had kissed each of them, heat had bloomed inside me like a lick of fire. Every nerve ending in my body had come alive. It had been consuming.

Overwhelming.

Perfect.

And even though I would never kiss any of them again, they had ruined me for anyone else.

Chapter 7

Another week passed, and I started to seriously doubt the sanity of my plan. Of my decision to come back to Oak Park at all.

I hadn’t been able to get close enough to the Princes to get any dirt on them I couldn’t find on the internet, and nothing I found on the internet was good enough to bring them down.

So why the fuck was I here?

What kind of delusions of grandeur had made me think I could stand up as a one-woman army against the Princes and all their minions at the school?

It was a numbers game, and the math wasn’t on my side.

Still, I saw little signs of victory. I walked in on a couple students describing the Cole hair-cutting incident—and away from his threatening presence, they were laughing uproariously about it. Several students, including Sable, had stopped taunting me or interacting with me much at all, and a couple people besides Oliver had stepped up to defend me once or twice.

They were small things, but they represented exactly what I wanted to see. A crack in the Princes’ iron grip on this school, a crumbling pillar in the foundation of their power. If I kept standing up to them, weakening them in the eyes of the student body, making them look like assholes and fools, maybe more kids would defect from their camp.

The Princes were terrifying, and the power they wielded was real. But at some level, they only had power because enough people had agreed to give it to them. If enough people decided to stop… well, there were only so many battles the Princes could fight at a time.

I found myself oddly grateful I had no family left who cared about me—in a way, it made me invincible. The Princes had already done the worst to me. They couldn’t do it again. They couldn’t leverage my family against me or threaten them to