Page 19 of Dark Delights

“Because I read your little nepotism letter? Who cares? You really think anyone at HHU will think you’re there out of merit anyway? You’re an Anderson. People just assume you pick and choose whatever you want in life and Daddy pays for it, anyway.”

My words bounced off Beckett’s fury, leaving him untouched. “Try again.”

Try again?Just like that, the damn pencil case with the drugs inside flooded my mind. My eyes jumped guiltily to his.

He nodded. “And there it is.”

I didn’t know what to say. My mouth opened and closed wordlessly. My mom had told Beckett about the drugs? Or Soren?

“Do you have any idea what you’ve done? Poking around where you don’t belong and tattling like a little bitch. You’ve cost me?—”

“It’s not my fault you were doing drugs,” I rallied and fought back.

He was standing close to me, so close I could see the green notes in his gray eyes.

“No, but it’s your fault my father knows. It’s your fault that he’s threatening my hockey career and forcing me to do his bullshit classes.”

“No, it’s not my fault!”

“So, you didn’t tell my father? It was your mother, then?” Beckett seized on my words.

Fear leaped through me. It felt a lot more dangerous to have Beckett’s rage directed at my mother than at me.

“No. I didn’t say that.”

“So, itwasyou…Tell the truth, Cinderella, because I’ll find out anyway.” His voice was low and menacing.

He pressed me up against a freezer behind me. He was so big and burly, his presence overwhelmed me. Why had my mom told Soren? Beckett was dangerous. He had way too much power. He could have her fired. Then we’d never be able to afford her medications.

“It was me.” My lie was only a whisper, but he heard it.

He caged me against the freezer with a hand on either side of me. I glanced up and was caught in his dark, furious gaze.

“Do you know what this means, Evie?”

I didn’t like him using my brother’s nickname for me at all.

“That you’ll have to follow your dad’s orders for a while, until it blows over?” I suggested, as flippantly as I could manage.

Beckett shook his head slowly. “It means you’re fucking dead, is what it means. You’re finished. I’ve wanted to crush you since the day we met, and because of your brother, I didn’t. Now, he’snot here, and you – you deserve every second of the hell I’m going to put you through,” he murmured.

His low voice was intimate somehow, stroking across my nerves, even as fear filled me.

I swallowed the words of protest in my throat. “Don’t be dramatic, Beckett. You can’t do anything to me, whether Asher is here or not. It’ll all blow over.”

I didn’t get to hear his response.

The sound of shouts pierced the air from the front of the store. Someone was making a commotion at the checkout. We both looked that way at the same time. My attention caught on the four guys who’d been loitering, just in time to see one of them jump the barrier that sat between the general store and the pharmacy. An alarm blared.

“Shit,” Beckett muttered, assessing the situation quickly, then stepping back. He took my arm in a rough grip. “We need to get out of here.”

There was no time, though. The alarm continued to scream, and another of the guys, the one who had grinned at me, pulled a gun from his waistband and grabbed an old man who was shuffling near him.

“Turn the fucking alarm off right now, or this guy is the first to go!”

The security guards stopped moving, halfway to pulling their guns free from their holsters. At a jerk of the gunman’s head, his cronies went to the guards and took their weapons.

“Alarm off, now,” the gunman repeated.

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