Page 6 of Defiant Beta

Sprinting past the wellness center, I duck around the back. And, after making sure the alpha isn’t in hot pursuit, I fling my towel-wrapped perfume bottle in the lake. When it doesn’t immediately sink, I stamp until it disappears under the surface.

Wheeling around, I dash to the other side of the building and back to the dorms, desperate to know who the alpha was sniffing me with such desperate hunger.

Chapter 3

Vincent

I watchthe redhead vanish around the wellness center, clutching a towel that stank of perfume.

Delilah Farrow.

I’d seen her arrive at the school. She’d been nodding thoughtfully as a woman from admissions showed her around. Then, big blue eyes sparkling as she laughed with a blond-haired student who’d seemingly taken her under her wing.

Later, I caught her sneaking around the campus.

She leaves a scent of cherries, praline, and trouble in her wake.

"Was there a reason you pretended to be enamored by the beta posing as an omega?" Xavier steps out from under the trees on my left.

Haven Academy’s newest gardener wears grass-stained black overalls, and his dark brown hair hangs loose around his sun-tanned face.

"I was curious,” I admit.

"About?"

“Her.”

I feel his gaze sharpen. “She’s no omega.”

“I know.”

The overpowering smell coming from the bundle in her arms had confirmed it.

But that doesn’t explain my interest in her.

I’m not sure why she’s at an omega-only academy, but it seems to involve attempting to set the place on fire whenever she thinks no one is watching. “She is a menace.”

“And the reason you had her pinned to the wall like a rutting alpha was…”

She’d felt damned good pressed up against me.

Too good.

Delilah Farrow is slightly unhinged. Maybe even crazy. And beautiful. Distractingly so.

"She is... interesting.” That word doesn’t do justice to what she is.

“She fell over laughing after she set fire to the science building,” Xavier says mildly.

I’d been meeting with Xavier and Levi when we’d watched the newest student sprint out of the building, trip over her own feet, then laughingly pick herself up from the grass and rush toward the dorms, shoulder-length auburn hair whipping around her pale face.

“Did you see that?” my brother had asked me.

“Uh, huh,” I’d responded.

And we’d silently watched her until she’d disappeared.

“She’s too young for you,” Levi says from behind me.

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