Page 3 of Resurrecting the Enemy
I let go of her neck and took a step back. While the camera looked expensive, it wasn’t very big. However, I knew I had to give her some room to remove it from around her neck.
Big fucking mistake.
As soon as I had given her some breathing room, she took off like a rabbit. My stupid ass barely got to her in time as we hit the clearing where a car, presumably hers, was parked on a dirt trail. She must have driven up after we’d all arrived because we had scanned the entire woodlands before we had brought Childress out here.
I had her slammed up against the driver’s side door, and, boy, was I fucking pissed. At my own stupidity? Yeah. But I was still pissed.
“Let me go!” she yelled, and I immediately cupped one of my hands over her mouth as my body pinned her to the car, my left hand around her neck again.
“Scream again and see what happens,” I threatened. “If you want to bring people running, you better believe I’ll give them a story to take back with them.” Her blue eyes widened again, but I wasn’t falling for it. This girl had a set of balls on her, and her damsel in distress cover was already blown.
Pressing my body against her tightly enough to make her wince, I removed my hands from her mouth and neck and pulled the camera off her. This time, her face looked panicked, and that countered her claims that she hadn’t seen anything.
I smirked. “I wonder what I’m going to find on here.”
“Give that back to me,” she hissed. “It’s not yours. That’s…that’s invasion of privacy.”
I snorted. I had been five seconds away from killing Ashton Childress, with a clear fucking conscience, and she thought violating her privacy was going to keep me up at night?
“Tell me your name,” I demanded again, this time her precious camera dangling from my fingers.
Her jaw popped, and the snarl sounded like it was coming from her soul. “Lake,” she bit out.
She was pissing me off. “You got a last name to go with that?”
“Lake Warren,” she answered in that same resentful tone.
“I want it all,” I informed her mercilessly.
“Why?” she stubbornly asked. “What does the rest of it matter?”
I stared down at the gorgeous creature, who was fuming with hate and rebellion, and my name, alone, wasn’t doing enough to instill the kind of fear I needed from her. It wasn’t that I was worried about what she knew, so much as I didn’t like how she wasn’t cowering. Again, my parents would get me out of any trouble I ever found myself in, so this was more than that.
I cocked my head. “How badly do you want this camera back?”
Chapter 2
Lake~
My heart sank.
That camera was my entire life as sad as that might sound. I had saved my allowance money for three years to buy that camera and all its components. All my life, I’ve loved capturing moments, so they couldn’t disappear, and it’s what I wanted to do with my life. I wanted to be a freelance photographer, and that camera was the start of making that happen. The pictures on it didn’t matter because the camera was already set to automatically upload the pictures to a backup cloud, but I couldn’t replace the camera. But I also knew who he was, and Ramsey Reed Jr. knowing someone’s personal business was not anything a person needed in their life.
Least of all, me.
But what choice did I have?
There were no pictures of him and his friends on the reel because I wasn’t stupid or suicidal. When I had walked close enough to make out the clearing, the moonlight had been bright enough to make sense of the scene happening before me, and there was no way I was going to get caught up in whatever had been going down. But looking into those storming whiskey-colored eyes, I guess the joke was on me.
“Spill it,” he demanded when I remained silent.
I knew what he was asking, and I had to weigh that against the importance of my camera. But then, I almost laughed when I reminded myself that he was Ramsey fucking Reed Jr. Whatever I refused to tell him, he could find out on his own. It was no secret in Sands Cove, whether it be in town or not, that his father controlled the entire town and everyone in it. Ramsey Reed Sr. didn’t have a heart, and I imagined neither did his son, if this exchange was any indication.
“I’m eighteen, but still go to SC High as a senior,” I bit out, and even his prestigious Windsor-pampered ass knew that meant Sands Cove High, our town’s only public high school. See, while Sands Cove was made up of mostly the obnoxiously wealthy, regular common folk still had to work the town, and their children-that’d be me-had to go to school somewhere. So, that left one public elementary school, one public middle school, and one public high school.
“And?”
“My father’s an IT tech, and my mother is the manager of the pet store in town.” Every piece of myself that I was giving him felt like a punch in the chest. But, again, I couldn’t lose that camera over things he could learn from his father, anyway. “No siblings.”
