Total pages in book: 138
Estimated words: 126823 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 634(@200wpm)___ 507(@250wpm)___ 423(@300wpm)
Estimated words: 126823 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 634(@200wpm)___ 507(@250wpm)___ 423(@300wpm)
“I don’t understand Sean at all. If he really has a thing for me, why would he act so obnoxious? Does he think that’s going to win him points? If he ever once had the chance to date me, it ended the first time he threw a fit in my café insisting my food was bad.” Shabina lifted her chin. “My food is never bad. Had he said he didn’t like what he’d ordered and asked if he could try something else, I would have gladly switched the items for him.”
Harlow leaned against her car. “You know what I think? Bale calls the shots and the others dance to his tune. I think he told them to start harassing you. Bale’s been the ringleader since they were kids, so they follow his lead blindly.”
“Like sheep. Great. Our Fish and Wildlife ranger is a sheep.” Shabina rubbed her temples. Her headaches were coming back in force. She used to get them all the time, but after finding her way to Knightly, the headaches had slowly begun to disappear. “Worse, Sean believes he’s a predator.”
“Well, we know he’s not,” Harlow said staunchly. “If he’s so ridiculous as to be part of a scheme to try to frame you for murder, we definitely can outsmart him, and he’ll get everything he has coming to him.”
Shabina hoped she was right. “What do you think about Jason? He’s always with them, or at least he used to be.”
Harlow sighed. “I honestly don’t know what to make of him. He went to college with them and came here and fell in love with the Sierra. My impression is he doesn’t like the things they do. If you notice, he rarely says anything when the others are harassing women. Sometimes he just walks off. More and more it seems as if he is separating himself from them.”
“Were you surprised when Bruce offered him a job at the Brewery? Because it shocked me. And I think it shocked Bale.” Shabina rubbed at her thigh. The dogs pushed closer to her, another sign that they knew she was becoming more anxious.
“I think everyone was shocked, especially Zahra. In the end, that, more than anything else, really made up her mind that she wouldn’t wait around for Bruce to man up and ask her out. If he could become close to a man who surrounded himself with the kinds of friends Jason had, the ones who taunted her and harassed her, she wasn’t going to wait. You know Zahra, she just fades away.”
“Bruce appears to be still pining.”
“That’s on him. If he’s too dense to realize what he’s done and that he’s lost his opportunity, then it’s too bad for him,” Harlow reiterated. “At least Jason isn’t hanging around Bale so much, taking his command as absolute law like Edward and Sean.”
“No, he doesn’t seem to be.”
Shabina knew Bale wasn’t giving up his anger and whatever revenge he had planned, whether it had anything to do with the murder or not. She’d felt his eyes on her several times, and when she’d looked his way, he’d been looking at her with open malice.
“Why do you suppose men despise me so much?” She intended to ask Rainier the same question the next time he turned up. “What is it about me that causes them to hate me so much that they’re willing to do such despicable things, Harlow?”
She’d asked the question of herself so many times, she didn’t even feel sorry for herself the way she had when she was a teenager. Scorpion had reminded her a hundred times a day every torture, every death was on her head. She didn’t understand why. When she asked, he beat her and told her she should know. She should be able to figure it out if she had a brain. She knew she was intelligent, but logically she couldn’t put it together. Why his cabinet despised her. Why he did. Why most of the mercenaries had. Now Bale and his friends.
“You have to know it isn’t you, Shabina,” Harlow said. “How could it be? There isn’t anything you do or say that could possibly make anyone dislike you. You’re friendly to everyone.”
That was the standard reaction. It didn’t explain anything. Her therapist had given her that same exact answer. Raine had given it to her. It was always the same, and yet, men seemed to be driven to commit heinous acts because of her. At least, they claimed it was because of her.
Her head began to feel as if it were being crushed in a vise. She had to stop thinking so much about Scorpion, or she would be too sick to drive home.
“Last night I had such fun with all of you, and I felt that I could get through the next few days, that maybe all of us together could figure out what was really happening. That we could make sense of it. But just a few hours in the company of Bale and the men from Paris and the one from Belgium, and I’m a mess all over again. I’m so paranoid I suspect everyone.”