NFH 03 Checkmate Read Online Free

pictures of the act.
    On her birthday, he placed all those lovely
pictures into a small box, gift wrapped it, and placed it inside
her locker. Then he leaned against the locker across from hers and
waited with all his friends and half the school for her to open it.
Everyone watched as she opened her locker, waiting for her
reaction. She looked surprised at first to find a present in her
locker and of course that look turned to horror as she flipped
through the pictures. As hard as she tried she just couldn't hide
the little gag sound she made.
    Everyone laughed.
    He remembered standing there, cocky as hell,
waiting for her to finally react like a girl and cry. Instead, she
calmly put the pictures back in the box, gagged louder, and
returned it to her locker. She grabbed the lunch that he and all
his friends spit in, hey it was her birthday after all, and walked
over to him.
    Instead of crying and screaming at him or
even threatening to tell her daddy and her rather large brothers
about what he did, she kneed him in the balls. When he was down on
the ground she forced half her lunch down his throat while his
friends fell over themselves, laughing their asses off, but it had
been worth it. Even the month of detention that followed couldn't
take away the joy he received from that little prank.
    "Mr. O'Neil? Miss James? He's ready for
you."

Chapter 2
     
    Rory sat in the padded chair, trying to hide
her annoyance at being seated next to the bastard. She didn't
understand why Mr. McGill was handling their bids this way. She'd
known a month ago when she placed her bid that Connor was going for
the same job. It hadn't been a big deal then, because they usually
bid for the same job unless one of them was already busy.
    Usually these things were handled more
privately. She couldn't remember ever being in the room with her
competition before when the client announced his decision. The only
thing she could come up with was that the client was hoping to use
their well known animosity towards each other to start a bidding
war right here and now.
    It wasn't going to happen. As much as she
would love to get her hands on Strawberry Fields Manor, she wasn't
about to get into another embarrassing public confrontation with
Connor. The one they had last month at the strawberry festival
still made her cringe.
    Things probably wouldn't have gotten out of
hand if their dates had just stayed out of it, but once Mary Lee
decided to get in her face and Jeff took it as his cue to get into
Connor's face, things kind of went downhill quickly. Okay, so she
may have started trouble when she dumped the bucket of juicy mashed
strawberries over Mary Lee's head, but in her defense, she could
only hear '”stupid bitch” so many times before she snapped.
    She still didn't understand why the festival
committee banned them for a year, especially after they paid for
all those strawberries they'd wrecked. At least she was still
allowed to have a booth at next year's festival for her business,
Shadow Construction. Granted, one of her brothers would have to man
the table and that probably wouldn't go too well, but at least her
company would be represented during the town's biggest event.
    Connor shifted in his chair next to hers,
probably just as nervous as she was. A thought occurred to her,
annoying the hell out of her. If he actually went along with this
and tried to outbid her, she was going pants his ass on the way
out.
    Her lips twitched at the memory of the last
time she'd done that. Granted, it had been a week after he did it
to her, but at least she hadn't been wearing pink boxers with
hearts on them at a bar like a certain someone. It really had
brought such joy to her and her brothers' lives as they watched
guys hit on Connor all night and send drinks his way. She'd been
sixty percent sure that he was going to kill her with his bare
hands that night.
    "As you both know," Mr. McGill started,
bringing her attention back to him, "we've had problems