Page 8 of Sin (Salvation #1)
Cassidy
My alarm blares, and I hit snooze, hoping the five more minutes of sleep it buys me will somehow make up for my mostly sleepless night. I played and replayed my interaction with Sin until my exhausted brain finally gave up obsessing and let me fall asleep about an hour and a half ago.
The alarm sounds again, and I finally get up and go to the mirror, only to see bleary eyes looking back at me.
Not the best way to start the first day of my new Sinclair-Brandt-free life.
Determined to make a better show of it, I jump in the shower under scalding hot water and recite all the self-help mantras I can think of.
Once dressed and ready for school, I realize I have a new problem that, for once, doesn’t involve my stepbrother.
According to Gideon, I have a meeting with Thurston’s registrar’s office to sign up for classes, and I have no way of getting there.
I know Gideon and my mother are already in the city and took their chauffeur with them. I don’t have a car, and even if I borrowed one of the cars in the garage, I don’t know how to drive.
Sin is the only person here who would be able to drive me.
I’d rather walk—and I would—but the compound is in a small town outside of Nashville, and Thurston is in the middle of the city, over a thirty-minute drive away.
I could call a rideshare service, but even if I could get one to come all the way out here, it would overdraw my bank account, leaving me no way to get back home.
Refusing to give up easily, I decide I’ll walk to the highway and learn a new life skill—hitchhiking. That decided, I grab my backpack and head toward the door.
Sin is nowhere around, and I tell myself the sinking feeling in my stomach is relief that there won’t be another run-in with him today.
“Need a ride?” Sin asks, standing in the foyer looking annoyingly good in faded jeans and a gray henley, a pair of car keys dangling from his hand. He wasn’t up all night obsessing over our little run-in.
“Not from you,” I say, walking past him.
“You can’t drive, so how, exactly, are you planning on getting to Thurston?” he looks at his trendy, expensive watch, “in a little more than an hour?” he asks with a truly annoying amount of cockiness.
“I’m hitchhiking,” I tell him.
My body is met with hard muscle as Sin blocks the door. “There’s no fucking way you’re hitchhiking,” he says, his voice tight as a steel wire as his eyes blaze down on me. “I’ll drive you.”
“No.” I duck down and slip underneath his arms in a sneaky move I’m pretty proud of.
“Then at least let me call you a ride-share,” he offers.
“No,” I repeat. “You may not have believed me yesterday when I told you I didn’t want anything from you, but I meant it. Not your money, not a ride. Nothing.” I start marching down the driveway that will lead me past the private gate and eventually to the highway.
“You hitchhiking is not going to happen,” Sin warns as he follows me, but then his phone dings with a text message and he stops to answer it.
Good . I’m sure whoever is on the other side of that text message will distract him from the cat-and-mouse games he likes to play with me when he’s bored and has nothing better to do.
I’m about a mile past the gate when I hear footsteps as Sin runs up behind me. “You aren’t going to stop me,” I tell him as he comes up beside me and slows down to match my stride.
“Fine. I won’t stop you,” he says. “I’ll join you.”
“What?” I stop in my tracks. “ You are going to hitchhike?”
He shrugs. “I’m not going to let you do it on your own.”
I start laughing. “You’ve never hitchhiked in your life.”
He arches an eyebrow at me. “And you have?”
My laughter sputters out. “Well, no,” I admit, “but I’m poorer and so I’m bound to be better at it than you.”
“Really?” he says, his eyes sparking with a challenge. He tilts his head. “Care to make a bet? When we get to the highway, the first one of us to get a ride wins.”
I roll my eyes. “If I had money to bet, I wouldn’t be hoofing it to the highway to hitchhike to school right now.”
He gives me a look that sends heat skittering through my entire body. “Ahh, Cassidy,” he chucks me on the chin, “I never said I wanted to bet with money.”
A blush flames my cheeks and as sudden as a strike of lightning, I swear I see a smoldering heat in his eyes. Just like that, though, it’s gone and Sin is back to the wily negotiator, leaving me to wonder if it was just my imagination.
“If I win, which I’m warning you, I will,” he says cockily, “you have to agree never to try to hitchhike again, and to let me take you to and from school for the semester.”
“How would that be a win for you? You’d be stuck being my personal taxi driver for three months.”
“I have to drive to Thurston almost every day anyway, and I’ll know you won’t be sneaking off to get in strange cars with serial killers.”
“And when I win?” I counter.
“Then you pick a car in my collection and it’s yours. I’ll even teach you to drive it.”
“I told you. I don’t want anything from you.”
“I wouldn’t be giving you anything. If I lose, which, again, is doubtful, the car would be yours fair and square from winning the bet.” He gives me a used-car-salesman smile. “But if you don’t think you can win?—”
“Fine,” I say, realizing too late that Sin has caught me up in one of his games. Despite the knowledge, I quicken my stride, determined to beat him to the highway and win just to spite the cocky bastard.
We reach the highway and take turns trying our luck.
I go first with several cars passing me by and leaving me choking in their clouds of dust. After making sure I use my inhaler, Sin calls out that it’s his turn, sticks out his thumb, and almost immediately, a car full of girls in a convertible pulls over for him.
He charms them into offering him a ride, but since there isn’t room for me in the crowded car, he waves them away.
Seriously rethinking the brilliance of the whole hitchhiking plan, I try again, wondering if I’ll ever make it to Thurston for my appointment. Less than a minute later, I whoop in victory when a Land Rover pulls over in front of me with my extended thumb.
“You want the Audi or the McLaren?” Sin calls out in a suspiciously gracious show of defeat.
The window rolls down to reveal the handsome face of Mercer Saint. “Wanna ride?”
“You cheated,” I point an accusing finger at Sin, who’s wearing a shit-eating grin as he opens the Land Rover’s back passenger door and motions for me to climb in. “You set this whole thing up to lose.”
“That’s never how I play the game, sweetheart,” he says, leaning through the vehicle’s open window and pulling my seatbelt tight across my body and buckling it. “It’s creating stakes so that no matter if I win or lose, I get what I want.”
“And just what did you want in all this, Sin?” I ask bitterly. “For you to show me that no matter what I want, you’re in control?”
“For you not to fucking hitchhike,” he growls back. “To make sure you’re safe and no one ever hurts you.”
I sit back in my seat, shocked by his protectiveness. Trying to figure out how this Sin sums up with the one who offered me a huge amount of money to chase me out of his life.
Before I can start obsessing over it, Sin’s mood shifts, and he focuses on Mercer, who has been watching us from the driver’s seat like we were an afternoon matinee. “Dude, thanks for the ride and all, but turn that shit off,” he says, referring to the laid-back emo music playing.
“Don’t yuck my yum,” Mercer shoots back while turning the music up louder. “You should try listening to it. It’s called a feeling purge, and since you’re the most emotionally constipated guy I know, it might loosen you up a bit.”
Sin flips him off and jumps into the front seat. My fingernails grip the leather upholstery as I try to prepare myself for the sight of two lovers greeting each other, but instead of a torrid kiss, they start wrestling over the music until they reach a compromise and start playing Jonah Reeves.
“What’s up?” Mercer makes eye contact with me in his rear-view mirror.
I nod, unable to offer any more enthusiasm at seeing him when a replay of the shared moans between him and Sin are replaying in my head louder than the music blasting through the Land Rover’s speakers.
Reading my greeting for what it is, Mercer smirks at me. “One of these days you’re gonna like me, little brother,” he says with an annoying wink.
“Stepbrother,” Sin and I correct him at the same time.
“Whatever.” Mercer shakes his head at us. “I don’t mind playing chauffeur for you this morning,” he says as he maneuvers around a step van going slow. “But y’all are gonna have to find your own way home after classes. I have to have dinner with the asshole tonight.”
A look of happy surprise comes over Sin’s face. “Devlin is in town?”
Exasperation takes over Mercer’s face. “I don’t know why you say it like it’s a good thing.”
“Devlin is cool.”
“You know he hates you, right? Like, can’t stand your guts, gets a face tick every time I bring up your name.”
“That’s just because of the time he walked in on us in the hot tub.” He rubs his jaw as if in deep contemplation. “Looking back, I probably shouldn’t have invited him to join in.”
Mercer glares at him. “Ya think?”
“Live and learn.” Sin shrugs. “My point is that he was just being your protective stand-in daddy by throwing me out. Shame though, Devlin is a snack. That would have been hot.”
My nails dig back into the upholstery at Sin’s remarks.
Mercer doesn’t seem to like them either—for what I suspect to be totally different reasons.
His face turns red. “It wouldn’t have been hot,” he insists, his hands clutching at the steering wheel.
“And he was never my ‘daddy.’ I was his legal ward for less than six months.”
“Exactly,” Sin agrees. “Devlin hasn’t been responsible for your legal and moral well-being for, like, two-plus years now. It’s time he got to know me now that he’s not protecting you from me like a rabid guard dog. He’s too fucking cool not to want to call me friend.”
“Cool? That uptight, domineering asshole?”
Sin continues to listen to Mercer’s rant, but steals a look back at me and silently mouths “daddy issues” with an amused glint in his eyes.
I look between them as they spar back and forth, wondering just what exactly the dynamic of their relationship is.
They obviously hook up, but I don’t think they’re exclusive.
Mercer’s phone keeps going off with new alerts from hook-up apps, and earlier, Sin gave at least two of those girls who stopped to give him a ride his socials and told them to hit him up.
Maybe it’s because I’m inexperienced, but the idea of sharing someone makes me sick.
Someone? My inner voice taunts me. My eyes fixate on Sin.
To touch him, to let my hands travel over his golden-tanned body, exploring every inch of him and charting it as my own.
The idea of letting someone else touch him after that would drive me insane.
“Cassidy.” I startle, Sin’s voice pulling me out of my fantasy. “Wh-What’s wrong?” I look up to find Sin and Mercer both staring at me. I get the feeling that Sin might have called my name multiple times.
“Nothing’s wrong. We’re at Thurston.” I look out the window to see that Mercer has pulled up to the admin building and is waiting for me to get out. “You’ve got about five minutes to book it to the top floor to make your meeting.”
“Sorry,” I tell them, gathering up my backpack and jumping out of the Land Rover.
“Cassidy,” Sin calls out. I walk to the passenger’s side window. He grabs me by the shirt and pulls me toward him. “I need you to listen to me.”
“Sin,” I try pulling out of his grip but he has too strong of a hold. “I’m gonna be late.”
“I don’t give a shit if you’re late for your meeting. I’ll make you stand here all day if I have to.”
“He will,” Mercer backs him up. “He’s an asshole like that.”
“What do you want?” I huff out.
“Text me after you get your schedule. And after your last class, you’re going to meet me at the Student Union.” His grip tightens. “I swear to God, if I find out your stubborn ass tried to hitchhike home, you’re gonna wish a serial killer got a hold of you instead of me. Got that?”
“Got it,” I mutter, knowing I’ll never make it to the registrar’s office if I don’t agree.
“I like it when you follow my orders,” Sin says, his voice so low and rough that I feel it almost like a touch.
Suddenly, I’m free and the Land Rover is pulling away from the curb, leaving me feeling lost in the absence of his strong presence.