OTHER TITLES BY SARIAH WILSON
The Royals of Monterra
Royal Date
Royal Chase
Royal Games
Royal Design
#Lovestruck
#Starstruck
The Ugly Stepsister Series
The Ugly Stepsister Strikes Back
Stand-Alone Novels
Once Upon a Time Travel
This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, organizations, places, events, and incidents are either products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, or actual events is purely coincidental.
No part of this work may be reproduced, or stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without written permission of the publisher.
Published by Kindle Press, Seattle, 2017
Amazon, the Amazon logo, Kindle Scout, and Kindle Press are trademarks of Amazon.com, Inc., or its affiliates.
For Kaleb—I love you, I miss you,
and I’m so proud of you.
CONTENTS
CHAPTER ONE
CHAPTER TWO
CHAPTER THREE
CHAPTER FOUR
CHAPTER FIVE
CHAPTER SIX
CHAPTER SEVEN
CHAPTER EIGHT
CHAPTER NINE
CHAPTER TEN
CHAPTER ELEVEN
CHAPTER TWELVE
CHAPTER THIRTEEN
CHAPTER FOURTEEN
CHAPTER FIFTEEN
CHAPTER SIXTEEN
CHAPTER SEVENTEEN
CHAPTER EIGHTEEN
CHAPTER NINETEEN
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
CHAPTER ONE
“Where are we?” I whispered as my boyfriend, Jake Kingston, came to a stop and turned his car’s engine off. He’d mentioned his plan to drive us somewhere in downtown Los Angeles. At night. And there were no functioning streetlights, trash was everywhere, and crumbling walls covered in graffiti. This area did not look particularly safe. Yes, thanks to my rich, famous artist father, my idea of safe consisted of valets and state-of-the-art home security systems, but this really was scary.
“I’ll show you.” Then he opened his door and got out.
What? Seriously? He’d brought me to the corner of Homicide and Assault, and he was intentionally leaving our bubble of safety?
Then he came around and tried to open my door. I locked it. He raised one eyebrow at me and pushed his key fob, making the silver lock pop back up. I pushed it down. Did he really expect me to join him in this madness?
“Tills, you’re being ridiculous. There’s nothing to be afraid of. Open the door.”
Ugh. He had to go and call me Tills. Only Jake called me that—short for Tilly, which was short for my actual name, Matilda. Everybody at school called me Mattie, my family called me Tilly, and Jake called me Tills. Rhymed with chills. And thrills. Both of which he gave me on a regular basis. Him using his pet nickname for me was kind of my kryptonite.
Which he totally knew.
Glaring, I undid my seat belt and let him open my door. His gentlemanlike behavior also fell in my kryptonite category. (Which included, among other things, every time he would touch or kiss me. Which happened frequently.)
As if to prove my point, Jake took me by the hand to help me onto the sidewalk and then pressed a soft and sweet kiss against my right temple. He shut the car door, and it seriously sounded like a prison cell clanking shut.
He started walking down the street, and I clung to his hand. His grip tightened in response, and he gave me one of his movie star smiles that made my knees feel hollow. There was a man across the street from us muttering to himself and pushing a shopping cart with all his belongings. Honestly, homeless people scared me, too. Probably because I hadn’t had much exposure to them. I hated to think that I might be hobo-phobic.
But I had no problem admitting that I was definitely criminal-phobic, and I was worried this area might have more than its fair share of those. Jake would be totally fine—he was big and athletic. And if he couldn’t fight his way out of something, he’d be able to charm just about anybody into submission.
Me, on the other hand? I’d be screwed.
“Here we are.” We stopped in front of an old, abandoned building covered in spray paint and littered with broken windows. It gave me the bad kind of chills. “Do you recognize this place?” he asked.
“Yep. It’s where we’re going to get murdered.”
He shook his head and let out a chuckle, slipping a key from his pocket.
“How do you have a key?” I asked.
“My dad knows a guy.” Of course his dad knew a guy. “Come on.”
We walked up some stone steps, and Jake unlocked one of the massive front doors. It literally creaked, sending shivers up and down my back. “This is the part of the horror movie where the audience would be screaming at us to not go into that spooky building.”
“You know I’d never let anything happen to you.”
It was a good thing he was so gorgeous. It was the only reason I was following him inside.
That, and I happened to be head over heels in love with him.
Jake closed the creaky door behind us once we were in, making sure to lock it. Trapping us. Then he turned on the flashlight app on his phone. We could see only a couple of feet ahead of us; everything else was plunged into total blackness. And it smelled terrible. Like animals and trash and something else I did not want to identify. I put my free hand over my nose and mouth.
“This is the Alban Havelock Hotel. Back in the day, this was the place to be seen.” His words echoed eerily around us. The ceilings must have been high. “All the big movie stars of the 1920s and 1930s came here to dance and drink illegally and party until dawn.”
“Are they still here? Haunting the place?”
That made him laugh, but I still felt nauseous and light-headed. What if that was a sign I was being possessed and didn’t know it?
It surprised me that I was such a total and complete wuss. I’d actually considered myself somewhat tough before the Hotel of Horrors.
If this was how he was planning on doing his promposal to me, he’d made a bad decision. I might even make him wait a long time before I answered, given how much he was freaking me out with this place. Obviously I would say yes, because, hello—most important moment in a teenage girl’s life, and as I mentioned, I happened to love the guy—but he deserved to sweat it out a little.
It was weird to think that not too long ago I would have assumed that Jake had lured me here so that his friends (and my nemeses) Scott and Mercedes could play some kind of Carrie-type prank on me. But now Jake just made me feel safe. Or he did until he brought me to the creepy death-murder-kill building.
I heard a distant noise and couldn’t help myself. I shrieked and threw myself into Jake’s arms. Not as a ploy, but because I was legit terrified.
“That was outside, not inside,” he said, and I could tell he was trying not to laugh.
“Are you sure we’re alone?” I whispered, not wanting to raise my voice too much and offend the ghosts.
“Yes, the hotel is locked up nice and tight. We’re fine.”
Yeah, because locks so often stopped ax murderers.
“In fact,” he said, putting his lips near mine, “we’re so alone we could make out as much as we wanted.”
It was a testament to how panicked I felt that I wasn’t even a little bit tempted to kiss my boyfriend. Because if my superpower was my amazin
g poker face, all Jake’s superpowers were centrally located in his lips. That boy could seriously kiss.
Or me not wanting to make out could have been a sign of the impending apocalypse. Which would obviously begin in this decrepit hotel. “No thanks.”
And again he laughed, and despite how much I adored the sound of his laughter, it kind of made me want to hit him.
“This way,” he told me.
We walked in silence, my ears straining to catch every little sound, real and imagined. I wondered if I should text my final will and testament to my sister, Ella. I would leave her my John Hughes DVDs, and my dad could have my manga drawings. My mother could keep her bitter disappointment in me as my last legacy.
Jake finally came to a stop, and all I could see were some wooden floors.
“You know how I’ve been trying to figure out what I want to do with my life since I’m not going to be a lawyer?”
I nodded, even though he couldn’t see me. “Yeah.”
“This is what I want to do.”
“Hang out in old creepy buildings?” The hair on my forearms stood straight up. Oh Buddha, he was going to tell me he decided to become a serial killer, and this would be his lair.
“No. Let me show you. Stay here.”
Then . . . he let go of my hand! I could see him walking because of his phone, but icy fear wrapped around my heart, making me shake. If any scary dolls or guys with chainsaws jumped out at me, Jake was on his own.
“Why did you leave me alone in the dark?” I asked. Well, whimpered.
“Don’t think of the dark as scary. Think of it as romantic.”
“It’s not romantic,” I informed him through clenched teeth.
“I think it’s romantic.”
“Ha. Says the guy who yelled ‘finally’ at the end of Dirty Dancing.”
He put his phone on the floor, and a moment later, light exploded, filling the entire room. I had to close my eyes for a second. When I could open them again, I saw large floodlights in the corners of this massive, beautiful room. A ballroom? It was in the process of being cleaned up. There were large metal scaffolding structures up against the walls and canvas tarps scattered around the wooden floor. The murals on the ceiling were gorgeous. Somebody extremely talented had painted those royalty-themed frescoes. I considered climbing the scaffolding to get a closer look.
Jake came and stood in front of me. “My dad has a client, a guy named John Biltmore, who has started restoring this hotel to its glory days. He came over for dinner the other night, and we got to talking, and I realized that this is what I want to do. I want to be an architect. I want to make buildings like this one.”
Whew. That was definitely better than planning on becoming a serial killer. I thought of all the elaborate Lego projects in Jake’s room, and it made perfect sense that he’d want to be an architect. “That’s great!” I told him weakly, finally feeling the blood returning to my fingertips and toes.
“Let me show you.” He grabbed my hand, lacing our fingers together in the way that always felt completely right, like our hands had been made for just this purpose. “Now today’s ballrooms in hotels are usually more generic so they can be used by different people in different ways. But this room? Look at the character. How unique it is. The man who started the hotel was from Australia. He made a fortune from gold mines and apparently loved movies. He came to the United States to live with the movie stars, and he wanted to create a place they would want to hang out at. Only the best would do. He ended up hiring Gianni Battista to design it. He was one of the world’s leading and most well-known architects at the time.”
I watched him as he went on, saying something about Spanish and Italian Renaissance influences, gilded arches, and concave-domed ceilings, and I loved how passionate he was about this. How caught up he was in explaining it to me.
When he ran out of steam, I told him, “This is definitely what you should major in when we get to college.”
“I knew you’d get it.” He wrapped his arms around me, hugging me close, and then swung me around in a circle. I couldn’t help but giggle. In a very undignified fashion.
He put me back on the ground and held me close. This had to be it. The moment. My heart thumped as he reached into his pocket and pulled out . . . his cell phone? A slow song by my favorite Irish band filled the room. “Dance with me.”
Jake might have hated romantic movies, but he sure did know how to be a romantic boyfriend. Maybe this was how he was leading up to it. We swayed to the music, one of his hands slowly traveling up and down my back as he held me close. I again had shivers, just not of the terrified variety. But he didn’t say anything. Or ask anything. We just danced.
Which normally would be more than enough. But I was getting impatient, and we were running out of time. “Was there anything else? Like maybe something you wanted to ask me?”
He pulled his head back and gave me a confused look. A sincerely confused look. “Like what?”
Before I could explain what I thought all this had been leading up to, his phone rang, interrupting our song. He looked at the number, and a shadow crossed his face. “Give me a sec, Tills.”
Strange. He walked across the room, out of earshot. Jake had never done that before. It felt like he was hiding something from me.
Now that shuddery “somebody just walked across my grave” feeling had nothing to do with the run-down building and everything to do with how weird he was acting. He was obviously upset. What was going on?
He hung up his phone. And stood there for a second, sporting a serious frown.
When he came back over to me, I asked, “Is everything okay?”
“Yeah, fine.” He sounded distracted, like he wasn’t really paying attention to me. “I—we have to go. I have to get this key back to my father.”
“Do you want to talk about your phone call? Who was that?”
“I said everything’s fine, Tills. Just leave it alone,” he snapped at me. Actually snapped at me. The last time he’d been upset with me was before we started dating. I didn’t know whether to be hurt or angry.
Jake unplugged the lights and then led me back through the still ghoulish hotel. Only I was so focused on what had just occurred that I forgot to be scared. Because something important had happened with that call. Something that had seriously rattled him.
Something he wouldn’t tell me about.
Did he not trust me by now? Didn’t he know I would do anything to help him? Why would he shut me out?
And as we got back into his car and drove off, I realized that of all the bad things that had just happened—there was one thing that was the absolute worst.
Jake still hadn’t asked me to prom.
CHAPTER TWO
“He really didn’t ask you?” Ella sounded totally surprised. “When he said he wanted to show you something, I just thought . . .” Her voice trailed off as we walked across the school parking lot. Jake had texted that he couldn’t pick me up that morning, so Ella and I had driven in together.
“He really didn’t.” In any other school, it would be understood that Jake and I would go to prom together. But not at Malibu Prep. Those elaborate promposals all over the internet? Where guys would go to expensive and creative extremes to ask a girl to prom? That style of asking had started at our school decades ago. They caught on when social media allowed us to share them with the world. While some high schools had begun to ban them for being too distracting, ours went all in on the crazy and let kids take asking to dizzying levels.
And it was highly competitive to see who pulled off the best promposal, the one that would go viral and give the guy bragging rights for the rest of the year. Which meant that some boys asked early, hitting it hard out of the gate. Wanting to be first in case someone else had a similar kind of promposal planned. Others didn’t much care, putting in minimal effort and resorting to asking on the lid of various baked goods (“It’d be SWEET if you went to prom with me” or “Be a SMART COOKIE and go wit
h me to prom!” or “DONUT miss the chance to be my prom date!”).
Then there were the ones who waited until almost the last minute, watching their competition closely, hoping their creative, over-the-top ask would blow up any that had come before. Sometimes it reminded me of a 1980s arm race.
My hope was that Jake was waiting because he instinctively understood how important this was to me and wanted to get it just right. That he got that our prom would be the pinnacle of my student body presidential career and the highlight of my high school experience (if my John Hughes movies were to be believed). That he would make a big, showy gesture guaranteed to melt my heart, and then we would have the most incredible night together at the dance.
“Has Trent asked you yet?” Things didn’t seem to be too great between my friend and my sister. Ella hadn’t talked very much about it, but it was just the feeling I got from her whenever I brought him up.
“Don’t you think I would have told you every detail if he had?”
True. Ella would probably tell the whole school over the morning announcements. Or hire one of those skywriters to announce it to the entire town.
Much like the noisy airplane currently overhead that had just written out, Vanessa? Prom?
Distracted, I wasn’t watching where I was going and nearly tripped over Randall Hayworth. He was covered in some kind of blood and lying on the asphalt surrounded by a white chalk outline. He had a bouquet of sunflowers in one hand and a sign in the other that read, “Allison, I am dying to go to prom with you!”
“You’re going to get run over and actually need that chalk outline!” I told him, but he didn’t even acknowledge me as I stepped over his body. “Does he really think that’s romantic? No little girl dreams of the day a boy asks her to prom utilizing pig’s blood.” In fact, based on the horror movies Ella forced me to watch, pig’s blood and proms did not go well together.
Ella shrugged. “It’s not even original. Don’t you remember when his older brother did the same thing a couple of years ago? Only he staged it in his bedroom along with fake cops, crime scene tape, blood everywhere, and his mom sobbing. He nearly gave his girlfriend a heart attack.”
The Promposal (The Ugly Stepsister Series Book 2) Page 1
