by D. B. Webb
Table of Contents
Playlist
Synopsis
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
Chapter 7
Chapter 8
Chapter 9
Chapter 10
Chapter 11
Chapter 12
Chapter 14
Chapter 15
Epilogue
Acknowledgments
Meet D.B. Webb
Loving A Sinner
Copyright © 2018 D.B. Webb
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form, including electronic or mechanical, or by any other means, without written permission from the author. The only time passages may be used is for a teaser, blog post, article, or review, so long as the work isn’t being wrongfully used.
This book is a work of fiction. Characters, names, places, events, and incidents portrayed are solely from the author’s imagination. Any resemblance to actual places, people, events, or other incidents is coincidental or are used fictitiously.
Cover Design: Decadent Designs by Dee
Formatting: Formatting Done Wright
Table of Contents
Playlist
Synopsis
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
Chapter 7
Chapter 8
Chapter 9
Chapter 10
Chapter 11
Chapter 12
Chapter 13
Chapter 14
Chapter 15
Epilogue
Acknowledgments
Meet D.B. Webb
Red by Taylor Swift
Slow Hands by Niall Horan
All I Want by Kodaline
Choke by OneRepublic
Ruin by Shawn Mendes
fOol fOr YoU by Zayne
Words by Sammy Plotkin
Alone With You by Canyon City
It should have been a terrible night. It should have left me gutted and alone. But instead I found him… or he found me, rather. What should have been the worst night of my life led me to a whirlwind love affair. But it was one that had a time limit. I knew it. He knew it. It was devastatingly beautiful.
I thought I’d left the man with amber eyes behind me. He was supposed to be a nice memory to keep for a rainy day. But here he is, handsome as ever, in my present. He’s bad news, but something keeps pulling me back to him like it had all those years ago.
My saving grace. My last supper. My perfect sinner.
They say a heart is not found but won.
The weak and the warrior can bend and fall,
But only the brave get up and try again.
“Learn to drive asshole!”
Those were the first welcoming words I received after arriving in California. My best friend had tried to warn me. He’d told me to get a driver when I arrived, but had I listened? Of course not. I’d grown up in New York City and didn’t think traffic could get any worse than that, but apparently I’d been mistaken.
Grumbling a “Fuck you” under my breath, I flipped off the man in the lifted truck as he zoomed past me. Clearly he was compensating for something. But who was I to judge a man and the size of his… truck.
The traffic was worse than I’d thought it would be, and I had a party to get to. Ryan Patterson was turning twenty, and even though I really had no idea who the hell she was, I’d agreed to be there.
She was my best friend’s girl. They had been dating for five years.
Yes, those two had been dating since they were fifteen. She must’ve had a magical pussy or something, because there was no way I’d have stayed with my high school girlfriend once I left for college. But here they were, five years later. I had known Devlin, my best friend, for two of those five years, and this was going to be the first time I had ever had the pleasure of meeting Ryan.
I wasn’t normally one to go out of my way to be at the birthday party of someone I didn’t even know, but I was promised booze. And if there were free shots, I was there. Besides, when I had asked Devlin if Ryan had hot friends, he had told me there were plenty of girls that would fit my usual type of fuck.
Alcohol? Check. Girls? Check.
So making an appearance the same night I’d arrived in the godforsaken state of California wasn’t the worst way to spend my night… I hoped.
One rental car, two suitcases, and a traffic jam later, I was finally pulling up to an ugly apartment complex that looked like the kind of place that only beach bums would inhabit. Peeling paint, rusty gates, and even a half-clothed guy sleeping under a bush. I was actually pretty shocked the future Mrs. Devlin Lane was living in such a hellhole.
Devlin, much like me, was a billionaire’s son. His family sent him to the best school to get the best education so that he would eventually be the best businessman the family had ever seen. I was the lucky bastard he was forced to room with our Freshman year of college. Together we had plotted our future business together, and we were well on our way to making our families proud.
But this place? This place looked like a dump. I was even leery about leaving my luggage in the trunk when I parked. I couldn’t imagine this Ryan girl was anyone his parents had hoped he would end up with. I know my dad had subtly hinted over the years at what kind of girl I was destined to settle down with. Those kind of women were boring and wore pearls while they sipped on cocktails at dinner parties and gossiped mercilessly about one another. They were exactly the opposite of the kind of girls who were usually in my company.
Luckily for me, I wasn’t even close to settling down.
I liked the girls as much as they liked me. I wasn’t ashamed to admit that. What was wrong with having fun in your twenties?
Abso-fucking-lutely nothing.
As I pushed the unlocked door open, I braced myself for the scene that I was going to enter. The apartment was filled with drunk twenty-somethings. The latest popular song was blasting through the speakers, and I wondered how in the world these girls were getting away with the noise level when they lived in an apartment.
As if to prove my point, a small female began to call “Shots! Shots! Shots!” over the music. She had long dark hair that was curled down her back. Her olive complexion highlighted her beauty, and she had full lips. She was the kind of girl I would have normally considered taking home. And I would have, except for one detail I couldn’t ignore. She was wearing a crown on the top of her head.
Over the past couple years at college, I had learned a lot of things about college girls. One of those things was that college girls loved their birthday. They wore sashes, skimpy clothes, and tiaras like they were the princesses they pretended to be if only for one drunken night. So, if I had to guess, the petite, sexy woman standing at the table where dudebros gathered and took shots was the birthday girl.
I furrowed my brow and looked around for any sign that Devlin was near, but his normally smug face was nowhere to be found. Sighing, I stepped closer to the obnoxious group of partiers, ready to introduce myself to my best friend’s girl.
When she saw me approaching a smile spread across her face, and I wondered if maybe she’d seen a picture of me somehow and knew who I was. But when she waved me over yelling, “Hey, sexy! Come join the fun crowd!” I had a feeling she was 1. very drunk and 2. definitely not the kind of woman I was expecting a Lane to date.
I sauntered over and sat down in an empty chair around the table. It was then that a shot was placed in front of me. It was amber liquid and, if I had to guess, tequila.
I fucking hated tequila.
>
“Shot for the birthday girl!” The pretty brunette smiled, raising her own shot glass. I nodded with a smile and downed the alcohol. It burned on the way down, and I wondered where the hell my best friend was.
“Hey! Where’s your boyfriend?” I asked her over the loud music.
She seemed to appraise me, and I wondered what she thought of me. I had to remind myself that it didn’t matter. She was my best friend’s girlfriend.
“Uh… What has Brody told you? I told him we weren’t exclusive, dammit!”
Brody? Who the fuck was Brody?
“Brody? I meant Devlin!”
Her eyes widened in horror and she made a gagging sound. “Holy shit, gross! No, I’m not dating Devlin. You’re looking for Ryan?”
I briefly wondered why she had such a distaste for Devlin, but I had to admit if I was a woman who looked the way this girl did, I probably wouldn’t be into the guy either. She was fiery and walking sex. Devlin was hair gel and sweater vests.
“Shit, I thought you were Ryan.” I ran my hands over my face, slightly relieved that his girlfriend wasn’t this bombshell. Maybe I did have a chance with her if she wasn’t exclusive with whomever this Brody dude was.
She quirked an amused eyebrow, and I motioned toward the top of her head.
“Because of the birthday crown,” I explained.
Her laugh was throaty, and she threw her head back as if that were the funniest thing she’d ever heard.
“Naw,” she waved me off, “I’m not the birthday girl. Just the princess.” She smirked and took a sip from her red Solo cup. “Ryan is a Debbie Downer. She refused to wear her crown, so I took it upon myself as her best friend.”
Now that sounded like the kind of girl Devlin would date. Someone who would refuse crowns. I held back a smirk at the thought of a girl in a turtleneck walking around this dirty place. Maybe she didn’t live here after all.
“Do you know where they are?” I asked this girl, needing to find my best friend before I offered to take Ryan’s best friend to an empty room.
“Devlin and Ryan? Well, her douche boyfriend has yet to show up, and she’s somewhere around here hiding,” she waved her hand around the room before shrugging. “She hates parties.”
Again, I decided that this Ryan chick sounded much more up Devlin’s alley than the girl I had imagined when I pulled up to this apartment. But it was the fact that my best friend had yet to show his face that had me concerned. Because come to think of it, he hadn’t replied to a single text and hadn’t called me back after I landed.
“Well,” her friend smiled, cutting me from my thoughts, “if you see Ryan, tell her to come out of hiding and actually enjoy herself!”
The girl turned away from me and began to disappear into the crowd, cup held high. She must have forgotten that I clearly didn’t know who Ryan was, but I smiled, shaking my head.
After a few minutes of standing around awkwardly checking my phone to see if Devlin had ever gotten back to me, I headed to the kitchen. If I was expected to get through the night surrounded by strangers without my wingman, I needed something to drink.
The kitchen was significantly quieter, and I realized it must be off limits to the party goers because it was empty and clean. The only person who was there beside me was a pretty blonde sipping from a wine glass. While Ryan’s friend was sexy as hell, this mystery woman was beautiful. She wasn’t like the usual girl I took home. Something about that intrigued me.
I took a moment to take her in and liked what I saw. She wore a tight black dress and her hair was pulled to the side in a loose braid. Her lips were heart-shaped and red with a bright lipstick. She was absolutely gorgeous, but in a natural way.
“You’re not supposed to be in here,” she informed me as her honey-sweet voice broke through my thoughts.
“Sorry… I just thought… Wait, you’re in here?”
She rolled her eyes and took another sip from her wineglass, her red lipstick leaving a print. I couldn’t help but wonder what it would look like if her lips left their print somewhere else.
“Maybe I know the owners of the apartment,” she suggested. Her lips curled into a small smile that didn’t quite reach her eyes. Eyes that were a deep blue. They reminded me of the ocean, the kind that would drown you if you weren’t careful.
“Well, maybe I know the owners too.”
She raised her eyebrows but didn’t say anything to that. Instead she nodded her head toward the fridge, and I opened it. “Take whatever you want. The good stuff’s in there.”
I found beer, the expensive kind, along bottles of white and pink wine. I chose one of the pale ales and shut the fridge.
She stood against the counter across from me, so I leaned against the fridge.
“How do you know the birthday girl?” she asked me. I couldn’t quite place the emotion in her voice, but she sounded genuinely curious and a little amused.
“She’s my best friend’s girlfriend, actually.”
“You’re Dev’s best friend?”
I had never, in my two years of knowing Devlin, ever heard anyone refer to him as Dev, but I stopped my eyes from rolling at the ridiculous nickname and instead nodded. I took the magnetic beer opener from the fridge and popped the lid off of my drink.
“Hmm,” was all she said she continued to sip gingerly from her glass. She continued to watch me from underneath her long eyelashes, and I hoped that meant she was interested.
Taking a sip from my beer, I directed the attention back to her. “How do you know the birthday girl?”
“We’re close,” was her answer. She didn’t offer anything else but instead placed her glass down on the counter and stepped closer to me.
I had been with a lot of women in my time. Many people often referred to me as a playboy, and they wouldn’t be wrong. I liked women, and I liked sex. There was nothing wrong with that, and I wouldn’t apologize for it. But when a woman stalked toward you the way this girl was, you knew she meant business.
I straightened and placed my beer on the counter too. I closed the distance between us and smiled down at her.
“You think you’re smooth, don’t you?” she asked in a low voice. It seeped into my blood system and I was drunk. I knew then that without a doubt I wanted to take this woman home with me. The way her eyebrows rose suggested she thought I was full of shit, down to the way she bit the inside of her cheek as she took me in. I wanted to know every detail of this woman.
Shit, where had that thought come from?
I cleared my throat and smirked, “No, I’m just confident.”
“Ahh… So you think you stand a chance with me?”
I paused, because the truth was that I didn’t know if I did or not. She had completely thrown me off. I tried to think of something, anything, I could say back to this woman who had stolen my words.
“I know I do,” was the less than brilliant response I came up with.
Her eyes narrowed and she appeared to study me from behind her thick eyelashes. She made me nervous. And Jackson Bennett didn’t do nervous. She also made me feel a little guilty for being the cocky bastard I was.
Normally I wasn’t ashamed of being cocky. I knew what I wanted and I went for it. But I didn’t like how her bright eyes watched me carefully. It felt like she could see into the places of my soul that I kept locked away. They were there for a reason, and a pretty girl at a party was not going to be the one to find the key to that shit.
“You haven’t even asked for my name,” she reprimanded me gently.
Shit, I hadn’t. But I couldn’t be blamed for that. All I saw was an incredibly sexy woman, one that piqued my interest. She was clearly someone who didn’t take shit from anyone—not even someone like me, and I liked that.
“You haven’t asked for mine either,” I pointed out.
“I know who you are, Jackson Bennett.”
That caught my attention. I should have seen the red flags, but I ignored them and furrowed my brow.
&nb
sp; “You know my name… what’s yours?”
I could feel the heat of her body, and I wanted to wrap myself in it. She smelled like vanilla and something I couldn’t quite place, but I knew that I wanted it to linger on my sheets once she was gone tomorrow morning.
“I’m Ryan… And where the hell is Devlin?”
Ryan?
She was my best friend’s girl.
And she was pissed.
Do not cry, Ryan. You’re stronger than that.
It was the mantra I was replaying over and over in my head as each hour ticked by. Each time the door swung open, I turned my head to see if it was Devlin walking through the door. Each time, it never was. I didn’t get it. He said he’d be here. I held out hope. He would be here. My boyfriend was never late. He held a strict schedule, one that I’d been accused of forgetting on several occasions. It was unlike him to have not shown up even though the party had started well over an hour ago.
He’d be here.
But deep down I knew I was lying to myself. Something was off.
“Ryan!” came a familiar voice behind me. I turned to find Kayla, my best friend.
Devlin and Kayla had come into my life when we were all babies. From the sandbox to the busy halls of high school to college, we’d always been by each other’s side.
It took every ounce of strength in me to smile and say, “Kay, hi.”
She looked me up and down, admiring her handiwork. I was wearing a fancy party dress— strapless and black, hair pulled to the side, and bright red lipstick. Hell, I had even pulled out the red lipstick. Kayla, my force-to-be-reckoned-with best friend, had swiped it across my lips earlier that night informing me that I was going to be a “sexy motherfucker” tonight.
