Page 13 of Sin

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 thedriveway 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. “Youare 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.”

---