Ruined Sinner by Becker Gray
Chapter One
Aurora
The summer before junior year
Iloved parties.
I loved the big ones, the small ones, and the ones in between.
I loved parties at people’s houses, on their yachts, and in their beachy vacation homes. I loved formal dances, and I loved bonfires in the woods, and I loved getting fries and milkshakes at the all-night diner with a big group of people.
I loved parties with strangers, and I loved parties with friends. I loved picking the perfect outfit, the best lipstick, and the right playlist to listen to on the way there.
I lived for parties.
Which was why I was in a good mood, even though Serafina van Doren, my best friend and heiress to the van Doren shipping empire, was giving me a job to do at her first ever garden party for her friends.
“I didn’t expect the invitation to go viral,” Sera muttered as I zipped her into the strapless Monique Lhuillier dress she was wearing today. The blush-colored tulle and silk set off her deep brown skin perfectly, picking up the jeweled undertones in her complexion. She wore a delicate gold necklace around her neck, drop earrings, and had her hair in big curls that spilled over her bare shoulders. “So I need you to be Hostess Part Two. My eyes and ears. Tell me if we’re running low on things or if the vibe is getting weird or if the Hellfire boys are causing trouble.”
I thought of the exclusive, all-male club at Pembroke Preparatory Academy, and then I rolled my eyes. “They always cause trouble.”
That part was true. If there was trouble somewhere, likely you’d find one of them at the center.
Sera looked at me in the mirror. “That’s why I need you to be my eyes and ears! If Rhys makes somebody cry or Phin flirts his way into my cousin’s pants…”
I shoved aside my sudden and immediate dislike of Sera’s cousin at the thought of her being the object of Phin’s interest. No one else knew that I’d nursed a crush on Phineas Yates for the last year. “Phin is a flirt,” I agreed, trying to sound casual. I hooked the dress above the zipper and stepped back to make sure she was good to go. “But he’s harmless.”
“He’s Hellfire, Aurora. They’re never harmless.” Sera spun around to give me a critical once over and then nodded with approval. “The boots are a nice touch.”
I was wearing an Alexander McQueen scarf-neck dress that hit right above the knee with combat boots—and lots of eyeliner. The dress left my pale shoulders and legs bare, and the pink and black silk made my white-blond hair look stark and edgy, which was how I liked it. More punk princess than actual princess.
My family’s fairy tale was long over anyway.
“Should I rope Tanith and Sloane into helping?” I asked, going over to the vanity to find the lip gloss I’d applied earlier so I could slide it into my boot.
I could hear Sera’s eye-roll in her voice. “Tanith is in her room reading and says she might come down later if it doesn’t devolve into a drunken orgy. And you know Sloane is incapable of mingling. She’s probably already up in a tree and watching the entrances and exits like Batman or something.”
That did sound like Sloane. She was the daughter of a man I was pretty sure was a spy, and she was even better at melting into the shadows and observing things than my and Lennox’s security team, who were stationed discreetly around the party to make sure we were safe.
The team had been threaded through my life for so long that I didn’t even notice them most of the time—except when I needed to sneak out to have fun, of course. Then I was as melt-into-the-shadows as Sloane, no spy training needed.
I tucked the tube of lip gloss into my boot and then gave her a salute. “I was born for this moment, Captain van Doren. Also, you look beautiful.”
“No, you look beautiful.”
“No, you do!”
“I hate you! Shut up!” she said with an eye roll.
It was the same mock-fight we had before every party, and with that little ritual out of the way, we hugged, grabbed our phones, and headed down the stairs to welcome the first of the guests.
* * *
I’d just settled the first victim of the bottomless mimosas into a guest bathroom with some water and a towel and emerged back onto the expansive lawn when someone came up beside me.
“It looks like you need this,” Phineas said with a slow, melting grin. My belly did this flip-flop thing, and I could barely tear my eyes away from that grin to look down at the flute of champagne he was offering.
I took it with a grateful smile. It had only been two months since I’d seen Phineas Yates last, but something had changed. I knew that he was about to turn seventeen like me, but he looked like… I don’t know. Like a man almost.
He’d always been cute, but his jaw was more angular and less boyish. His shoulders had gotten broader too, rounding with layered muscle under the button-down shirt and linen sport coat he wore, and he’d gone from tallish to the kind of tall that meant I could tuck my head under his chin if I wanted.
And I did want. I wanted it like I wanted a night out dancing, or a new dress, or for my mother to be happy. I wanted to tuck my head under his chin and breathe in the woodsy, spicy smell of his Gucci cologne—yes, I knew what cologne he used, thanks to Lennox whinging about how it stank up his dorm room whenever Phin hung out in there—and I wanted to feel his strong arms wrapped tight around me. I wanted my entire body pressed to his; I wanted his lips in my hair.
I wanted to see what happened to too-hot-for-their-own-good fuckboys when they were finally snared by someone.
Sera and Tanith teased me about my terminal weakness for flirty boys with big grins. But the truth was I’d only ever really liked one flirty boy with a big grin, and the others had only caught my eye because they’d reminded me of him.
Phineas Yates, heir to the Yates fortune, and resident playboy of the Hellfire Club.
But there was a reason I’d never done anything about my little crush, and it wasn’t because I was shy. It was because as much as my stomach fluttered whenever I saw him, as much as I privately adored his easygoing charm and smoldering gaze, I had no interest in being a notch on a bedpost. I was the granddaughter of the Prince and Princess of Lichtenstein, and while the Yates were old money dating from before the invention of the telephone—so my notch would be on a very expensive bedpost imported from Italy or something—I still deserved better than that.
I’d learned that from watching my mother. She’d married for love, or for infatuation, depending on who was telling the story. My father was a charming Englishmen who’d spun her every pretty lie under the sun, and look where it had gotten her. An ex-husband in prison, an embarrassingly intimate picture of him and his mistress printed on every tabloid cover in the world, and years of public disgrace.
That’s what happened when you fell in love with someone charming. You fucking got conned. And I was too smart for that.
Are you?
I took a sip of the cool champagne and sighed with delight. In our world, no one fussed too much about underage drinking, but I’d abstained for most of the day so I could have a clear head while serving as vice-hostess. This was exactly what I needed.
Although, it being delivered by a tall, dark-haired boy with a light golden suntan and a smile so wide it hurt to look at… That was probably everything I didn’t need.
Not that I had any intention of walking away. After all, what could a little flirtation hurt? He was hardly going to work some dark playboy magic and get into my knickers here at the party, now was he?
“So,” I said, smiling at him and then feeling my pulse kick up as he tucked his lower lip between his teeth at the sight of my smile, “do you want to do a job with me?”
“A job?” he asked, a thick brow lifting a bit. He had dark, straight eyebrows that were classically masculine, but they were set over brown eyes as soft and warm as caramel. Those eyes were also fringed with dark lashes that wouldn’t look out of place on a doll, lashes I was downright jealous of.
It made him so gorgeous and yet still so very male, and I had to remind myself that I was only going to flirt, and nothing more.
“Yes, a job,” I told him and then gestured to the wide lawn with my champagne flute. The lawn was a typical Bishop’s Landing jewel, an emerald-green expanse set with immaculately maintained paths, an aquamarine pool and its elegant pool house, the trees strung with lights which would turn on as the ruby sun began sinking its way down to the horizon. At the far end was a koi pond filled with flashing orange koi, shaded by a massive oak tree that looked older than anything else here in Bishop’s Landing.
Currently, this jewel of a lawn was packed with milling guests, all of them our age, all of them somewhere between tipsy and outright legless from the freely flowing booze. Soon, I knew, the music would begin, and this very respectable garden party would morph into something a bit more like the parties we had at Pembroke—loud, chaotic, and peppered with sex. I couldn’t wait, even if I was still on vice-hostess duty.
“Party patrol!” I informed Phin cheerily.
He laughed. It was a hot boy laugh—white, straight teeth, deep dimples, all with a delighted sound to it too, as if you were the most fun he’d ever had.
Even knowing the ingredients, it still worked on me. Embarrassingly well.
You are a glutton for punishment.
“Oh, I’m very qualified for party patrol,” he said, still laughing.
But there was something about the way he said it—almost ruefully—like partying was the only thing anyone would ever say he was good for. Which was possible, since Phin wasn’t exactly known as a wallflower around Pembroke Prep, but still. I didn’t want him to think I thought the same as everyone else—that he was the laddiest lad who ever ladded.
“You are qualified for it,” I said firmly. “You know how to help other people relax and have fun, and you treat everyone like they’re your best friend, even if you barely know them. You make them feel included. That’s not a skill everyone has. It’s why everyone likes you.”
He turned to me, and the late afternoon light caught in those amber-brown eyes, revealing every fleck of gold. “Everyone likes me, eh?” he asked in a soft voice.
“Yes,” I replied, just as softly. “You know they do.”
“Maybe I don’t.”
I couldn’t break our stare, and it seemed that neither could he.
It was a cheer from the bottom of the lawn that caught my attention and finally pulled me away from those wonderful eyes. My brother was waving a croquet mallet about like the fuckwit he was.
When I pulled my eyes back to Phin, they travelled the full length of his chest before settling on his eyes again. Bloody hell, no wonder Phin was rumored to have girls lined up to have a turn with him. It wasn’t fair to have a body like that with eyes like those. Like engineering a wet dream in a wet dream laboratory or something.
“We should circulate if we’re on patrol,” Phin said, offering me his arm with another dashing grin. “Shall we?”
“We shall,” I declared, and so we strode out onto the lawn.
It was shockingly easy to play co-host with Phin. We mingled, we chattered, we discreetly gestured to staff to clean up messes. And even though I’d decided after my father went to prison that I did not want to play the role of pretty, delicate royal and did everything I possibly could to act the opposite, Phin made me feel like a stereotypical princess as he escorted me around the party, making sure I wasn’t in the sun or that I didn’t need a plate of food, always smiling at me with a fond, sort of besotted look.
It was like having a boyfriend.
It was like having Phin be my boyfriend.
And I liked it a lot. A dangerous amount.
So much for just flirting.
As evening came and the heat eased into a gentler warmth, the party began to shift. The music changed, and the guests grew louder and more animated. We decided to check the pool house to make sure that no one was doing anything dangerous—illicit was fine, just not injury-inducing—and then we’d head up to the wide patio to refresh our drinks. But as we stepped away from the thankfully empty pool house onto the path that would take us back to the party, Phin tugged me to a stop with a gentle hand on my elbow.
“Look,” he said, nodding his head in the direction of the oak tree. “The sun’s setting.”
It was quite beautiful seeing the summer sun shining through the tree as it slid down to the horizon. It reminded me of my childhood home in England, the one my father had lost after his Ponzi scheme had been exposed and he’d been arrested.
“You know, Sera calls this her climbing tree,” I told Phin as we watched the gold-orange rays pierce through the leaves. “She and her cousins would make forts and hide up there for hours. She said it was her favorite spot in the world because she could sit up there and pretend she was a queen in her tower watching over her realm.”
Phin laughed a warm laugh. “Yeah, that sounds like Sera. What do you think? Do you think you’d like to be up there, like a queen?”
Like a queen…
Being like a queen was a very literal job in my family, one my grandmother did with cool poise and determination. I sometimes wondered how different my life would be if my mother had followed in my grandmother’s footsteps and had chosen duty and sense over following her heart.
But she hadn’t.
She’d fallen in love with a charmer instead—a charmer who seemed like the best husband and daddy in the world, right up until five years ago, when his Ponzi scheme collapsed in the most dramatic and public way. He’d robbed people of millions all while cheating on my mother in the worst way, and so we’d lost everything all at once. Our house in England, our money, our pride.
Our happy and sweet mother, too, as she abruptly transformed into a sad, quiet woman I barely recognized.
It had been our grandmother who’d salvaged what remained of our lives, taking charge and moving us all back to Lichtenstein, where we’d have a place to stay away from the prying eyes of the tabloids and gossip sites. And when the time came, she found a school for Lennox and me that was private enough to keep us shielded from the worst of the press’s sordid fascination with my criminal father and our heartbroken royal mother.
It was how we came to Pembroke; how Lennox ended up joining the Hellfire Club.
It was how I’d met Serafina and Sloane and Tanith and Iris, now my best friends, and how I’d ended up here, at my best friend’s gorgeous Bishop’s Landing house on a gorgeous summer evening, standing under an old oak tree with a gorgeous boy. It was hard not to love my life as it was right now . . . but it was equally hard to forget the reason I was here at all.
Lies and heartbreak and having to leave an entire life in England behind.
I moved my eyes up to the upper branches of the tree, thick and perfect for climbing. A distant kind of longing tugged at my stomach and chest and twinged at my nerves.
“I normally love being right in the thick of things,” I said, thinking out loud, “but I think I’d love it because up there, nothing else would feel real. There’d be no problems, no pain. Just me and the tree. What about you? Would you like to be up there?”
His eyes burned along the side of my face, and I looked over at him, my breath catching at the expression on his face.
“I think I’d love it if you were up there too,” he said in a voice so achingly soft it sent shivers all over my skin. “I think I’d love to be anywhere you were.”
He took my elbow again, and then my upper arm, and then I was in his arms, his cedar and spice cologne filling my nostrils and his eyes glowing down at me.
He’s just flirting, I tried to remind myself, but it didn’t work because I didn’t want it to work. He was so hot and fun and sweet, and so what if he had a reputation? So what if I knew better than to let my guard down around a Hellfire boy? A charmer?
Because I’d wanted this for so long, and we were there in the soft, sweet shadows of twilight, and his lower lip was tucked between his teeth again…
Hot guy. Perfect dress. The exact right setting for a bone-melting kiss.
I suddenly wanted so much more than flirting. I wanted everything. Starting with that wicked mouth on mine.
What could go wrong?
“Phin,” I said, looking up at him. “I think it’s about time that you kissed me.”