Defy (Sinners of Saint Book 2) Read online

  I taught six classes. The first five had gone better than expected, meaning I didn’t have to slap anyone with a detention slip or call an ambulance/911/a SWAT team for assistance. But it was the sixth and last class that changed my life forever.

  I sashayed into Jaime’s class—following another barking session from his bitchy mom—into an echoing silence I wasn’t used to. Everyone was seated, nobody threw anything, and Vicious, Jaime’s BFF, hadn’t cut anyone’s face and adorned their forehead with a satanic symbol just to burn time.

  Normally, this was the part where I had to contain the wrath and deplorable behavior of the Four HotHoles. (Hot Assholes, as they were dubbed by everyone in Todos Santos.) It was three months before graduation, and they were all seniors, a possible excuse for their behavior. Except they’d been this way since the first day.

  There was Jaime, who spent my class texting the whole world and drawing the attention of every girl who wasn’t tongue-deep into Trent Rexroth, the underprivileged mocha-skinned football star, who made out with random chicks in the back. He once had a girl sucking his cock under his table in calculus. I kid you not. There was Dean Cole, the airheaded stoner who enjoyed pranks and annoying me in equal measure, and finally, Baron “Vicious” Spencer, the World’s Biggest Jerk.

  Vicious was by far the worst. He made good on his name. So goddamned cold and sullen all the time that people nicknamed him after Sid Vicious of the Sex Pistols. He had coal black hair, expressionless eyes, fair skin, and the kind of rebellious anger that could electrify you to the point of the chills. The permanent tick of his clenched square jaw made girls wet their panties from fear and lust. He was a jock, like all the HotHoles, but he was leaner than the rest, not as muscular. But scarier. Definitely fucking scarier.

  That day, Millie LeBlanc, a sweet girl who was the most frequent target of Vicious’s wrath, arrived three minutes late. I tilted my head, signaling for her to take a seat. I felt bad for her. Her parents had dragged her all the way from Virginia her senior year to take a job as live-in servants at one of the town’s many mansions—Vicious Spencer’s house to be exact.

  As always, she strode right in the psycho’s direction and took the empty seat beside him as if she didn’t know or care who Vicious was. My soul shouted an extended “Noooooooo!” when I saw how he was watching her. He will grind you and feed you to his pet snake, I wanted to warn.

  But Emilia just lifted her head, offered a polite smile, and drawled a Southern “hey, y’all” in the direction of him and the other HotHoles. Vicious blinked slowly, intrigued by the idea that she dared to speak to him without permission, and his expression clouded into a taut frown.

  “Motherfucker, did you just ‘hey, y’all’ me?” He let out a feral growl. “Please tell me it’s a fucking safe word you’re using now because some new boyfriend shoved the Confederate flag up your ass, pole included. Otherwise, don’t ever fucking ‘hey y’all’ me again.”

  Wow. That was more words than he’d spoken all year.

  Millie sighed and said, “I’m only trying to be polite. You should try it sometime.”

  “I don’t do polite,” he retorted, a rare smile tugging on his lips. Usually, he seemed to despise her, but he was studying her so intently it looked as if he was the one who’d like to shove numerous things up her perky little butt.

  “Leave him alone, baby doll.” Trent, the guy next to her (who took a breather from letting the chick next to him suck his thumb) glanced from Dean to Vicious. “Vicious stop being a—”

  “A raging fucking asshole,” Jaime finished from behind them, scraping his chair back and towering over their heads, his sculpted muscles flexed to the max.

  Goddammit. It was the first time my workday had ever been blissfully uneventful. The HotHoles just had to ruin it.

  Before I could warn everyone off with an impotent threat I’d never follow through with, Jaime galloped toward Vicious and pinned him to the nearest wall, his fingers laced firmly around Vic’s neck in a death squeeze.

  “Where’s your loyalty, man? Leave it be, okay?” Jaime tightened his hold on Vicious’s neck.

  “James!” I raised my voice, flying up from my chair and banging my palm over the desk. “Back to your seat, now!”

  Vicious looked thoroughly amused, rolling his head on the wall and laughing like a maniac. Jaime and Vicious were best friends, but they were also two alphas with a shitload of testosterone and hormones coursing through their veins.

  They were also the inventors of Defy. The teachers and high school staff didn’t know too much about Defy, because it went on at Vicious’s house parties over the weekends, but we got the general idea. The game was simple: Our students challenged each other to bloody fights and beat the shit out of each other. For fun.

  Defy was supposedly voluntary, but I didn’t doubt people were afraid enough of Vicious to indulge his whims, however ridiculous or dangerous.

  “Make me,” Jaime challenged me on a whisper, his eyes narrowing into slits and zeroing in on my face, his fingers still digging into the neck of an amused, bluish Vic.

  Jesus Christ. I never touched Followhill when it came to detentions and tardy slips. His mom was the fucking principal, and she already hated my guts. But he’d cornered me. I had to react.

  I clutched my necklace tighter.

  Why was he doing this? Yesterday, he eye-fucked me to unconsciousness and back. And now…he…he…

  Oh, shit. Now he’s cashing in on the debt.

  He didn’t want me to back down. He wanted me to accept his dare. Was I going to take the bait? It wasn’t like I had much choice. I owed him big time for the Range Rover. Whatever it was he wanted from me, it was already his.

  “You’ve just landed yourself in detention for the next week, starting this afternoon.” I pulled open the drawer of my wooden desk and started filling out the detention form.

  Everyone fell silent. I’d never done this before. Not to a senior and definitely not to James Charles Followhill III.

  From the corner of my eye, I watched as Jaime finally let go of Vicious’s neck. Vicious made a sucking sound and grabbed his junk, motioning to Jaime, laughing as he strode back to his seat. Other students slapped his back and looked between them, slipping notes. Probably bets on an impending Defy fight that was about to go down this weekend.

  I smacked the detention slip on Jaime’s desk, and he jerked his eyes up, beaming a smile at me so sinister my panties melted into gooey, sweet liquid. We both knew what I was doing.

  Awarding him with one-on-one time with me, exactly what he wanted.

  Accepting an arrangement that’d put me in a fragile, potentially disastrous spot.

  I was saying thank you to him for threatening my class, telling them to behave, so that he’d be the only person in detention for the next week.

  And at this point, there was no denying it—I was allowing myself to free-fall headfirst into the end of my career, doing somersaults on my way down.

  Jaime Followhill had celebrated his eighteenth birthday three days before the parking lot incident, which made the chain of recent events even more suspicious. Had he waited to hit on me? Why? He could have any girl in school. (After Trent Rexroth had a taste, of course.)

  I’d already spent my lunch break roaming his Facebook page like there was no tomorrow. His timeline was a pointed reminder that he was eight years my junior. He had pictures from summer camp, for fuck’s sake. He was always sporting a dimply smile, tan muscular forearms, a stunning pair of bright blues, and a ton of friends.

  Jaime had everything, and I had nothing. He had a coddled past, a cushy present, and a dazzling future. I, on the other hand, was already tainted with career failure and headed toward a life of scrambling to stay employed and out of debt. We didn’t make sense. Even for a fling.

  But I was too selfish and vulnerable to say no. Besides, having him would be like sticking it to his mom without really letting her know about it.

  Win-win, right?

&
nbsp; That afternoon, I slipped into the classroom where detention took place, noting that the wooden door to the room had a window.

  I wasn’t surprised to see the blond HotHole was already there, sitting in the front row, jingling his car keys—and our secret—between his strong fingers with a smirk, haunting me with his teal eyes. Gulping, I sat down at the teacher’s table and took out my laptop and some exams I needed to grade.

  “Put your phone in your backpack, Jaime.” I wet my lips, my eyes focused on my paperwork.

  He did as he was told, but I felt his lingering gaze licking me everywhere. My self-consciousness levels were so high I was on the verge of throwing up. I acted like I was about to commit a crime. In a way, I was.

  After a few minutes of me pretending to type absolutely nothing on my laptop and him staring at me with a cocky smile, like he was about to devour me at any second, I grunted, “Why don’t you do your homework? I’m sure you can do something constructive with your time while you’re here.” He had two hours to burn, and my face couldn’t be that fascinating.

  But I swore I heard him mumble, “Sizing up my prey is constructive.”

  My head bolted up from my screen, and I shot him a dirty look. “Excuse me?”

  He tilted his chin up, flashing a row of pearly whites of the Hollywood variety. “Ms. Greene, this is going to happen.”

  I knew what he meant.

  “I have no idea what you mean,” I snipped. Pshh. Playing games with an eighteen-year-old. I promised myself that after today, I was going to take a long, hard look at my life. Preferably while enjoying a generous glass of wine. Well, not a glass, maybe more like a bowl.

  Jaime leaned forward on his elbows, his huge arms spanning his whole desk. The devious twinkle in his eyes assured me, once again, that his age was merely a number. Hell, he’d probably slept with more people than I’d kissed in my entire life.

  “Yes, you do. You know,” he said with a smile that was arrogant, yet forgiving. Who was the grown-up here? Who was corrupting who? I swallowed.

  My eyes dropped to my keyboard, and I struggled for a steady breath. I was shit-scared and turned on. Apparently, this was the perfect combination to make me produce small moans resembling a cat in heat.

  “Why me?” I asked.

  Jaime remained motionless, but his stare nipped at the sensitive flesh of my neck, tickling my lower abdomen. “Because,” he said slowly, his soft lips parting as he drank me in, “I want to fuck a teacher before I go off to college.”

  And just like that, ladies and gentlemen, my quivering thighs and glassy eyes suffered a bad case of ice-cold bucket of rage.

  Standing up and folding my arms, I pinched my lips together to make sure a curse didn’t escape them. “I’m sorry, James. I don’t seem to register half of the things you’ve said today, because it sounds like you’re begging to fail my class and get kicked out of school.”

  Now it was his turn to stand, and I shrank back toward the whiteboard when I remembered he had a good nine inches on me (also in his pants, if that prevailing rumor was right.)

  “Sweetheart,” he said, following that with a tsk-tsk of his tongue, his confidence unnerving. “Give me your worst. Fail me. Throw me in detention for the rest of the year. We both know it won’t affect my graduation or my future. You’d only be shooting yourself in that lovely, sexy-as-fuck foot of yours.”

  His eyes moved to my legs, and he took a step forward. My throat constricted with an unfamiliar need to bite something. Preferably this HotHole’s butt.

  “The damage to the Range Rover is around eighty-five hundred dollars, thanks for asking,” he continued, straight-faced.

  Another step. Thump, thump, thump, went my heart. I was a flower and he was a rare sunray, and we were drawn to each other, reluctantly, unwittingly, disastrously. Every cell in my body sizzled, begging for his touch.

  Jaime wanted to fuck a teacher, so what? I wanted to fuck a baller. We were two sensible grown-ups making a conscious decision…only he wasn’t really a grown-up, was he? And I was anything but sensible to get into this mess.

  But he had leverage on me.

  And those piercing blue eyes.

  Besides…I wanted him. He was the first thing that had made me feel giddy in a while. Since Julliard, to be exact.

  How sad was that?

  “Jaime,” I croaked. “I’m sure there are other teachers you could…work your charm on. How about Ms. Perklin?”

  She was about three centuries old and smelled like used dental floss, but I wanted to gauge his reaction, postponing what was beginning to feel inevitable. Jaime stopped when our toes touched, his dimpled smile broadening, the black eye barely visible. I might have an easier time rejecting him if he weren’t a female lubricant, I thought while admiring his masculine jaw and high forehead.

  “Correction…” His lips brushed mine as he leaned down, and I shivered and stepped back, aware people might see us through the door’s glass window. “I don’t only want to fuck a teacher. I want to fuck my Lit teacher. She’s got sass, great ass, long legs, and even though she thinks I haven’t figured her out, I know that behind the prissy disguise is a woman who curses like a sailor and can outdrink anyone on my football team.”

  Damn right, I could. They were only teenagers. I had impressive binge-drinking mileage. Eras of destructiveness caused by dark times of depression. But I digress.

  “Do you want us both to get kicked out of All Saints?” I inhaled, patting my sweaty palms on my navy polka-dot dress. Someone had to talk sense into this boy. Too bad it was me we depended on. My willpower was nonexistent in those days. I had very little to lose at this point, if at all.

  He grabbed me by the waist and spun us around so his back shielded my whole body from the windowed door. He pulled me into him, and my body melted against his like hot butter.

  “I won’t tell,” he whispered into my neck, making me shiver with pleasure. “Neither will you. A nice short fling, Ms. G. I’ll move to Texas to play college football. You’ll move on to an ugly-ass accountant with a good heart or some shit. Someone to make babies with. That’s all. Now what do you say, Melody?”

  I was about to say dream on but didn’t have the chance.

  Jaime dove down, his sultry lips breathing into mine. “On second thought, don’t say a word. I’ll see for myself.”

  Jaime Followhill kissed me, the most intoxicating kiss I’d ever had. The minute his mouth slammed over mine, my toes curled inside my sensible pumps. It wasn’t just the urgency of his hot mouth or the sweet taste of his gum but also his drugging male scent. He invaded every inch of my pores, kissing me like he had something to prove, a point to make. I grabbed his smooth-cheeked face with abandon and inhaled, while he opened my mouth with his tongue and devoured me like I was his fucking last meal.

  His tongue attacked mine, owning my mouth, licking every part and swallowing my needy moans. I wasn’t surprised when his hand dug into my ass and he yanked me into his erection. He rubbed himself against me, shamelessly jerking off on me, grabbing one of my hands and placing it against his impressive cock.

  It was wrong.

  It was wrong, and I’d be lying if I said I didn’t like how wrong it felt.

  Whether I was corrupting or being corrupted…I loved how it made me feel.

  My heart drummed with excitement and fear. I knew part of the thrill was the possibility we’d get caught. It felt like swallowing an eight ball of speed and washing it down with a dozen shots of vodka.

  Hot fucking damn. Jaime Followhill had some moves.

  “Anyone can see us,” I muttered into another dirty-hot kiss. The space between us was already charged with sex, reeking of juices we barely kept hidden behind thin clothing. I was soaked and ready, and he’d released those male hormones that make teenage guys’ rooms smell like jizz and sweat. Only on him, the smell was pretty magical.

  “You’re covered by me,” he murmured into my neck, nipping my skin with his teeth and moving south. His t
ongue sliced through the valley of my swollen breasts like an arrow.

  “Not true.” My face was now on display for anyone to see.

  “Meet you at your place in an hour.”

  “You don’t know where I live.” I hungrily skimmed my hands over his iron chest.

  Jaime pulled away and gave me one of his mischievous grins.

  Jesus. He was a stalker, too? I had to admit, I found it hot as hell. One of the sexiest guys at school…stalked me. Why did I have to be a teacher? Shit like that never happened when I was a student.

  “No.” My voice was resolute. With every second his lips weren’t on mine, the fog of a building orgasm faded, making way for logic.

  Hello, logic. You killjoy, you.

  “Ms. Greene…” His forehead and nose were crushed against mine. We both panted, eye to eye, chest to chest. “You’re about eight minutes too late to walk out of this arrangement. This…” His hand ducked under my dress hem and up between my thighs, and a finger traveled along my wet slit through my plain cotton underwear (no lace today), stroking not pushing, in a torturous tease. “Is mine until school ends. I will eat it, fuck it, play with it, and sleep in it if I want to. And I want to. I wanna do all those things to you.”

  What horrified me the most about Jaime’s statement was that I knew he was going to get his way. I had agreed to it before I’d even walked into detention today. He had too much power over me, and not only because of his social status. I’d always been aware of his beauty and powerful presence, but up until now, I used them to resent him. Now that they were offered to me, all bets were off.

  “We’re going to be exclusive. If I catch you spreading those toned legs for anyone else, he’s gonna regret he was born with a dick.”

  Oh yeah? Was he going to resist all the temptation that was swarming around him like bad BO at Coachella?

  As if reading my mind, he added, “My cock will only have two homes. Your mouth and your pussy. Ass, too, if you’re feeling adventurous.”

  Mother of God.

  “Detention’s over. Take your stuff and leave,” I gritted, taking one step back and then another.