Vicious Bet
Don’t fall in love!
Sinners and Saints 1
Alice Ann Wonder
Copyright © 2019 Alice Ann Wonder
All rights reserved.
Reproduction or other use is only permitted with the written permission of the author. All persons in this book are fictitious. Similarities with living or deceased persons are coincidental.
* * * Get inspired by Alice * * *
* ---> Why I'm not on Facebook:
I'm a person who is easily distracted.
When I am intensively involved with social media, the things that are really important to me disappear more and more from my focus over time.
Instead, an inner restlessness, the worry of missing something and a constant urge to *keep up* with the world is building up inside me.
So, little by little, what I like best is falling by the wayside: writing books, reading books, spending time with the people of my heart, and living in the moment.
If you want more from me – love, bad-boy-inspirations, motivating impulses, personal (I like to travel all over the world) & advance information on new books – then click here to register for my reading group:
www.alice-ann-wonder.com
Love, Alice <--- *
DISCLAIMER:
Dreamworld
Come with me and let me take you to Alice’ Wonderland!
Forget all your troubles,
don't think about yesterday,
… or tomorrow.
Immerse yourself in strange worlds,
that delights your mind
and touch your heart.
Just come with me and let
drive you,
if you want,
you can stay forever,
because I'm holding the door open for you.
XO,
Alice
Flap text
Don't fall in love!
She breaks hearts until they bleed.
He puts red on all her exams.
She teaches her classmates to fear.
He teaches literature.
She's the bad girl, he's the good guy.
Or so she thought.
Because the young professor is anything but harmless – she'll find that out.
... and wish he'd never given in to her cunning little game.
... or maybe she did?
The beginning of the Sinners and Saints series.
Meet the privileged fiends – the privileged devils – of Thorn Elite College.
>>> It'll be dramatic, hot and unpredictable.
Pure emotion – with optional handkerchief alert. <<<
The setting and the perfect backdrop for the Thorn rowing team's competitions is the picturesque and beautiful Vancouver in Canada.
Table of contents
The little mermaid
Who doesn't like literature?
Purgatory
I see you
Pact with the devil
Just a cake
Dark shadow
Beloved enemy
Because you belong to me
Pretty Privileged
Consequences
Theme Song
Wolf & Moon – Before
The little mermaid
"Will we go for ice cream later?" James asked as he drilled a hole in the sand beneath our feet with a bony branch.
I buried my toes in the fine grains until they were no longer visible.
Most people thought Vancouver was at its best in the summer.
I liked the beginning of autumn best.
On days like today, when it was still warm enough to swim, but you could already sense the awakening of nature, I felt most comfortable.
The leaves of the trees were still green, but if you looked closely, you could feel that they were already waiting to change colour. Brown and yellow knocked on the door.
I had always been fascinated by the power of nature, which brought about change in constant, reliable rhythms.
It always seemed so easy with her. She did what she should, when she should, how she should.
"Mmmm", I hummed and jumped up in one go. Then I walked a few yards. "Catch me," I yelled and ran for the waves.
I had to be home in less than half an hour. But I didn't want to think about that now.
"Don't go too close to the water, Blaire," James yelled after me.
But I didn't hear him. I chased into the cold waves until I was knee-deep in white combs that kept coming up around me.
My trousers were soaking wet almost to the waist. I had rolled them up earlier, but the way the waves splashed around me didn't help much.
My mother wouldn't like that.
I laid my head back and looked up at the sky.
It was blue and clear. A couple of seagulls were circling and contributing to the perfect idyll of the surroundings with their screeching sounds.
Blessed with happiness I closed my eyes and breathed in the salty air of the sea.
"Blaire!"
As I turned around, James had almost reached me.
He hated the water, especially this time of year when it was colder than in July or August.
"You're going to be sick," he remarked, reaching out his hand to me.
"I won't!" I replied defiantly, rolling my eyes.
"Come on, let's go," James insisted. "You're going to get in trouble.”
I knew he was right. But home was the last place I wanted to be right now.
"Let's go!”
James waggled his fingers encouragingly. I grinned and sprayed him wet.
"Hey! Stupid cow!" he nagged and splashed ice-cold water in my direction as well.
He missed me by a hair.
I knew that he missed me on purpose. Just like with all the other games we played, he always took me into consideration. Some days I liked that.
But when Mom and Dad fought again, for some reason, it made me angry that James never wanted to mess with me.
On days like that, I would have liked to wrestle him like he did with boys his own age. But he wouldn't let me, which made me feel insulted.
But I rarely managed to stay angry at him for very long.
I loved him too much to get mad at him, even if he did annoy me sometimes.
James Wyatt Cole was my best friend since kindergarten.
There was no one in the world with whom I had more fun or who could build better hiding places and keep secrets.
"Same to you," I returned, sulking and patting the water with one hand.
James shook his head and turned around.
"Wait," I shouted as he had already taken a few steps back towards the beach.
"Sorry."
I looked at him with a mischievous grin as we waded side by side towards the shore.
"I'll buy you an ice-cream later," I suggested as compensation.
I would have done that anyway, because James's family had even less money than mine.
Sometimes he couldn't even afford new exercise books.
We would always come up with something, like selling homemade lemonade in summer and cookies in winter.
James was good at math, so we always spent only as much on ingredients as we needed to have a good margin after the sale.
Sometimes we also mowed the lawn in the neighbourhood or offered to wash cars.
Since we always lived in the same street, people knew and trusted us. So we got along well and in lean months, as James Dad called them, we provided the necessary change.
His father worked on commission in a shipping company and there were not always
the same number of orders.
James' mother had died four years ago, one day before his sixth birthday. That was pretty tough. She had lung cancer, although she had never smoked.
I prayed every night that she would get better, but it didn't help. Maybe I should have told James about it.
They said that two people can do more than one.
But at the time I thought it would probably only make him sadder, because I didn't know from the beginning if it would work.
Besides, Dad always said the noblest thing you can do for another person is a good thing he doesn't know anything about.
You don't tell him because you don't expect any thanks or recognition for it. Because you do it because you want to do something for the other person and it's not about you.
Anyway, James had run to me the day it happened.
And then we went down to the ocean in our place and threw rocks into the water.
He didn't want to talk, so we just kept quiet.
At some point he started crying really horribly and I took him in my arms and held him for about twenty minutes or more.
Then we built a cave out of driftwood logs and hid in it.
"You'll be safe here," I had told him, and then painted a heart in the sand. "Your mom is watching over you from above. even though she's not here anymore."
Another thing Dad had explained to me when we talked about James' mom maybe dying.
James had just clenched his lips together and said nothing else, which I could really understand, because if my mom died, I wouldn't have said anything either.
In the end, I just wanted to let him know that his mom wasn't missing, even if it looked that way right now.
I would have thought that was important if I had been him.
Because you need your mom, no matter how old you are.
After that day, I never saw James cry again.
He also refused to celebrate his birthday ever since.
I could understand that, but I still baked him a nougat cake with caramel and brittle sprinkles on top every year, because James really liked nougat!
When he blew out the candle, we both thought of his mom and sent her a lovely greeting to heaven.
That was our little ritual.
Still, I wished that James would celebrate his birthday again some day.
Everyone deserves to celebrate one day of the year, I thought.
At least.
We walked down Beach Ave and then turned into Jervis Street.
Now it was only a few blocks to ours.
We lived right by the hospital, which was handy if one of us ever got hurt, Dad always said.
Sometimes it was a bit noisy because of the ambulances with their sirens.
But you quickly got used to it and the tatütata was a small price to pay for living close to the beach.
Everything good has a price, my father once told me.
You had to do something or make a sacrifice.
Our sacrifice was to bear the sound of the sirens.
Then I'm ready for a lot of good, I thought when Dad told me about his theory.
I couldn't have known that there were greater sacrifices to be made when you love something.
Or someone.
"Should I come with you?" James asked when we arrived at my house.
We've always lived here – at least since I was born.
The olive green paint was peeling off the walls and some roof tiles were missing.
He would repair them when the money was right again, Dad had said.
Our wooden garden fence also looked a bit battered.
But it didn't bother me. Dad had to work a lot and Mom didn't know how to make things right.
I decided that as soon as I was old enough to work on Dad's toolbox, I would learn how to repair a fence.
"Meet me at five," I said to James and smiled.
That was plenty of time to help Lu with her homework, do the dishes and polish up a little on my lecture on sea anemones that I had to drop off at school after the weekend.
Our father had taught us that homework is important.
I couldn't say that I liked doing them, but it was hard to resist adults. Besides, I even enjoyed doing the dishes in the meantime.
I had always loved water and if I didn't think that I was doing a compulsory task, but concentrated only on the warm water and the circling movements of my hands, then it wasn't so bad.
I really hated ironing!
But even that had to be done sometimes.
Thank God not today.
"Great, I'll pick you up," James replied beaming.
"I stammered and tugged at my purple Ariel The Mermaid T-shirt. "I think we'd better meet down by the rock."
I bit my lip and gnawed on my cuticle.
James drew his brows together and frowned.
His green eyes looked at me sceptically.
"So long", I said quickly so as not to give him the chance to dig any deeper.
I waved, then I ran past our front door to the back entrance.
That was safer.
I didn't want James to hear my parents arguing when I opened the front door. Because they were doing that a lot lately and I was starting to worry that it was never gonna change.
They seemed to have a different theme every time, too, which was wearing them down. That's why I couldn't keep up with the solutions I had thought up for their differences of opinion.
In school at the dispute resolution, I had learned that both parties should make a compromise - and that it is important to apologize when you were wrong.
In class it all sounded so easy, but with Mom and Dad it was really hard to say who should apologize first.
I loved Mom, of course, but I idolized Dad, which was always the case.
Mom was often moody and kind of exhausting.
Sometimes I could understand why Dad was upset with her.
On the other hand, my father worked a lot, just like James'.
Maybe if I were Mom, I would feel alone every now and then and would be angry with him for that.
I knocked the sand off my Converse and put it on the edge of the doormat that was outside the patio door.
Then I pushed the door open – it was only locked at night.
Inside it was as quiet as a mouse. Very strange.
I tiptoed up the stairs. At the top of the stairs, I knocked twice on Lu's door, gently.
When I entered, my little sister was sitting cross-legged under her window, cutting out horse figures.
Lucinda loved horses in all shapes and colours.
I, on the other hand, had too much respect for these large, noisy animals to ever voluntarily approach them, let alone ride them.
Lu had no love for mermaids, the ocean or swimming - which I could not understand at all.
"What's the situation?" I asked my little sister after I closed the door behind me.
I did not need to explain what I meant by that.
Lu looked up at me. She had big brown eyes like mine and curls of the same colour.
Mom always made sure we looked pretty, and since she was too young to defend herself against her styling attacks, she wore pink ribbons in the braids that fell over her shoulders left and right.
"It was never as bad as before," Lu explained, lowering her gaze to continue cutting out.
"But they made up again," I noticed and sat down next to her.
I stroked over the cuddly turquoise carpet that had once lain in my room.
I would have liked to keep it, but as we were short of money and Lu could use a play carpet, I had left it to her.
Lu shrugged his shoulders.
"Looks like it," she said in her angelic voice and cut a fringe hairdo for her pony.
For her five and a half years she was astonishingly skilled.
Unlike me, she was always great at balancing, dancing or making things.
I had little talent for such things.
That's probably why I loved roaming
the woods with James, romping on the beach and building castles instead of playing with dolls.
Suddenly we heard a door slam.
"You're gonna tell them! You're going to tell them today!" Mom's voice was muffled.
She was angry, it was hard not to hear.
Friday, Dad usually came home from work early. Still, Mom usually complained that he worked too much when he entered the house.
The strange thing was that she also complained that we didn't have enough money.
I didn't understand how Dad could have worked less and made more money instead. But I didn't tell her that. She had a habit of getting angry quickly and not just about our father.
"You're the worst," I heard dad hiss and got scared.
He didn't usually say mean things to Mom.
No matter how much she raged, he always remained calm and level-headed.
I admired that about him. In fact, he was exactly the opposite of her.
And there was that saying that opposites attract. That's why I sometimes thought that my parents' many arguments couldn't be all that bad. Maybe that's the way it had to be when you loved each other.
But from time to time I still had the feeling that something was not going right at home.
James had told me that his parents rarely fought.
Not even when his mother was healthy.
I couldn't imagine that, but knowing that James never lied, I believed him.
At that moment, the door to Lu's nursery opened.
Our dad, a tall, slim man with full brown hair and small round glasses on his nose, was beaming at us.
"Do you feel like an adventure?" he asked with the tone of a game show host.
"Yay!", cried Lu and jumped up in a flash.
She ran towards him with outstretched arms, he grabbed her hips and whirled her around in the tiny nursery.
As he let her down to the floor, my father looked past her to me.
"And what about that little mermaid back there?" he asked and raised an eyebrow.
Vicious Bet: Don't fall in love! (Sinners and Saints Book 1) Page 1