Teach Me To Sin- Jace and Clara
One year. One deal. One irreversible mistake.
I agreed to be his bride so he could claim his grandfather's legacy. Jace Sterling Hayes is a movie star, filthy rich, and absolutely forbidden. Our marriage was supposed to be strictly business.
But the way he looks at me? The way he touches me? Nothing about this feels fake.
Now enemies old and new want to destroy us. His scheming agent blackmails me. My sister lies bleeding in a hospital because of my connection to him. And the world watches, waiting for me to fail.
I have one problem I never planned for.
I'm hopelessly, desperately in love with my fake husband.
Teach me to sin. Teach me to trust. Teach me that forever is possible.
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Chapter 3
CLARA'S POV
I sit down next to him and shut the door. If I leave now, he'll end up in another hotel suite or a club. It doesn't matter that he isn't even dressed. This town worships fame and money, and he has plenty of both. The air conditioning inside the car blows over me, and I shiver. My reaction annoys me further. If I weren't soaked, the temperature would be perfect.
"We're going home," I say in my most stern don't argue with me boss voice. "You're going to sleep this off. And you will go to the rehearsal dinner tomorrow."
"Don't want to," he mutters.
"Would you rather attend your father's wedding?" Jace's sixty something father is marrying for the sixth time, and to a woman who is barely twenty and there seems to be an epidemic of matrimony in the family because it's on the same weekend as his cousin's ceremony. "It's not too late to make the travel arrangements."
"Hell no." Jace moans theatrically. "Hey, maybe I'll be too hung over to go to either of 'em."
"Then I'll have a driver take you. Don't worry."
By the time I'm home, it's well after four a.m. I open the door and spot my roommate, Sasha Vance, kicking off her shoes after having finished her shift at the bar downtown. An aspiring actress from Chicago, Sasha is petite with flowing black hair that reaches her lumbar, and pale green eyes that look arrestingly large in her tiny pixie like face. Combined with a pert nose and wide mouth, she creates the kind of mesmerizing beauty you can't look away from.
When I first came to Miami, she more or less took me under her wing. It was pure luck that I found her listing for a roommate online. Her lack of success as an actress bothers me, because she works so hard. Amazingly enough, I've never heard her complain about it. Her upbeat attitude makes me wish I could do something for her, but she's asked me not to bother because stuff like that can jeopardize my job.
Jace is a nice guy, but he's made it clear he doesn't do favors for aspiring anyone, and Ivy is uninterested in newbies.
"Hey," I say.
She turns, and her eyes widen. "Oh my gosh, what happened to you?"
"It's a long story." My clothes are clammy, and I feel gross. I remind myself to leave an extra change of clothes at Jace's place.
"Uh you okay?" she asks, peering into my face.
"No." I don't tell her what happened because my employment contract comes with an NDA. I'm not allowed to talk about anything that happens while I'm working for him.
"You aren't doing anything crazy because of you know Cole?"
"No." Cole Reynolds is my ex. We broke up earlier today. Well, technically yesterday. We met because I wanted to tell him I was pregnant. But he told me I was worthless before I could get a word out. And once he made it clear how contemptible he found me too fat, too unhelpful, too bitchy I couldn't talk about the baby.
"Um. Okay." Sasha's giving me a look that says she doesn't really believe me. "He's a jerk. I never liked him. Neither did Zane."
"I know," I say, although I didn't. Sasha was always friendly to Cole. So was Zane, her twin brother. I sigh. They were probably polite to him for my sake. Who knows? I'm too tired to care.
"Hey, come here." Sasha opens her arms for a hug.
I duck away. "You're going to get wet."
"Whatever. I need to shower anyway." She hugs me tightly. She doesn't say anything. But I close my eyes and let myself enjoy the affection and love from my friend.
It's been seven days since the hotel. Seven glorious, incident free days. I even got the whole weekend off because Jace was away at the wedding, and he insisted that he didn't want me coming with him. He promised he would attend and do all the right things. I've never seen him break a promise, so I stayed home. Read some books and relaxed. Pampered myself a little. I figured I deserved it after finding out that I'm pregnant, getting dumped by Cole and being dunked in a hot tub full of skanks.
And the days following the weekend pass in relative peace. Now why can't we do this all the time?
On Friday, I drive up the road that winds through what seems like miles of lush flower gardens. A giant pool appears to my left, the water sparkling like liquid jewels. I park my six year old Altima and get out. Even after four years, I still can't get over how grand Jace's Star Island mansion is.
The main house is three stories tall, with thick columns between the doors. I go inside without ringing. I am one of a very very few people who can do that at Jace's place. The interior matches the splendor outside. The floor is real marble; huge and glittering chandeliers hang from the vaulted ceiling. The walls have numerous paintings, but not a single photo of Jace or poster from one of his movies. For such a handsome man, he doesn't like to look at himself much.
After grabbing a cup of ginger ale from the state of the art kitchen, I head toward my office on the second level, climbing the winding staircase. It's exactly like the one from Tara in Gone with the Wind.
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9.5
My boyfriend, Jefferson, convinced me to give up my Yale scholarship for him. He was my secret, my escape from the shame of my mother's past, and I threw away my future for our love.
Then, at a gala, he publicly announced his engagement to Aubrey Carroll-the girl who made my high school years a living hell.
He trapped me in his mansion, forcing me to become her personal servant. She tortured me daily, culminating in her brutally killing our dog, Charlie, with a garden trowel.
When her friends arrived, they joined in, stripping me half-naked and live-streaming my panic attack for the world to see.
The man who once promised to protect me watched as they destroyed me.
But as I lay bleeding out on the floor, it wasn't an ambulance that arrived. It was the private security of Alexzander Stevens-my estranged, billionaire grandfather.
He revealed I was his sole heiress, and now, we were going to make them pay for every last tear.
7.4
In a city where data is power and truth is a weapon, some secrets are worth killing for.
Mara Quinn is a ghost in the system, an underground journalist known only as Cipher, feared by corporations and hunted by those with everything to lose. When she breaches a classified network inside Axiom Industries, she uncovers something no one was meant to see: ORACLE, a predictive AI capable of shaping human behavior on a global scale.
She expects retaliation. She doesn't expect Kael Draven.
Cold, brilliant, and untouchable, Kael is the architect behind Axiom's empire, and a man who doesn't make threats he can't execute. Instead of silencing Mara, he offers her a choice: work under his watch, or disappear from existence entirely. Trapped inside his glass fortress known as The Spire, Mara is pulled deeper into a world of surveillance, manipulation, and power plays that stretch far beyond anything she imagined.
But ORACLE isn't just a tool, it's already been used. Governments have fallen. Empires have shifted. And someone else is pulling the strings.
As a rival syndicate closes in and a hidden war erupts across the city, Mara and Kael are forced into an uneasy alliance, one built on intellect, suspicion, and a dangerous, undeniable pull neither of them can ignore.
Because in a world where every move is predicted...
the only thing more dangerous than control is feeling.
And the system is already watching.
7.1
I never should have let my mother hold my future hostage.
She paid my tuition with his father's money. Locked my birth certificate, my transcripts, every scrap of paper I need to survive in a safe I'll never open. And the one thing I had left of my dad, his old watch, she dangled like a noose.
Run, and I lose my education. Fight, and I lose the last piece of the man who actually loved me.
So I moved into the Hunters' mansion. Into the lair of the boy who spent years making my life hell.
Chase Hunter. Six-foot-five of pure venom wrapped in muscle and money. The senior who cornered me in empty hallways, who whispered filth in my ear just to watch me flinch, who smiled that sharp, cruel smile every time I broke a little more.
I thought graduation meant freedom from him.
I was wrong.
Now he's my stepbrother.
He hates that I'm here. Hates my mother for sinking her claws into his father. Hates me most of all, for breathing his air, for walking his halls, for daring to exist where he can reach me.
But hate isn't clean anymore.
It's tangled up in heat. In the way his grey eyes strip me bare every time they land on me. In the way his hand closes around my throat, not to hurt, but to own. In the way he punishes me over his lap, in his car, against walls, until I'm shaking and soaked and furious at myself for wanting more.
He calls me Little Lamb like it's poison on his tongue.
I call him every name I can think of under my breath.
How long until we stop fighting the deadly inferno raging between us and finally let it consume us both?
8.7
At eighteen years old, Estelle is kicked out of the only place she knew as home. With nowhere left to go, she goes toward Club Paradise, a place that offers the basic amenities she lacks: food, clothes, shelter, and a well-paying job.
***
The room was thick with smoke and muted chatter, but the moment Antonio D'Amico's eyes landed on her, the world narrowed to just her.
Estelle froze, heart hammering, as if some unseen force had pulled her into his gaze. He didn't move at first, simply studied her with a cold, calculating intensity that sent a shiver straight down her spine.
One night with him shifts the course of her life forever. Something in him fractures; obsession blooms, dangerous, consuming and he decides to take her away, forever.
***
What will happen to Estelle? Will her fortune finally turn around, or is she about to experience hell... and an unexpected, forbidden bond growing inside the darkness?
7.7
My husband, Hudson Higgins, used my dowry to buy his way into the Chicago underworld while his family treated me like a servant in my own home. I endured their insults for the sake of my five-year-old daughter, Josie.
But then, the unthinkable happened. I found Josie's small, lifeless body by the garden fountain, while my sister-in-law Karly and mother-in-law Eleanor stood by, complaining about their party plans.
"She was just too naughty," Karly sneered, adjusting her pearls over my dead child.
When I turned to Hudson for help, he looked at me with dead eyes and told me it was just her fate. In that moment of absolute grief, I remembered the words of the ruthless Don Damien Falcone: "Your husband is a man who knows how to close a deal."
The truth sliced through me like a blade. Hudson hadn't just ignored the Don's interest in me; he had actively sold me to the Devil of Chicago to buy his seat at the table. He let his family punish me for the very sin he committed.
I had lost everything-my dignity, my mother, and now my baby-all sacrificed for a man who traded his wife's body for power. The sorrow in my chest evaporated, replaced by a scorching, blinding thirst for a blood vendetta.
After lunging at Hudson and feeling the world explode into white, I opened my eyes to find myself back in the winter of 1928. It was the exact night the nightmare began, and Don Damien Falcone was walking toward me in his penthouse.
This time, I won't be the broken bird in his gilded cage. If Hudson wants to use me to climb the ranks, I will use the Don's dark obsession to burn the Higgins family to the ground.
7.8
Melanie had been in a secret relationship with her best friend's brother, Ethan, for five years, and finally, he agreed to make it public.
Her best friend excitedly called to confirm, "Melanie, I can't believe my brother's sweetheart is you..."
Just as she was about to nod, she heard her friend say, "Half-sister? I thought he would like you."
That single sentence hit Melanie like a ton of bricks. In a frenzy, she rushed to the company to confront Ethan for clarification.
Unexpectedly, she overheard him confessing his deep feelings to his half-sister.
"Rosalyn, you're the only one I love," he declared. "Marrying her was just to protect you. Keeping her nearby ensures she won't dig into her mother's accident and won't harm you!"
Upon discovering the truth, Melanie decided to accept the marriage to turn the tables on him.
However, after obtaining the marriage certificate, she realized she might have married the wrong person...
Before she could regret it, Ethan's rival, swept her into his arms. "You think you can just up and leave after tying the knot?"