Son of Sin (Book 3 of the Forbidden Series)

1

Laughter spread around the table as the members of FX guzzled their drinks and poured another round. The tour was finally over, and they were all happy to be going home for some well-earned R and R. The tour bus was still ten hours from home, so they decided to drink the night away. Blaring the radio in the back of the bus while Donna Olson, their voluptuous bass player with the short punk rock haircut, danced about with a Jack Daniel’s bottle in her hands singing along, off-key, with the radio. The guys could not stop laughing at the spectacle she was making of herself.

Blake Williams, their frontman, threw a balled-up piece of paper at her and booed between laughs. “Leave the singing to me.” Blake was Donna’s ex-boyfriend from high school, and after a brief battle period, they both realized how profitable burying the hatchet could be and ended up in the same band. Much like Donna, Blake had a punk feel to him with his spiky blond hair and many piercings in his ears and eyebrow. Punk wasn’t Damien’s thing, but Donna and Blake were both sensational at what they did which was in turn good enough for him.

Of course, they were fun as hell too, which was always a bonus.

John Horton, their lead guitar player, was less punk and scruffier than the other three. He slightly resembled what Damien would have assumed Jesus looked like if he had become a rock star. John might have resembled the holy saviour with the long hair and scruffy beard, but he was far from wholesome in any way. FX was a wild pack of rowdy self-indulgent sinners, and Damien loved every single moment.

“You’re just jealous,” Donna giggled, “that I got boobs and you don’t.” She said sticking her tongue out at Blake.

“Oh yeah, that’s it. It has nothing at all to do with the fact that you screech like a dying cat.” Blake teased drawing a mild cheer of agreement from the rest of the guys.

“Here-here.” Damien cheered.

Donna jumped up into Damien’s lap putting her arm around his shoulder and pressing her breasts against his chest flirtatiously. Damien took a sip of his drink and placed it on the table looking her in the eye as she leaned into him seductively. His hand on her thigh. Her dark red lips hovered over his. “You’re just mad because I won’t let you into my pants.” She said breathlessly.

“But baby everyone’s been in your pants.” He laughed sticking out his tongue at her. The guys laughed, and Donna slugged Damien in the chest. He rubbed the sore spot with a chuckle as Donna slipped into the seat next to him guzzling back the bottle in her hand.

“Trying to sing has got to be the worst thing you ever did.” John teased Donna from across the small table.

“No, the worse thing I ever did was sleep with your brother.” She teased back.

“Worse thing I ever did was sleep with your mama.” John laughed scratching his crotch. “She gave me crabs.”

“Worse thing I’ve ever done was spray paint this girl’s phone number across the lockers in the boy’s bathroom in school when she cheated on me,” Blake confessed. “She was harassed by the football team all year. Oh, wait that was your number.” He feigned surprise and snickered at Donna.

“Yeah let’s all pick on the girl. God, I hate being outnumbered all the time.” She pouted.

“Liar,” Damien called her bluff as he took another sip. Donna loved being one of the guys. She was fun and brutally honest about everything. Able to get as rude and crude as any of them if not worse than them from time to time.

“What is the worst thing you ever did?” Blake asked looking at Damien.

“Gee, there are so many how do I choose.” Damien placed his glass down and thought to himself for a moment. “Ok, I got it. Back in school before I came into my philandering ways, I attempted a handful of relationships.” A collective gasp rose up. “I know so unlike me, but hear me out. Their daddies didn’t like my daddy so in turn; they didn’t like me. Since the daddies didn’t like me, the girls wouldn’t date me. This started to piss me off. So, when I was about nineteen, I realized that my father’s friend Ronny was right. I was rich. I figured if I threw enough money at these girls that had rejected me they would probably spread their legs for me. So, I did, and they did, and I videotaped it….” he said with a self-satisfied grin, “and then I mailed the videotapes to their daddies.”

They all broke out in hysterical laughter. “You are the king of evil.” Blake praised him. “So, is that when you got into the habit of ruining good girl?”

The smile faded from Damien’s face as he became defensive. “I don’t ruin good girls. They were never good, to begin with, and they were sure as hell ruined long before I get to them.”

“Please, you are a classic predator of women,” Donna added.

“You set your sights on them, and you’re not happy until you have devastated them.” John agreed with Blake.

“That’s not true.” Damien snarled insulted by the implication that he was a villain.

“Is too, what about Vivien?” Donna argued wiggling her eyebrows at him knowingly.

“She was a gold digger anyway.” He argued.

“Hannah.” Blake listed another. “She was so devastated her career completely went down the toilet after you left her.”

“Not my fault she was a one-hit wonder.”

“Carla gained forty pounds when you dumped her she was so depressed it ended her career as a model,” John added.

“I didn’t put the ice cream in her hand.”

“Janet?”

“She was married.” Damien pointed out.

“And you brought an end to that right quick. Then you left her.”

Damien shrugged. “Her fault for cheating.”

“See it’s always her fault somehow. You never own up to your callous part in things. You’re a great guy Damien,” Donna told him patting his shoulder supportively, “but face it; you are incapable of having a relationship with any woman let alone a nice woman without devastating her horribly in some way.”

“I could too.” Damien snarled. He did not like it when people told him he could not do something. He always felt a compulsion to prove people wrong.

His friends laughed not believing one word. “You could not.” John agreed with Donna.

Damien leaned forward in his seat his hands on the table. “Oh yeah, put your money where your mouth is.” Damien challenged.

“Ok.” John grinned, taking Damien’s challenge. “When we get home, we’ll go out and find you a girl. A nice girl, of my choosing, and I bet you that you can’t get in with her and last, let’s say six months, and then leave her, without devastating her or destroying her life in some way.”

“I bet you five grand that I can do just that.” Damien challenged.

“Oh, you are on.” John shook his hand to seal the deal.

“Wait, I want in on this.” Blake jumped in with a wicked grin.

“Me too.” Donna chuckled. “Talk about easy money.”

***

Edmonton Alberta…

Eve Cassie flipped through the envelopes she found in the rack by the door as she had every morning over the last four weeks, finding bills and letters for her father, one or two replies from local colleges, but not the letter she was hoping for.

Sighing, she tossed the mail on the dining room table in front of her mother who was still finishing off her breakfast. She had sent in her admissions tape to Kurtwood months ago and still nothing. She would even welcome a rejection notice so that she could know one way or the other. The not knowing was killing her. Frustrated Eve dropped down on the sofa and pouted. She needed to get out of this place.

Mrs. Cassie flipped through the mail opening one after the other and turned around in her seat to look at Eve. “Eve you got into another one. Both Lockhart and the University. Have you decided yet what you’re going to take? I hear Lockhart has a top-notch accounting program.”

Accounting, she couldn’t have picked a more boring job. Eve didn’t want to be an accountant. Just another nine-to-five drone cooped up in some mind-numbing cubical. She wanted to go to Kurtwood. She wanted to dance. Wanted to perform on the big stage a member of a real New York ballet company. She wanted excitement in her life.

“I don’t know.” She sighed. “I-”

“Oh, Mary don’t you look pretty.” Her mother said cutting Eve off as her older sister Mary came into the room dressed for church in a flattering but conservative yellow summer dress. As always Mary had entered the room and was automatically the focus of attention. Mary was their parents’ favourite. They had gotten married and wanted a child so much. When they had been blessed with Mary, they had been so happy. But then a few years later an accident happened… namely Eve. An unplanned, unwanted mistake. However, being devout Christians and her father a reverend they were forced to have her and never let her forget that Mary was perfect and she, well she was just a nuisance.

Mary was twenty-five and still living at home. Determined to stay under her parents’ roof and protective watch until she was married off to a nice Christian boy. She was a beauty with her long blonde hair and blue eyes. Her hourglass figure and sweet, wholesome obedient personality.

Eve couldn’t be more different from her perfect sister. Nineteen years old she was smaller than Mary. Eve was tiny and trim. Her breasts were small, and her body was slim, even in heels she couldn’t clear five-foot-five. Her raven hair wasn’t spun gold, and her eyes were more silver than blue. She had never had the perfect Barbie doll figure like Mary, and she wasn’t obedient and mild tempered either.

“Are we ready to go?” Her father asked coming into the room fixing the cuffs of his brown blazer. He paused abruptly staring at the fitted black jeans and the green baby-t Eve was wearing. “Good god Eve, would it kill you to dress properly for church? It’s the house of the Lord you think you could show a little respect. Get up to your room and put on that dress your mother bought you.” He ordered.

“I hate that dress it makes me look like a child.”

“You are a child.” Her mother retorted.

“I am not, I’m nineteen. Old enough to sign a contract, vote, and even drink.”

“Maybe if you stopped acting like a child people would treat you like an adult.” Mary snipped. Eve got up and headed for the stairs pulling Mary’s hair on the way. “Ouch!” Mary cried. “Grow up.”

“Goodie-goodie.” Eve snapped back.

“Jezebel.”

“Eve quit being difficult and go get dressed.” He father snapped.

Eve raced up the stairs to her room and threw open the closet. She hated this house it was stifling. She took out the ugly blue dress her mother had bought her for church. It buttoned all the way up to her throat and was a good eighty years out of date. Mary got a new dress to attract a husband and as always Eve got the marked down crap from the discount thrift shop.

She quickly changed and braided her hair as her parents often insisted on. She looked herself over in the mirror and groaned. God, she looked ridiculous. When would they stop treating her like a child?

Eve picked up her iPod from the dresser and placed the earphones into her ears. She had downloaded music from her friends’ houses and hid them on her iPod. Her parents did not approve of rock music in the least. It was the devil’s music they would say. Only gospel was allowed in this house, but what her folks didn’t know wouldn’t hurt them.

She headed back down the stairs to join the rest of her family only to have her iPod ripped from her hands the moment she reached the living room. “You are not taking that to church.” Her father snapped and placed it on the table. “Why can’t you be more like Mary? She never gives us any trouble.”

Be more like Mary. Eve heard that phrase a million times a day. She didn’t want to be like Mary. She just wanted to be.

“Now go get into the van. It’s time for church.”

***

Damien shuffled about in his seat. The small wooden pew was hard and uncomfortable for a man of Damien’s size. His knees were pressed against the back of the pew in front of him, and the church’s air conditioner did not work. It had to be forty degrees in that bloody place, and he was wedged between some disapproving old biddy and John in the back of the church. His head was pounding from the rye and the partying they had done the night before. “Anyone else thinks Sunday morning follows too damn close after Saturday night,” Damien complained unbuttoning the top of his dress shirt to relieve some of the sweltering heat.

“Shh.” The old blue-haired biddy beside him shushed him giving the two men dirty looks.

“Shh, you.” Damien snarled back, his head hurting too much to be polite.

“Well, I’ve never!” She gasped horrified with the way he spoke to her.

“Then perhaps you should try.” He snarled. The woman stood up in a huff and moved to the next pew still giving Damien dirty looks. Damien lowered his sunglasses, crossed his eyes and stuck out his tongue at her until he felt John dig his elbow into his side. “Ouch.”

“Behave; we are supposed to be blending.” John scolded him.

“Come on a church are you serious?” Damien rolled his eyes. The last time he had been forced to sit through mass he was still living at home with his parents and going to that damn Catholic school they had sent him to. They had been hoping it would have instilled some good sense and values into their son, but it had only bored him greatly. His father, having been raised by a very devout Catholic grandmother, still insisted that the family catch mass when they could. Granted his busy rock star lifestyle made that hard and often contradicted every aspect they taught in Sunday school. In the end, they had settled for mass on Easter and Christmas and the odd confession, but that was the existent of their religious conviction after Damien’s great-grandmother died.

“Where else would you suggest we find a nice girl?” John asked.

Damien shrugged. “I don’t know a grocery store. The mall. How about the strip club?” He wickedly suggested.

John shook his head. “You are hopeless. Does your mother know how dirty you are?”

Damien made the sign of the cross and folded his hands in prayer. “Dear Lord, protect my dear sweet mother from finding out exactly how terrible her son is. I fear her weak heart could not withstand the shock.”

“Cut that out.” John scolded. “Are we going to do this or are you backing out?”

Damien sighed. “Ok.” He looked around and nodded to the dark-haired woman in the third row. “How about her?”

“No.” John pointed at a plain brunette in the fifth row. “Her.”

Damien scoffed. “Oh please, that’s not even a challenge.”

“Ok, you want better?” John looked around thoughtfully.

“Could this guy be more boring?” Damien complained watching the reverend blather on. He called up his daughter to lead the congregation in a hymn. She was tall and pretty with long blonde hair and bright blue eyes. She dressed in a very conservative pale-yellow dress that hung below the knee. The congregation took out their books and joined her as she sang. She sang very well, for that sort of thing at least.

“That one.” John grinned. “The preacher’s daughter.”

Damien looked at John and shook his head. “You are cruel.” Sending Damien after the preacher’s daughter was cruel and unusual… to him.

“Only if you devastate her or ruin her life in some way.” John patted Damien on the back and chuckled maniacally. “Enjoy.”

Damien watched her as she led the congregation in song. She was so far beyond his type Damien wasn’t sure just how he was going to handle the situation. He didn’t want to lose the bet, but something told him he was about to be very bored for six long months.

***

Eve slumped in her seat chewing her gum and popping it. Dear God, she was bored. Her parents did this to her every Sunday, one of the many downsides to being the Reverend’s daughter. Her whole life she had been dragged to these sermons to listen to the same stuff over and over. It was not that she did not love her father or that she was faithless she was just bored. There had to be life outside these church walls. Every time she tried to find it she got dragged back in. Her mother held out a tissue and eyed Eve with a harsh look. Eve spat out the gym and sat up straight taking the book her mother offered her so she could sing along with her sister who was standing at the altar.

Oh yes, her older sister Mary. Daddy’s little girl and the perfect daughter. The perfect student. The perfect parishioner. The perfect pain in Eve’s butt. Mary got everything.

Eve suffered through the rest of the service reminding herself that at least in the fall she would go away to school. After mass Eve stood up with her family, as usual, shaking hands with the parishioners and half listening to the dull conversations. She could not wait to get home and get out of this silly granny dress her mother insisted her daughter wear, so she looked respectable.

She was about to make a break for the van and wait for her family when she saw him. Eve could not believe her eyes. At first, she thought she was seeing things when he emerged from the crowd of familiar faces. He stood out in his Armani suit and dark sunglasses. His tanned skin and dark hair only added to his allure. He stood almost a foot taller than everyone else. Eve could not breathe as he approached. He carried himself with such confidence and certainty that came from a life of power and privilege.

Eve was sure her mouth was agape, and she did her best to shut it as he reached them and removed his sunglasses. His bright piercing green eyes and the sinful smile left no doubt in her mind as to who this man was. Dear blessed lord in heaven, Damien Sanchez was in her church and standing less than five feet away from her.

“A positively moving sermon Reverend Cassie,” Damien said shaking her father’s hand and then he turned to Mary. “And might I say you sing like an angel.” Mary blushed, and he introduced himself. “My name is Damien Sanchez.”

“You are new to our church.” Her father observed.

“Yes, I am. This is my good friend John Horton.” Eve almost fell over. She had thought he looked familiar too and now she knew why. She looked around to see if the rest of FX was in the church but she did not see them.

“Are you thinking of changing churches?” Mr. Cassie asked.

“No, regretfully that is not it. We travel quite a bit, so regular attendance anywhere is somewhat difficult.” Damien admitted.

“Oh, why do you travel so often?” Mrs. Cassie asked. Eve closed her eyes in embarrassment. Her family was so lame they did not even know who they were talking too.

Eve could see the surprise in Damien’s face when her family did not recognize him. John snickered and then said, “Are you serious?” Her parents looked at John blankly, and he patted Damien on the back before going outside. “Good luck buddy.”

Her parents redirected their attention back to Damien who gathered himself and smiled again. “It’s not often I get asked, but it is a refreshing change of pace. I’m a musician.” He admitted and Eve snickered when she saw her parents straighten their backs and look at each other. He must have sensed their disapproval. “I’m a successful musician if that makes any difference.”

It didn’t.

“I’m sure you’re very good. We thank you for coming today and hope to see you next Sunday.” Mr. Cassie said politely ushering his children outside.

Eve snickered to herself. She did not imagine a man like Damien was used to rejection. She glanced over her shoulder and saw him following them out. “I was wondering if your daughter might like to join me for dinner tonight.” He asked bringing the group to a stop. Eve felt overwhelmed with excitement. She was positively giddy. Damien smiled and stepped up to Mary and Eve’s smile faded. Of course, he meant her. “Your name was?”

“Mary.” She grinned obviously no more immune to his charm than any other woman.

“A lovely name.” He said politely taking her hand in his and kissing the back of her knuckles. Mary blushed and giggled. Her father took Mary’s hand from Damien’s with annoyance.

“I am sorry, but my daughter cannot go out tonight.” He answered for her. Granted Mary was twenty-five, but she never dared to go against her father’s wishes, and he had said no. Eve felt a smug satisfaction in knowing Mary would miss out due to their parents’ lack of knowledge.

But then Damien spoke once more saying the one thing that would clinch the deal with any parent. “Did I mention that I am a multibillion-dollar heir?” Her parents froze and looked at each other than at the deadly serious expression on Damien’s face.

Eve’s father smiled, and then he shook Damien’s hand once more. “That is, she can’t go out tonight, but that is no reason why you could not join us for dinner in our humble home.” And he had them. Eve rolled her eyes, everyone had a price and marrying a daughter off to a multibillionaire appeared to be her parents. They gave Damien the address, directions, and the phone number in case he got lost. Damien shook their hands and said good-bye. Eve watched wistfully as he walked away having never even noticed her. That man was incredible. He was successful, sexy, and loaded… and after Mary.

Eve felt the jealousy boil up inside her at how unfair her life was. She wished she could punch her perfect sister in the head. Eve got in the van and pouted all the way home. “What’s wrong?” Mary asked as they climbed the stairs to go to their rooms and change their clothes. “You were so quiet all the way home, granted it’s a nice change from your usual complaining but what’s up?”

Eve stopped and turned to look at her sister on the step beneath her. “It’s not fair.”

“Oh, you’re jealous,” Mary said crossing her arms and smirking.

“Of course, I’m jealous, you land Damien Sanchez of all people, and what’s worse is you don’t even know who he is.” She ranted heading up the rest of the stairs and down the hall.

“Of course, I know who he is,” Mary argued. “He is a multibillion-dollar heir, and he is interested in me.” She bragged sticking out her tongue at Eve.

“Oh yeah? What is he an heir of?” Eve asked crossing her arms over her chest. Mary couldn’t answer and Eve grinned smugly. “What is the name of his band? What instrument does he play?” When Mary had no answer, Eve walked into her room and slammed her door.

She stripped away her ugly dress and pulled out a pair of worn white skinny jeans that hugged her body. She put on a white sleeveless tank top and a loose black glitzy t-shirt over the top. She finished it off with a thick black belt and a pair of black runners. Eve turned on her iPod and stood in front of the small mirror on the wall. She listened to her music while she combed out her long dark hair and styled it the way she liked. Her parents always made her wear it back in a childish braid at church, but at home, she wore her naturally wavy hair down in curls.

Eve looked herself over in the mirror; the change was so much better than the childish appearance her parents insisted on. This way she looked her age. She promised to obey their wishes in the church to show respect for her father at his work, but at home, her image was her own. Eve danced around the room for a bit and then lay on her bed looking through some college magazines her mother had left her. Her mother had applied to some schools and Eve heard back from a few of them but not the one she truly wanted to go too. So, it looked like she would be forced to pick from a future she did not want.