Page 1 of Sinner's Vow
Chapter One
NOAH
It feelslike an elephant sat on my brain and then someone took a chisel to the very center of it and hammered it in a few times for good measure.
My eyes slide open to the ceiling, only the room is painfully bright. I squeeze them closed again, and I press the heels of my hands into my sockets, trying to squash the insane spinning of the room.
But the soft sounds of someone else breathing pulls my eyes open again, drawing them to the space in the bed next to me.
“Fuck,” the curse breathes over my lips.
There’s a woman sleeping in the bed next to me. She’s lying facing me, her eyes soft and relaxed, her breathing slow and steady. And damn if she isn’t one of the most beautiful creatures I’ve ever seen, except she hardly even looks real. Her skin is nearly as white as the bedsheets beneath her. Her hair is so red it puts even Mia’s to shame. It falls in soft waves around her shoulders, pooling on the bed. And those lips. Shit. Words are knocking on my brain, entirely inspired by them. Her lips are full, damn near too full, and wildly red, though I don’t think she actually has any lipstick on.
She’s wearing the black button-up shirt I remember picking yesterday after the show.
Shit. Shit, shit, shit, shit, shit.
I take in a deep, angry breath and roll onto my back, glaring darkly at the ceiling. I swore I wasn’t going to do this. It’s one of the few promises I’ve made to myself since the world shattered into a million pieces of anger and pain. I swore I wouldn’t be weak like this.
But there’s a woman in the bed beside me, and as I search my memory of last night, I can’t remember how the fuck she got here.
You asshole, I think to myself.
I close my eyes and dig deeper. I know I got drunk last night, that much is obvious from the splitting hangover. Did I take anything else last night? Over the course of this tour, all of the nights are starting to blur, and I’ve been taking something more and more frequently.
But I can’t remember taking anything last night. But who the hell knows? I can’t remember anything else either.
A knock on the door just about splits my head right in half and I jump, hard. My eyes rip to the woman beside me, but somehow, she doesn’t stir. I watch her again for a moment, just to make sure she is actually breathing.
That’d be just my luck. Wake up with a dead girl in my bed with no memory of what happened.
I stumble out of bed, and pain rips through my brain. I hold the heel of my hand to my temple with a hiss of pain. Wearing nothing but my boxers, I cross to the door of the hotel room.
“Shit, Noah, what the hell did you do last night?”
My brother stands there in the doorway, shock and maybe anger on his face. He shakes his head like he truly can’t believe me.
My stomach clenches when I find Gina standing next to him, and Tori beside her, one of the label head honchos.
Fuck. What did I do last night? If they’re here, it had to be bad.
“What are you all doing here?” I growl, already planning my escape route. Shower. Get dressed. Get the fuck out of here before that woman wakes up and I hate myself even more when I see the disappointed look on her face when she realizes that I don’t know who she is and this isn’t going to be some fairytale where she falls in love with a rock star.
“What…” Gina growls. Her eyes spark with fury and she shakes her head.
“You go and post that video and you don’t expect there to be some questions?” Tori asks in that no-bullshit tone of hers. “For there to be some ramifications?”
I brush my hair back from my forehead, my fingers tangled in the knotted, wild mess. The kind of mess you only get when a woman runs her fingers through it and tugs at it over and over all night. “What the hell are you talking about? What video?”
“The one where you sang Promises To You with that woman, and then introduced her to the world as your wife,” Tyler growls.
My entire body flushes cold. Tyler’s hand snaps out and he grabs my left wrist, raising my hand. “You really fucking married someone last night? That you just met?”
It feels like the entire world is in a freefall. Because, there on my finger, is a ring. Gold and heavy and thick, it sits on that all-important finger for all four of us to see.
I glance back into the room where I can barely catch a glimpse of the woman’s shoulder and the curve of her hip on the bed. “Shit. Tyler, I can’t remember anything about last night.”
“Well, maybe this will refresh your memory,” Tori says as she taps something on her phone and then turns it around for me to see. “You posted it eight hours ago.”
