Savage Wilder: Dark New Adult High School Bully Romance (Sinners and Saints Book 4) Read online

  Savage Wilder

  Sinners and Saints Book 4

  Veronica Eden

  SAVAGE WILDER

  Copyright © 2021 Veronica Eden

  All rights reserved.

  No parts of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without the prior written permission of the copyright owner, except in the case of brief quotations embodied in reviews and certain other noncommercial uses permitted by copyright law. For permission requests, write to the author at this website:

  www.veronicaedenauthor.com

  This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, businesses, companies, organizations, locales, events and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or used fictitiously. Any resemblances to actual persons, living or dead, is unintentional and co-incidental. The author does not have any control over and does not assume any responsibility for author or third-party websites or their content.

  Contents

  Author’s Note

  About the Book

  Playlist

  Prologue

  1. Maisy

  2. Fox

  3. Fox

  4. Maisy

  5. Fox

  6. Maisy

  7. Fox

  8. Maisy

  9. Fox

  10. Maisy

  11. Maisy

  12. Fox

  13. Maisy

  14. Fox

  15. Maisy

  16. Maisy

  17. Fox

  18. Maisy

  19. Fox

  20. Maisy

  21. Maisy

  22. Fox

  23. Maisy

  24. Fox

  25. Maisy

  26. Fox

  27. Maisy

  28. Fox

  29. Maisy

  30. Maisy

  31. Fox

  32. Maisy

  33. Fox

  34. Maisy

  35. Fox

  36. Maisy

  37. Fox

  38. Maisy

  39. Fox

  Epilogue

  Epilogue

  Thank You + What’s Next?

  Acknowledgments

  About the Author

  Also by Veronica Eden

  Author’s Note

  Savage Wilder is a dark new adult high school bully romance with romantic suspense elements intended for mature readers. The Sinners and Saints series boys are all devilish bullies brought to their knees by a spitfire heroine, so if you love enemies-to-lovers type stories, you’re in the right place. This mature new adult romance contains crude language, dubious situations, revenge, and intense graphic sexual/violent content that some readers might find triggering or offensive. Please proceed with caution.

  If you like weak pushover heroines and nice guys this one ain’t for you, but if you dig strong females and smug antiheroes, then you’re in the right place! Hold onto your hearts, because these guys aren’t above stealing.

  Each book is part of a series but can be enjoyed as a standalone.

  Sinners and Saints series:

  #1 Wicked Saint

  #2 Tempting Devil

  #3 Ruthless Bishop

  #4 Savage Wilder

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  About the Book

  MAISY

  the boy i knew is gone.

  Rule follower. Straight laced. Goody-goody.

  I’m as well-behaved as they get, but then the worst thing ever happened to me…I caught the interest of the bad boy. Wilder isn’t the same guy I idolized when we were kids. He made that clear the day he moved back to Ridgeview.

  He hunts me, stalks me, surrounds me from all sides. I’m his new favorite plaything. Again. Last year was bad enough, but as graduation looms his claws are in me once more and he refuses to let go.

  And worst of all? I think I like it.

  FOX

  the wilder name is a curse.

  Pristine. Perfect. Fake.

  Once upon a time we were friends. Then her family destroyed mine. In return, I’ll destroy hers.

  I’m the resident black shadow this town fears. Whispers about. Everyone remembers that a Wilder means bad news. My sweet daisy should fear me because she’s the key piece in my revenge plot against her crooked parents.

  I’m not her friend anymore.

  I’ll take them all down, starting with her.

  Playlist

  (Spotify)

  Revenge—XXXTENTACION

  Killer—Valerie Broussard

  Riptide—Unlike Pluto

  JOLT—Unlike Pluto

  I’m a Sucker for a Liar in a Red Dress—Adam Jensen

  Good Girls—Elle King

  Arcade—Duncan Laurence, FLETCHER

  you broke me first—Tate McRae

  forget me too—Machine Gun Kelly, Halsey

  The Kid I Used to Know—Arrested Youth

  Dreams—Fleetwood Mac

  Nails—Call Me Karizma

  Heart-Shaped Box—Nirvana

  Riptide—grandson

  Monsters—All Time Low, blackbear

  Sick Thoughts—Lewis Blissett

  Hate The Way—G-Eazy, blackbear

  Consensual—Landon Tewers

  Heart Of The Young—coldrain

  body bag—Machine Gun Kelly, YUNGBLUD, The Used, Bert McCracken

  E-GIRLS ARE RUINING MY LIFE!—CORPSE, Savage Ga$p

  Gone—coldrain

  Monster (Under My Bed)—Call Me Karizma

  Learning to Survive—We Came As Romans

  Needed Me—Rihanna

  My Oh My—Paloma

  Rebels—Ivy Adara

  Trust—Alina Baraz

  We Belong—Dove Cameron

  Dandelions—Ruth B.

  To complicated. Friendships, histories, the thin line between love and hate.

  And to overcoming complicated to find the balance.

  Prologue

  MAISY

  10 Years Ago

  “That’s not fair!” I cry, chasing after my brother and our best friend. “You can’t win just because you’re nine, you jerk heads!”

  Their laughter echoes as the three of us run down the quiet street where we all live. They’re both a year older and bigger than me, meaning the boys can outrun me easily. It makes me so mad! Girls can be just as awesome at things as boys. I’ll show them.

  “Holden!” I yell at my brother’s back as frustration bubbles up in my chest.

  “Suck it up, Maisy. You lost!” Holden shoots a mean grin over his shoulder. “Maisy Daisy is a crybaby loser!”

  “I am not!” I shout loud enough that a few birds startle and fly away from the towering pine trees behind the houses on the block.

  Fox slows down, trailing Holden far enough that I can catch up. Once I’m beside him, he bumps his shoulder into mine and shoots me a secretive smirk. Some of the frustration leaves me.

  “I’m not a crybaby,” I mumble sourly.

  A huff of laughter escapes him and he gives me a sly look from the corner of his eyes. They’re like the ocean, dark blue and mysterious. I really want to see the ocean again someday. Both our families went last summer and it was my favorite trip, hunting for seashells and cool rocks with Fox and Holden as the waves crashed against the beach in California. I loved it so much, I made a bracelet of the s
tones Fox gave me. I never take it off.

  “You’re not,” Fox agrees. After a pause, his mouth curves into the trickster smile he gets when he wants to make trouble. It’s a smile that always draws me in for his sneaky plans. “Let’s get him back.”

  I grin. “Deal.”

  After high-fiving, he wraps an arm around my shoulder to tug me closer, whispering in my ear. He’s warm and smells like the sweet summer grass and a little like the motor oil from his dad’s garage. They must have been working on his dad’s motorcycle before he came out to play. My nose scrunches at the mix, but I don’t pull away.

  “You distract him, and I’ll find a beetle,” he instructs.

  I have to cover my mouth to keep my excitement from sneaking out and giving us away. It’s a perfect plan. Holden stayed up late one time and saw a scary movie about an army of mutant insects that freaked him out forever. Now he’s terrified of beetles because of one of the scenes.

  Nodding, I try to wink at Fox, but I end up blinking twice. Lame. He grins, shaking his head and messing with his dark brown hair as he slips away to hunt through the neighbor’s bushes.

  My brother has stopped running, waiting for Fox and I near the end of the street.

  “Holden,” I sing-song, skipping to quickly close the distance between us. “If you don’t stop being so mean to me, Fox says he won’t trade the Flareon he caught in Pokémon last week with you.” I stick my tongue out to sell my taunting distraction. “And I won’t show you how to build a cool treehouse on Animal Crossing.”

  “What?” Holden hisses. He brushes the long ends of his floppy light brown hair from his forehead agitatedly. It’s the same shade as mine. People used to think we were twins even though he’s older. “You both promised. I need those for my challenges!”

  Fox walks up, not giving anything away except for his hands tucked behind him. “What are we playing next? You beat us both to the finish line, so you pick.”

  Holden shakes his head. “Not yet.” He whirls on Fox. “You swear you’re going to trade your Flareon with me?”

  Fox tilts his head. “Yeah, dude.”

  Holden relaxes and mulls over what he wants to play next.

  “Hide and seek?” I suggest, unable to hold back a tiny smirk as I practically squirm with anticipation of what’s to come.

  “No, you lost. You don’t get to pick.” Holden sighs. “But hide and seek does sound good.”

  “Yeah?” Fox grins. “I was thinking the same thing. Can you hold this for me while we hide from your sister?”

  Before Holden can finish nodding, Fox grabs his hand and shakes out a round striped beetle into Holden’s palm. It’s a harmless potato bug, I think. My brother looks down and his brown eyes go wide. A scream tears from his throat as he flails his hand around to get the bug off. The tiny little thing drops to the ground, wriggling in confusion for a moment before scurrying away while Holden freaks out, waving his hand around like it was poisoned.

  “Got you!” I cheer, giving Fox a triumphant high five. “That’s what you get for cheating.”

  Holden’s face twists in embarrassed irritation. He swipes his hand on his jeans, over his freak out now that the bug is gone. “You guys suck!”

  My delighted laughter breaks free, making me double over and hug my belly when a cramp twinges. Fox leans against me for support as we fall into hysterics at our revenge prank.

  “Whatever,” Holden grumbles, waving a hand to act like he’s all cool. We totally got him. “I’m going home to play Xbox. This is boring.”

  Satisfaction fills me to the brim as I watch my brother jog across the street to our house. Holden can be such a whiny butthead sometimes, but Fox likes him anyway. I do too, because he’s my brother, and he’s not always a jerk. The three of us have grown up on this street since before I can remember. Our mom and his parents work together and they’re close friends.

  “Maise, come look.”

  Fox has wandered over to the grassy field at the end of the block. The tree the three of us challenge each other to climb every week sits in the middle. Beyond the tall grass and wildflowers, the woods stretch up into the hills at the base of the Rocky Mountains. I walk over, automatically reaching up to catch one of the lower branches of the tree and swing back and forth like a gymnast.

  “What’s up?” I try to get higher, but the bark bites into my hands.

  He pops up from the tall grass and reaches for me, tickling my stomach, making me shriek and wriggle until I’m forced to let go of the branch or keep suffering his attack.

  Once I’m on the ground, I curl into a protective crouch so he can’t mess with me. “What the heck?”

  Fox snorts. “You make it too easy.”

  “There are rules, Fox,” I point out, standing up. We have them written down and everything in a notebook with Pokémon stickers on the front. I huff importantly and recite the sacred rule: “No tickling when a climber is in the tree.”

  The corners of his mouth lift and his eyes are bright. “Yeah, you’re right.” He taps my nose. “Sorry.”

  “What did you want me to see?”

  “I found this.”

  Fox holds up a wildflower he picked, his crooked smile turning proud. It’s dainty with thin light purple petals, not like the white daisies we usually see. A small gasp escapes me as I take it.

  “It’s so pretty.” I touch a soft petal carefully. “What’s it for?”

  “You’re my daisy.”

  Fox waits until I tear my attention from the flower to look at him in surprise. He’s serious, his eyebrows wrinkled as he stares at me. Reaching out, he circles his fingers around my wrist. I watch, wide-eyed as he leans down and places a kiss on the wildflower clutched in my hands.

  “I’m going to marry you someday,” he promises.

  A feeling like butterflies fills my chest as I stare back at him.

  “Okay,” I whisper.

  He grins and tugs on my wrist. “Come on. There’s something else I want to show you. It’s in my dad’s garage. I wasn’t supposed to find it, but I did when Dad went to answer a call and left me alone.” We walk a few steps, then he stops us. “You have to promise not to tell anyone. Even Holden. Got it?”

  I nod. “Promise.”

  Flying on the giddiness making me dizzy, I follow Fox, like I always do.

  A week later my world feels crushed.

  I sit outside my house with my knees tucked against my chest and my arms wrapped around my skinny legs. Holden is at the end of the block throwing a football at our favorite climbing tree over and over. Across the street, the crooked for sale sign stuck in the Wilder’s front lawn mocks me.

  The someday he promised me won’t come.

  Fox Wilder is gone.

  One

  Maisy

  There are less than two months until graduation and Fox picks now to start messing with me again.

  Well, no. He actually chose a couple weeks ago, but I slam down hard on that memory before it can assault me.

  I squeeze Sam’s hand tight as we descend the steps from Silver Lake High School to the student parking lot at the base of the hill where our classmates hoot and call to each other while revving the engines of their expensive cars. The warm breeze moving through the pine trees carries the seniors’ rowdiness high above the school’s sprawling mountainside campus.

  Fox Wilder’s eyes don’t leave me for a second as he leans against his motorcycle with his arms crossed. Whenever his attention is on me, I know something horrible is coming. I can’t decide if it was better to be ignored by my oldest friend, or to be his plaything with a target on my back.

  Once he got it through my head last year that he despises me for some reason, he mostly left me alone. But that’s over now. Almost every day for the last two weeks he has some new twisted way to fuck with my head.

  This time I don’t have my older brother or my friends to watch out for me, so I’m on my own to stand up to his bullying crap.

  The leather jac
ket he wears stretches tight over the muscled arms I know hide beneath. He shifts his rigid posture, poised on his hunt for my pain and humiliation. Despite the warm spring weather, he’s in all black from his jacket to his jeans to his boots.

  Everyone else abides the preppy SLHS uniform—black blazers embroidered with the school’s gold crest, slacks for the guys, and evergreen plaid skirts for the girls. There are some who bend the rules for a shorter hem, a loose tie, or more fashionable shoes, and then there’s Fox, who never pays attention to the dress code, always the outlaw king of his own world.

  No one can tell him what to do, not even the school faculty. They’re as afraid of him as everyone else in town.

  His stormy dark blue gaze is hard and angry as usual, thick brows set in a permanent scowl. It’s the only way I’ve known my old friend since he returned to Ridgeview last year like a ghost coming back to haunt me with the heartache I’ve carried since he left Colorado.