Page 31 of Brody
“I messed up.”
I never should have gotten involved with Ellis. Maybe I shouldn’t have even brought him home, but I never expected him to be such a successful temptation.
No. That made it sound like this was somehow his fault. The fault lay with me. I was the one who was weak. I was the one who had taken advantage of him. Sure, he’d consented and seemed to enjoy everything we did, but that didn’t change the fact that hewas completely reliant on me. The way things were now, nothing between us could ever be equal, but that hadn’t stopped me from chasing my own desires last night.
I’d used him as a distraction. Even if he was a willing distraction, that didn’t change the fact that I’d used him.
“Not again,” I muttered to myself. “Never going to be that stupid again.”
I groaned, slapped my cheeks a few times to wake myself up, and got out of bed. The sun was barely up, and I already felt like I needed a stiff drink.
Or ten.
I may be a degenerate, but I hadn’t yet sunk so low that I would start getting drunk for breakfast.
Strong coffee would have to do.
Rounding the bed to approach my wardrobe, I noticed Ellis’s clothes scattered over the floor. Ordinarily, I wouldn’t touch a partner’s clothes and let them handle their own laundry, but technically, they were my clothes so I didn’t want them to get too wrinkled.
Picking the pieces up one by one, I tossed them into the hamper by the door to be cleaned and ironed later.
The last piece I picked up was the shirt. It was one of the few I owned that wasn’t a plaid pattern of some sort, but it was still one of my favorites due to the deep pockets. I was very familiar with this shirt, so when I picked it up, I immediately realized something was wrong.
It was heavier than it should have been.
Weighing it in my hands for a moment, I soon traced the extra weight to a wooden box in the pocket.
I should have realized what I was holding the moment I laid eyes on the box, but my sleep and sex addled brain was particularly slow that morning. It wasn’t until I opened the box and was staring down at its contents that the memories of yesterday came flooding back to me.
The key. In the chaos of finding out about Creed’s disappearance, I’d completely forgotten about Poppy Milford’s key.
Slamming the box closed, I started pulling fresh clothes out of my wardrobe.
Magnus needed to know about this.
I could only hope he wasn’t still mad at me.
CHAPTER 6
Ellis
I wokeup to the noise of Brody hurriedly getting dressed.
“Wha…?”
I was almost as groggy as when I woke up for the first time in the hospital, and when I tried to sit up, I was sore.
Very sore.
After so long with an empty head, I wasn’t used to being bombarded by memories upon waking. This time, moments after opening my eyes, images of the previous night flashed before my eyes.
Oh. So that’s why I was sore.
Clearing my throat, I tried again. “Brody? What’s going on?”
Brody froze with only one arm in his shirt and his pants hanging open on his hips.
“Ellis. Right… um...” It wasn’t often that Brody lost his words, and the sight of him hesitating now made me nervous.
