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But not nearly as much as I despised the way I welcomed the press of her body to mine with open arms.
“Goodnight, master,” she whispered, before dropping off to sleep in a flash.
And for the first time in years, so did I.Chapter Twenty-TwoBrandonI woke with a start, disoriented in a way I was unfamiliar with. Disorientation hadn’t been an associate of mine in adult life. My eyes blinked and flashed into the light. The sun was surprisingly high in the sky through the window for a winter morning, my body strangely warm from the press of the girl at my side.
I’d been sleeping deep.
Too fucking deep.
So fucking deep that it had taken some hellish kind of disturbance to pull me back to my senses.
The bruised Miss Emmerson jolted awake at the next round of pounding on the bedroom door, pressing closer to my side at the test of the door handle.
Locked. It was locked. I may have lost my damn mind in most of my actions last night, but locking the door had made it into my activities as standard seemingly.
“Bran!” the voice boomed from the other side, and I hissed out a curse as I pulled myself free from the limbs of the siren and got to my feet. “Bran! Are you in there? Jesus Christ!”
I threw myself into the first clothes I could lay my hands on, smoothing my hair down with pathetic strokes of my palms and shrugging on a jacket before crossing the room to the door.
“I’ll be back,” I told the beauty staring out from the bed covers. Her nod was barely visible as I unlocked the door and stepped out onto the landing before my idiot brother could come bursting in.
His eyes were virtually rabid, wild as I shunted him back along the landing and closed the door behind me.
“What the fuck?” I challenged. “Are you out of your fucking mind?!”
“Me out of my fucking mind?! What about you out of yours?!” he countered. “You’re going bastard crazy this week!”
His words slammed hard. For once the dumbass had a fucking point.
I straightened my jacket to some kind of order. “To what do I owe the pleasure of this ridiculous pissing alarm clock?”
He shook his head in disbelief. “Alarm clock? It’s gone midday. Midday, Bran. When’s the last time you were snoozing through the afternoon?”
My tone darkened. “I said, to what do I owe the pleasure of you hammering on my door like a man fucking possessed?”
“Your phone,” he said. “Have you taken a look at it this morning?”
“Clearly fucking not if the result is worth you disturbing my peace for, jackass,” I snapped, and fastened my shirt cuffs in some semblance of respectability.
“Fuck sake. The bids,” he carried on. “They’re going wild, Bran. Drake’s been on my case, said he’s fired you a whole whirlwind of messages on the encrypted portal. Wanted me to take action instead of you, but I told him it was your call. Told him I hadn’t the admin power to click to accept, nor to pissing send the scheduling forms out to the successful bidders.”
“More bids? Last night’s?” I asked like a fool, and he shoved his mobile handset in my direction.
There was a fresh roll of my gut as I observed the latest trail of client bids appearing in list form. There was a string of them, longer than I’d have considered at even the height of my bravado with the Paige Emmerson predictions. Clients I hadn’t thought of in months. Years in some cases. Bids with highest priority selected on their payment portal logins. Men wanting confirmations, wanting schedule forms, wanting their bids fired back with the tick boxes highlighted in full.
Normally I’d have been over it like a rash all night through. But no. I hadn’t given it a fucking thought all night through. My attention had been well and truly elsewhere.
“You need to accept them!” Eric gushed, like it was needed. “Drake says these people deserve the very finest feedback. Now, he said. He said right now, Bran.”
I could imagine his face as he spat out the instructions to Eric. His disapproval at the way I was handling his cuntish billionaire butt buddies.
The list was a whirlwind of high bids and zealous promises. I should have been euphoric, grinning like a fucking lunatic at the cash value of the girl in my bed.
But I wasn’t.
The way the prospect of selling her jammed into the woozy bout of weird-arsed fluffy bullshit tumbling through my brain was enough to make me pat my pockets for a smoke.
“Click them!” Eric urged. “Log in as you right here and click them! Get them rolling! Now!”
“I’ll go through them in my own time,” I grunted as I pulled out my cigarettes. “At my own pace, whenever I damn well see fit.”
