Filed To Story: Pretty Poisoned Novel by Elle Mitchell
“Are you ready to leave, Teagan?” Rhett asks.
“Yeah, I am.”
“You can’t be serious! He is a monster, Teagan.”
I wipe the tears from under my eyes as Rhett and Brady stand and push their chairs in.
“Come on,” Brady says. He takes my hand in his and starts toward the door.
Before we leave, I turn back to Blakely one more time.
“I really love you, Blake,” I tell her. “So much.”
“Are you okay?” Brady asks once we’re outside.
“No,” I sob. “I’m not okay in any way.”
“You will be,” Brady says. “People like us always are.”
“Teagan!” Blakely calls after me. She catches up to us and grabs me by my shoulder. “Don’t do this!”
“I’m sorry,” I cry.
“I’ll never talk to you again,” Blakely says. “If you do this, don’t call me when it happens to you. And you can’t come to my wedding.”
“Blake you don’t mean that.”
“I do mean it! I can’t believe I came all the way out here,” she says. “I should have listened to Austinyou’re a lost cause.”
She reaches into her purse, pulls out an envelope, and thrusts it at my chest. “Here. In case you change your mind.”
Once she storms off, I realize it’s a ticket for a direct flight from Denver to Santa Ana, leaving in about three hours.
“You want me to throw that away for you?” Rhett asks.
I nod, handing it to him, and then watch him tear it in half and throw it into a trash can on the street.
“You didn’t deserve that,” Rhett says. “You know that, right?”
“I don’t know,” I reply honestly. “I feel pretty stupid right now.”
“You’re not stupid, honey,” he says.
“I’m sorry. I know how it feels, Teagan,” Brady says.
He opens the door to the hotel, and I step inside.
I’m not so sure Brady does know how I feel. He told me he knows Rhett loves himthat he can see himself growing old with him, having children. Rhett isn’t whatever Luca is.
But Declan is right, too. Yesterday, I didn’t care.
“Teagan!” I turn and see Luca sitting on a couch in the lobby. “Thank fuck.”
He stands and rushes over to me, picking me up, and I wrap my arms around him, burying my head in his neck.
“You scared the shit out of me,” he says. “I’m so fucking happy to see you.”
Maybe I’m an idiot. Maybe I was wrong in my initial assessment that I’d know love when I saw itthat I’d recognize it when I finally felt it because I feel loved right now.
I felt loved last night.
The elevator doors open behind us, and he sets me down. I wipe under my eyes as I step into the elevator with the three of them.
“What happened?” Luca asks.
“I don’t want to talk about it.”
“Go easy on her,” Rhett says. “It was bad.”
“I’m always nice to Teagan,” he says. “She’s my sweet angel, aren’t you, Teag?”
I choke back a sob. I miss not crying.
He threads his fingers through my hair and kisses the top of my head. “I love you so much, Teagan.”
I step out of the elevator and walk to the room, stopping for him to unlock the door for us.
“I’m still the same person,” Luca says.
“I know.”
“I wash your hair for you and hold you while you sleep.”
I bite my lower lip. “I know.”
“Okay,” he says. He attempts a smile and, with his other hand on my lower back, pushes the door open.
“Teagan!”
River rushes over to me and pulls me into a hug. She looks like she’s been crying, too; she buries a sob into my neck.
“You can’t cry,” I tell her. “I’m having a really hard time with my own crying, and I fucking hate crying. I hate everything about it. I hate how ugly I look, I hate how it fucks up my face, I hate the tightness in my chest, and that feeling like I can’t fucking swallow. So please stop.”
“I’m sorry,” she says. “I just don’t want to lose any more people.”
It’s then that I realize we’re in a room full of faces I don’t recognize.
“Are you finally ready to sit down and deal with this?” a greasy, irritated man in a suit asks. “Maybe his girlfriend could be with him when he makes a statement.”
“No,” Declan says. “Teagan is not good PR.”
“Declan ” Hazel says, shaking her head.
“I’m not talking about the book shit,” he says. “She knows what I’m talking about.”
“One of the other two, then.”
“They’re married to each other. That might not be a good idea, either. And they had a relationship with her, too. Look, Luca speaking on camera is just an all-around terrible idea. You’re going to have to trust me on that.”
“Well, what do you have on this person that you could use?” the man asks.
I look back and forth between the two brothers and shake my head. “Are you serious?”
“It actually works in your favor that they reported the weird shit she said about cults,” another man says. “That was a dumb move by the journalist; it diminishes her credibility. No one is going to take that seriously.”
New Book: Returned To Make Them Pay
On her wedding anniversary, Alicia is drugged and stumbles into the wrong room—straight into the arms of the powerful Caden Ward, a man rumored never to touch women. Their night of passion shocks even him, especially when he discovers she’s still a virgin after two years of marriage to Joshua Yates.