Total pages in book: 81
Estimated words: 77124 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 386(@200wpm)___ 308(@250wpm)___ 257(@300wpm)
Estimated words: 77124 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 386(@200wpm)___ 308(@250wpm)___ 257(@300wpm)
While I still stood in awe of her condo.
“Ready?” she asked, and I turned to find her watching me.
“Somehow, it feels wrong to ask you to crash in a shitty studio apartment when you got this to come home to.”
But we were already cutting it close, so we rushed into a cab, then made our way back to Washington Heights just in time for our meeting.
Saylor filled out the paperwork.
I handed over the cash.
Then we were handed the keys.
I don’t think it fully sank in until we rode the elevator up silently, put the lock in the door, and stepped into the studio.
We were going to be living together for the time being.
And there was no fucking way we were going to be able to fight what was growing between us when we were in such close quarters.
“I’ll sleep on the couch,” she said, her mind clearly moving in the same direction. “You’re bigger. You need the bed.”
Oh, we were both going to be in the bed.
Whether she wanted to admit that or not…
CHAPTER ELEVEN
Saylor
Yeah, I really didn’t give this whole situation enough thought.
I was going to live with Anthony?
I mean, really, why had I even said anything? I could have just rented the place myself. Stayed in the place by myself. And not be forced to smell his spicy cologne filling up the small space, watching him do mundane life things like making the bed that really had no right to be as sexy as it was.
In my defense, he’d stripped off his jacket and rolled up his sleeves before he started to get the place in order as I sat on the couch with his binoculars, pretending to be watching the house across the street.
When it came to men, my experience with them tended to involve going out to eat and having sex. I never really got the chance to watch a man move around an apartment, arranging food and supplies we’d ordered to be delivered.
I mean, the man actually took the shelves out of the fridge, put them into the sink, and scrubbed them before he put the food inside.
Who would have thought that a man who cleaned would be so hot?
Or maybe it was just more accurate to say that everything Anthony Costa did was hot to me.
“You alright?” he asked, making me snap back to focus, finding him watching me watching him as he wiped down the kitchen counters before he set the new coffee machine there.
“I don’t think I’ve ever seen a man clean so thoroughly before,” I said, trying to cover up the fact that I found said cleaning oddly erotic.
To that, he shrugged, “My mom was big on all of us learning how to keep a house. Chores included scrubbing the fridge and the bathrooms. She said it would teach us not to be slobs if we were the ones who had to clean it all up.”
“Not just the girls, huh? I like that,” I decided.
“Cooking and cleaning are life skills,” he said, clearly quoting her. “Laundry too. Though, I suspect some of her aversion to doing that herself stemmed from having teenage boys,” he said, smirking.
It should have been amusing.
But my dirty-ass mind went right to adult Anthony with his hand around his cock, stroking it as he reached out to…
“Whoa,” he said when I shot up off the couch like it had fucking scalded me. “What’s up?”
“I’m gonna go let out Fury,” I said, grabbing my hoodie, and yanking it over my head before reaching for a gun.
“Give me five, and I will—“
“No!” Wincing at how desperately that burst out of me, I forced my voice to be calmer. “No, I think it’s better if one of us stays here to keep an eye on things,” I said. I reached for the key he’d hung on a hook just inside the door where generations of people likely stuck their keys, judging by the scratch marks across the paint. “I’ll be an hour, tops,” I said, checking for my phone, then rushing out before he could insist on coming with me.
I took a long walk with Fury, then spent a while playing and petting her as my body slowly calmed back down.
Once she settled in to sleep, I made my way back to the apartment, ready to snatch a few hours of sleep on the hard-ass couch.
Hood up over my head, I rushed into the building, hoping no one would suspect anything if they were looking out of the windows of the row house. It was fall, after all. Plenty of people were walking around with hoodies.
My heart was still hammering a bit as I let myself into the apartment, expecting to see Anthony sitting on the couch, watching out the window. Or maybe asleep.
But as the door closed behind me, the bathroom door slid open, and a puff of steam flooded out into the studio.