Total pages in book: 80
Estimated words: 77579 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 388(@200wpm)___ 310(@250wpm)___ 259(@300wpm)
Estimated words: 77579 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 388(@200wpm)___ 310(@250wpm)___ 259(@300wpm)
Neither of them were familiar to me.
“You need to stay inside,” one of them told me, barely sparing me a glance.
I jumped back inside, heartbeat kicking up.
Suddenly, I was wondering if I was even free to leave at all.
If I decided to say ‘Eff this’ and go out there, would they let me? Would they force me back into the penthouse? Was I a prisoner here?
What about my grandfather?
And the shop?
Half an hour later, there was a knock at the door, dragging me out of my storm of thoughts.
I made my way over there, stomach doing flip-flops until I reminded myself that none of these men had ever hurt me. Quite the opposite, in fact.
Pulling the door open, an arm was holding up a white bag.
“What’s this?” I asked.
“Breakfast,” he said, pushing it into my hands, then turning to face away from the door again.
Like he didn’t have permission to look at me or something like that.
I was too hungry to give that much thought as I went into the kitchen, pulling items out to find an omelet with cheese and veg, a side of hash browns, and a parfait. Oh, and an orange juice.
Had Cosimo ordered this for me?
And why did the idea of that give me the warm and fuzzies?
I rolled my eyes at myself.
That was ridiculous.
If someone had ordered me breakfast, it was likely Miko.
That realization kind of made disappointment burrow through me as I ate my breakfast.
The rest of the day was full of, well, boredom.
I couldn’t figure out where the TV was.
So I just walked around, bored.
At lunch, there was another knock, another bag, and a panini with a side of sweet potato fries.
As afternoon crept toward evening, my boredom had me way overstepping my place as a guest by climbing up the staircase, and moving into Cosimo’s bedroom.
And, yeah.
This place was the sexiest bedroom I’d ever seen in my life.
Black walls, hardwood floors, a gray carpet under the California King-sized bed covered in gray and black bedding. Like the rest of the penthouse, there was a bunch of hidden light to keep it warm.
His room was massive enough to have room for a sitting area with two chairs facing, finally, a big TV.
And under that TV was a smaller gas fireplace like the one in the living room.
Moving through the room, I found an absolutely massive walk-in closet full of more of his suits, shirts, shoes, and a small collection of workout clothes, and some black pajama bottoms.
The bathroom almost made me want to cry.
The walls were some sort of gray stone, the floors wooden, and the sink vanity some sort of floating hunk of wood with no storage in it.
There was a massive all-glass walk-in with several shower heads.
But the tub?
God, the tub.
Some sort of gray stone, and deep enough to submerge completely.
If it weren’t for potentially being caught naked in there, I would have totally indulged.
As it was, I only allowed myself to overstep by curling up on one of those chairs in front of the fire with the TV on, chasing away my boredom.
Until, eventually, I just passed out.
Only to be woken up by Cosimo.
CHAPTER ELEVEN
Cosimo
I’d left the apartment even earlier than usual.
Not because I needed to.
But because some part of me didn’t trust myself to keep my fucking hands to myself when Halle emerged from that bedroom at some point.
It had already gotten too far.
Normally, I didn’t give a shit about ‘appropriate’ timelines for sex and shit like that. Convention had no place in sex, in my opinion. But I also had only had very casual interactions with women.
And it always involved either the woman’s apartment or a hotel room.
Call it paranoid, but strange women in and out of my apartment sounded like a really fucking bad idea. It wasn’t like it was unprecedented to worry about honeytraps. Many organizations—yeah, even government ones—had been using sexy women to seduce marks for information since the damn dawn of time. Believing, not wrongly, that men could easily be led around by their dicks.
Not wanting my place to be bugged on the off-chance that a woman was there for something other than an orgasm, I didn’t allow them in my place.
I had no experience with having one around, but I had a feeling that allowing things to continue to get physical with Halle was only going to complicate shit.
So, yeah, I’d let things get out of hand the night before. But I couldn’t let more than that happen.
I’d needed to go out into the fucking freezing night air just to get my head on straight afterward.
And still, I’d needed to rub one out afterward.
Which, somehow, only left me feeling unsatisfied.
Space, it seemed, was going to be the only way I kept things casual between us.
By the time I’d left, I had two men stationed at my door, no longer trusting that just one would do the trick. Even in my doorman-guarded apartment.