Page 98 of The Trouble With Bad Boys

“No dirty diapers there.”

“Exactly!” Leni leaned in and kissed my cheek. “I’ll see you soon.”

“You better.” I walked her to the door and hugged her one last time before I watched her disappear down the hall. I hadn’t even reached our wine glasses to put them away when she was knocking at the door again.

Except, when I swung it open, it wasn’t Leni I found.

“King? What are you doing here?”

He barged inside, brushing past me like he belonged here when it was so clear that he didn’t. “Where the hell have you been?”

When he spun to face me, I crossed my arms over my chest. “You’ll have to be more clear. I don’t understand your question.”

He scowled, and a shiver raced down my spine. “You haven’t been at work. This is the third night you’ve been gone.”

“It’s called time off, Kingston. I am allowed, you know.”

“Three nights in a row?”

“It’s not unheard of. Evie did it just last week. Ruby did it two weeks before that. It’s all documented on our calendar. Please tell me you bothered to look at that before you came storming into my apartment to yell at me?”

He flinched and had the good sense to look guilty before he turned his back on me. He gestured to the wine glasses on the coffee table. “What have you been doing?”

Letting out a scoff, I squeezed around him to grab the glasses. “I had a friend over.”

He grabbed my arm. “One of our customers?”

I rolled my eyes and tore free from his grasp. “Not that it’s any of your business, but no. Men aren’t allowed in the apartment. House rules.”

He turned toward the living room, probably searching for proof of some nefarious affair. I rinsed the glasses but left them in the sink. I wasn’t in the mood to clean.

He was still scouring the room for evidence when I walked past him toward my bedroom. “Look, King, it’s been a long night. I’m going to bed so please see yourself out.”

Four

KINGSTON

Her apartment was nothing like I expected. The dressing room back at the club was always in disarray. The girls often left changes of clothes strewn about and their makeup scattered all over their vanity tops.

Here, it was the same but different.

There was a white stone sculpture of a naked female body sitting on a pillar between two open bedroom doors. It had someone’s bra tossed over it like they couldn’t be bothered to make it to their room before taking it off.

The paintings hanging around the apartment were mostly erotic nudes, and a couple of them also had lacy undergarments dangling from them.

Over on the wall next to what looked like the bathroom were little frames containing a packet of birth control pills, a condom, and what had to be an IUD, each with a pink outline of a uterus behind them.

It was messy, yet tasteful.

Chaos, yet controlled.

I heard Carina say something to me, but my attention fell on one of the nude paintings. A thousand fantasies played out in my mind as heat flooded my body. The woman in the picture had short black hair, ruby red lips, and large tits that were barely contained in a white lace bra, the straps falling free from her shoulders. She sat, legs splayed, fingers split into a V between them, revealing a pretty pink pussy that seemed to glimmer with wetness in the light shining down from above. My hands ached and my dick throbbed in my pants, and I knew I had to get out of there before I did something I’d end up regretting.

Turning to tell her I was leaving, I found Carina missing. She wasn’t in the kitchen, nor in the living room I’d been standing in. I was half-tempted to walk out of the apartment and never look back, to find some way of erasing the memories of this place and the painting that made me want to palm my dick and jack off right where I was standing.

Instead, I walked around the apartment, peering into the empty rooms while looking for Carina. Ruby, Evie, and Sienna lived here too, and though I didn’t know which rooms were theirs, I could see their touches everywhere. From the bold colors Sienna favored, to the pink palette Evie adored, to the wild patterns Ruby lived in. The three girls weren’t home—were likely at work where I should have been—but I could feel their presence stamped across every inch of the apartment as if they were standing right there.

I pushed at the half-open door to the final back bedroom and was caught off guard again. Partially by the perfect organization and spotlessness of the room. But mostly by the half-dressed woman in front of me.

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