Page 45 of The Woman in the Warehouse

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.

As Anthony moved out.

Wearing nothing but a towel slung dangerously low on his hips.

Clearly, he’d screwed up when he’d ordered the towels from the store. Because these were so small that it barely tucked at his hip, and exposed a slice of finely chiseled thigh.

It was also, well, cheap material.

Thin.

Clinging.

Not exactly leaving much up to the imagination.

And, believe me, my imagination was… imagining.

Then, of course, there was the rest of him.

The breadth of his chest, the corded ropes of his arms, a little bullet scar, pinker and smoother than the rest of his skin, the indents of his abdominal muscles, and, as if all of that wasn’t bad enough, the little lines on his pelvis that disappeared under the material of the towel.

I didn’t realize a whimpering sound escaped me until Anthony’s head whipped up, his gaze landing on me.

There was no way he couldn’t see the direction of my thoughts. My breathing felt quick and shallow, my face flushed, my eyes at half-mast. My desire was written all over me. And I’d been caught too off-guard to try to mask it.

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