Page 37 of The Woman with the Wallet

The last things were my shoes and a spritz of cologne that I could swear made Max let out a little whimpering sound.

It was a sound I absolutely did not need to know.

But now I was stuck with it.

“How long was I out?” Max asked as we both moved back into the hallway.

I checked my watch.

“Four hours,” I told her.

“Shit,” she hissed, rushing back toward the couch where she fished out her phone from between the couch cushions, likely afraid Megs had called or texted.

“She’s probably drained and taking a nap by now,” I reminded her.

“Right,” she said, tucking her phone back into her pocket. “So, about the pictures.”

“I’ll bring ‘em up for you. After we order something to eat.”

“I’m not hungry.”

“By my estimate, you’ve already missed two meals today,” I said, reaching for the drawer I kept stocked full of menus.

“Why do you care?” she shot back, crossing her arms and shooting me a suspicious glance.

“Sugar, if I had ulterior motives, don’t you think I’d have taken advantage of them when you were passed out? I just want some food. You need food. That’s all there is to it. You want Italian or Chinese?”

For just a moment, I saw a flash of the real Max underneath all the guards she put up. Someone so used to taking care of everyone else that she had no idea what it was like to be taken care of.

And, fuck, if that didn’t just make me want to care for her some more.

CHAPTER ELEVEN

Max

Okay.

Well.

Coming across him wearing just a low-slung towel that put an unexpectedly toned body on display when I was still a little slow and soft from sleep was definitely not part of the plan.

I’d woken up slowly, thanks to some siren blaring on the TV, then all at once, remembering where the hell I was.

I shot up off the couch, the blanket Miko must have draped around me sliding back onto the cushions as my sock-clad feet met the ground. And then I remembered him kneeling down to take off my boots.

How the hell had I let that happen?

How had this man that I’d known for point-five seconds managed to disarm me so easily?

Determined to try to get some of my dignity back, I went in search of Miko. I figured I would find him flipping through images on his laptop. Not walking through his bedroom nearly naked.

I learned a little secret about him right then, though. Not just that the man was incredibly fit, from his strong shouldersand chest to the cuts of his abdominal muscles and Adonis belt. But that, despite his very neat, old-fashioned appearance on the outside, underneath his clothes, he had a shitton of tattoos.

They were all black and gray and really well done, from the massive chest piece down to the ones that clung to his ribs and must have hurt like a bitch. He even had them on his legs and the tops of his feet.

There was an almost overwhelming urge to step closer, to see what all of the images were of, to ask if they had meaning, to run my fingers and my tongue…

No.

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