Page 74 of The Woman with the Wallet

By the time Miko came back, I’d managed to get back into my pants, but couldn’t find my shirt. He stooped down, fetching it from where it had managed to slip under the bed, then came back to me, helping me into it before finding his own pants again.

Afterward, we moved silently toward the door.

I’d never wanted so badly for someone to speak, to tell me what they were thinking.

But Miko said nothing as I followed him down the hall toward the common area.

The air was filled with the rich scent of tomato sauce, making my belly rumble again.

“What took you guys so long?” Chuck asked from his cross-legged position on the couch, balancing a massive bowl on a throw pillow. There were only a few noodles left on the bottom.

“I heard you cooked,” I said, sidestepping the question.

“Yep,” Chuck said, puffing up a bit.

“I don’t know how to cook,” I admitted.

“Miko helped,” Chuck admitted. “But I did all the work.”

“Smells good,” I told him as Miko fetched bowls and started to fill them.

“Next time, I’m gonna make garlic bread too. I found a recipe.”

I sincerely hoped there wouldn’t be a ‘next time,’ since that meant someone was still out there with Miko’s diamonds and wanting to clear house so no one could talk.

And since I was the one who’d seen him the best, I had a feeling if we didn’t find this asshole, I would never be able to stop looking over my shoulder.

“Oh, the trip,” I said as I took the bowl from Miko.

“I already got it all set up,” he said. At my pinched brows, he shrugged. “I got up before you,” he explained. “They have a room at a nice inn, passes to a ski resort, and reservations at a few local restaurants.”

Wow.

That was impressive.

There was something undeniably hot about a man who not only talked about shit, but carried through with it. All without needing to be nagged about it.

Competence was the sexiest thing to find in the opposite sex.

“I will text Megs about it while we eat,” I said, glad for a distraction.

Not that I needed one when we had Chuck sitting between us, talking about all the local attractions, about new recipes he wanted to try to make, about how he was thinking about a career change now that he was ‘rolling in it.’

Neither Miko nor I had the heart to inform him that ‘rolling in it’ in some small upstate town was likely ‘just scraping by’ in Manhattan.

“What did Megs say?” Miko asked when my phone chimed.

“A mix of suspicion and excitement,” I admitted.

“Why suspicion?”

“Because I’ve never sent them on a trip before. And she’s not an idiot, so the timing has to be setting off alarms.”

But Megs had a hard time holding onto her suspicions when I said that I’d talked to Tyler and he’d told me they’d been sad, and that I wanted to cheer them up with their anniversary coming up.

And once they got the name of the inn, it was all gushing about how gorgeous it—and the town around it—was.

“That sounds like excited texting,” Miko observed.

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