Page 57 of The Woman on the Jury

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.

From there, I’d met up with Miko, who seemed to me hadn’t gotten a fucking wink of sleep, but he looked showered and dressed in a fresh suit regardless.

“How’d the hospital go?”

“Trying to make Venezio do anything is like wrangling a fucking honey badger,” he said. “Even without use of his fucking leg, he was a nightmare,” he added. “But we got him in there for a scan. And, sure enough, he’s got a hairline fracture in his tibia. They casted him. He’s pissed as fuck about it.”

“I bet,” I agreed. I’d been laid up with a broken leg just once, back when I was a teenager. I’d been so over it just three weeks in, that I’d found someone to saw the damn thing off for me.

I’d probably be aching to high hell in my old age, but at least I’d managed to get back to my hustle sooner than the doctors thought.

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