9
“It’s really bad to eat dessert first, you know,” Stella commented.
She knew she sounded pedantic and boring, but she couldn’t help the nervous chatter spilling from her mouth. Her anxiety over clubbing had been escalating exponentially during the past week, and the main event was just hours away now.
Also, Michael was holding her hand.
Her palm sweated so badly she didn’t know how he could stand touching her, let alone act like it was the most normal thing in the world. Oddly, she’d handled foreplay better than this—up until the end, that was—and she’d been naked for that. She couldn’t blame her reaction on her usual aversion to touch. She liked Michael’s touch.
As she and Michael walked down the busy San Francisco sidewalk hand-in-hand, passersby smiled at them. An old man in a newsboy cap winked at her.
They thought she and Michael were a couple.
Stella would have laughed if she didn’t feel like she was somehow taking part in a duplicitous charade. A gaggle of party girls in low-cut dresses flocked by, giving Michael double takes, then triple takes as they giggled into their hands and whispered to one another. They glanced at Stella with open envy that she enjoyed even as she knew she didn’t deserve it. Wearing a slate-gray suit and black oxford shirt, he was particularly scrumptious-looking tonight.
“Here it is.” Michael released her hand and held open the door for her as she walked into the old-fashioned gelato shop. Black and white tiles checkered the floor. Pink chandeliers illuminated display freezers filled with gelato and toppings. “What’s your flavor?”
She could barely think about ice cream with his hand resting at the base of her spine like that. Did he know he was doing it? She’d seen men do that with their girlfriends. Stella wasn’t a girlfriend.
“Mint chocolate chip,” she said.
“Really? That’s my favorite, too. I’ll get something else, then, so we can try something new.” He idly rubbed her waist as he considered the gelato flavors, and her body heated with awareness.
“Wait, what do you mean by ‘we’?”
A mischievous grin curved on his lips. “You don’t want to share with me?”
The college-aged girl behind the counter stared at Stella like she’d kicked a puppy.
“No, that’s not it.” Not entirely. After all the kissing they’d done, she knew it was silly to worry about germ transference. The fact was she’d made a detailed analysis of ice cream flavors, and she’d decided this one was the best in existence. “I just know what I like.”
“We’ll see about that.” He tapped on the display case. “Mint chocolate chip for her and green tea for me.”
Stella wanted to pay, but he dug bills out of his wallet before she could pry the credit card out from the bodice of her sapphire-blue sheath dress. Once they were seated at a black wrought-iron table by the window, he dipped his spoon into his gelato, tasted it, and grinned a slow, wide grin as he slipped the clean spoon from his mouth and scooped out more.
“Oh, that’s just ridiculous,” she said. “You look like you’re auditioning for a Häagen-Dazs commercial. No one smiles like that after eating ice cream.”
He laughed. “It really is good.” His grin was out in full force, and, God forbid, did he have a dimple?
“Now, I have to try it.” She lowered her spoon toward his bowl.
“Ah, ah, ah.” Instead of letting her scoop up some herself, he held his spoon to her lips. Her eyes jumped to his, and conflicting thoughts skittered through her mind.
She shouldn’t do it. This was too intimate. It was crossing a line of some kind. It felt too much like dating—which they weren’t.
It was just gelato. Just his spoon. He might take it as rejection if she didn’t do it, and she could never, ever in a thousand years hurt him, not even in a trivial way.
She parted her lips and let him feed her the gelato. Her heart knocked around her chest like a pinball as sweet green tea melted on her tongue. He watched her with expectation, oblivious to his effect on her.
“Okay, it’s good.” She tried to sound casual. This didn’t mean anything. This wasn’t a date. She was just another of his clients. Keep a cool head. She stabbed her spoon into her gelato.
“I told you so.”
“I still like mine best.” She put a spoonful of mint chocolate chip in her mouth. The complex combination of vanilla and mint exploded on her palate. Bits of chocolate crunched between her teeth. Perfection.
“Let me try it.”
She held her bowl out toward him, but he didn’t put his spoon in it. He trailed his fingers over her jaw as he tipped her head back and sealed his lips over hers. His tongue speared into her mouth, and the salt of him mixed with the flavor of the ice cream. She didn’t know if she was mortified, shocked, aroused, or all three.
With a lingering lick on her bottom lip, he pulled away and grinned, his dark eyes intense and hazy.
“I can’t believe you did that.” Flustered, she tried to scoop herself another spoonful. Her white plastic spoon skittered onto the tabletop.
She grabbed for it, but his hands wrapped around hers. In the next instant, he was kissing her again—sweet, closed-mouth kisses that still felt scandalous. And too delicious to resist. The gelato shop dropped away. The people disappeared. In that moment, it was just her and Michael, the taste of ice cream, and their slowly warming lips.
As Michael eased his tongue between Stella’s parted lips, the chilled silk and mint chocolate sweetness of her mouth drove him out of his mind. He forgot he was seducing her. He even forgot why. All he knew was her taste and the hot sighs of her breath. He wanted to devour her.
Did she know she was making those soft humming sounds as she returned his kisses? Or that her cool fingers had snuck beneath the cuff of his shirt and were caressing his wrist?
He wanted to slide his hands up her bared thighs and slip them beneath the short hem of her dress so he could touch her again. But the last time he’d done that, he’d scared the hell out of her.
Because she didn’t want to make him feel the way she had with those three assholes.
Clients never worried about him like that. Why did she? He wished she’d stop. It was fucking with his head.
“Easy, man,” a laughing voice interjected. “You’re in a public establishment.”
Stella tore away, touching trembling fingers to her red lips. She’d surprised him today by trading her glasses for contacts and leaving her hair down in loose waves. She even wore makeup, though he’d kissed off all her lip gloss. That was fine. Like this, she was almost too beautiful to be real.
When the group of wiseasses at the next table started clapping and cheering, Michael expected her to grow flustered and embarrassed. She didn’t. She ducked her head in that shy way she had and laughed along with them. Her soft smile and the luminous look in her eyes, however, were just for him, and they made him feel like he’d single-handedly vanquished an army. He was the one she saw, the one she smiled at, no one else.
His plan to seduce her out of her anxiety was working. He had no doubt that by the time he took her home tonight, she’d be ready to check the big boxes on her lesson plans. He should have done this from the beginning. Everyone knew if you wanted inside someone’s pants, you didn’t start in the bedroom. That was what seduction, romance, hand-holding, and dancing were for. That was what these ice cream kisses were for.
The problem was they were working on him, too. The more time he spent with her, the stronger his attraction to her grew—and not just physically. If he couldn’t check all her boxes within the next two lessons, he’d feel obligated to extend the length of their arrangement, and that was a bad idea. He might do something stupid and fall for her.
Never once did he imagine he could spin a fairy-tale ending out of such a scenario. Not only were they worlds apart in terms of education and culture, but Stella was rich. If she learned about his dad and the shitty things he’d done to get his hands on money, she’d never be able to trust Michael. There was a reason they had sayings like the apple doesn’t fall far from the tree, like father like son, and a chip off the old block. He fought against it and hated his dad for it, but he carried that same badness inside himself. He was a ticking time bomb, and he didn’t want Stella to be around when his endurance ran out and he exploded, hurting everyone around him.
Sex was the way out of this. Check the boxes, finish the lessons, move on. Only now that he knew her better, he wanted to do more than teach her how to be good at sex. He wanted to give her the best nights of her life.
Tonight, he was giving her fireworks.