11

Stella was reserved as they walked the few blocks back to her white Model S. Several times, Michael caught her massaging her temples, but when he asked if she had a headache, her response was an unintelligible mumble. He would have thought she was doing the silent martyr act in retribution for his supposed cheating, but that didn’t seem her style.

No, her style was leaving him without a single word. When Quan had told him she wanted to abandon him at the club, it’d sucker-punched Michael in the gut. The last person to leave him had been his dad. But where Michael’s dad had left him with an enormous mess to clean up, Stella had planned to leave him with her car and her credit card. Who did that?

Even worse, he hadn’t deserved it. Either time.

Tonight, he’d been busy preventing his crazy ex-client from making an enormous scene in front of Stella. Aliza was a true diva and loved drama in all forms. Now that she’d finally succeeded in divorcing her millionaire husband—and taking half of his net worth—she wanted Michael back. She was willing to pay whatever it took.

She refused to accept that Michael would rather fuck his way through splintered driftwood than return to her bed. She’d detained him for long minutes, tossing extravagant numbers at him before plastering her mouth to his.

He would forever associate the taste of cinnamon gum, cigarettes, and whiskey with Aliza.

So different from Stella, who tasted like . . . mint chocolate chip ice cream.

They piled into her car, and she activated the seat warmer, sank against the backrest, and stared out the window, absently tapping her fingers on her knees. He turned the radio on to break the silence, but she promptly turned it back off. Her fingers resumed their tapping. It was hypnotic but a little annoying.

He sent her a pointed look, but she didn’t notice.

After he took them out of the city and merged into the light traffic on 101S, he broke down and said, “When you do that finger tapping, are you playing a song? Like on the piano?”

She stopped tapping her fingers and sat on her hands. “It’s Debussy’s Arabesque. I really like the combination of triplets and eighth notes.”

“So you play?” When he’d picked her up from her downtown Palo Alto house, it had been impossible to miss the black grand piano dominating her otherwise empty living room. If she was artistically talented on top of being smart, successful, and gorgeous, she was officially his dream woman in the flesh. And so far out of his league as to be laughable.

Even if he didn’t have all the shit associated with his dad dangling between them, he had almost nothing a girl like her could want. There was his face and his body, but anyone could have that if they paid enough. Maybe she would have been attracted to the old him, the man who had been free to pursue his passions. There’d been a lot going for that guy. Michael barely knew him anymore.

“I do,” Stella said. “I started playing before I could speak.”

He arched his eyebrows. Apparently, in addition to being his dream woman, she was also Mozart.

“That’s not as impressive as it sounds,” she said with a wry lift of her lips. “I was a late speaker.”

“I have a hard time picturing that. You seem so perfect to me.”

She bowed her head and released a heavy breath, but when he began to ask her what was wrong, the slow minivan in front of him caught his attention. He switched lanes and accelerated soundlessly past it. Smooth as buttah. He loved fast cars.

But thinking about cars always reminded him of his current car, a shiny black BMW M3, and how he’d gotten it.

“She’s my crazy ex-client,” he said.

He felt the weight of Stella’s gaze on the side of his face. “The woman in the club.”

“Yes.”

She lifted a hand toward the bridge of her nose. When she couldn’t adjust her glasses, she clasped her neck instead. “Did you like kissing her?”

“I didn’t kiss her. She kissed me. But no, I didn’t like it.”

“Can you be very honest and answer one question for me?”

This was going to be interesting. “Yes.”

“Are you a different person when you’re with me?”

“You mean, if I bumped into you when you’re not my client anymore, would I be a dick around you?” If she was no longer his client, she’d probably be with another man. He twisted his lips as a bad taste filled his mouth. “No.”

“Are you lying just to make me feel better?”

“Stella, I’ve never lied to you. You’re going to have to decide if you believe me.”

They didn’t speak for the rest of the drive. He drove up the driveway to her smart, renovated cottage, complete with rosemary hedges and solar panels on the roof, and parked in the surgically sterile two-car garage. Once he turned off the car, her eyelids fluttered open.

“You’re home.”

She ran a hand over her sleep-matted hair. “I’m almost too tired to get out of the car.”

“I can carry you.”

She aimed a sleepy smile at him, clearly thinking he was joking.

“I’m serious.” The idea of carrying her to bed was highly appealing at the moment. He liked holding her, and as messed up as it was, he wanted to check boxes. He hadn’t gone this long without fucking in three years, and seeing Stella in that dress was giving him full-body blue balls.

“Don’t be silly.” She pawed her door open and stood up with movements that were clumsy even for her. When he locked the car and met her at the door to her house, however, her eyes were steady. “I don’t have energy for lessons tonight.”

“It doesn’t have to be lessons.” He trailed his fingertips down her arm, and her skin dotted with goose bumps. Her eyelids went heavy, her eyes sensual. Beautiful Stella. “I can just make you feel good.” He stroked over her palm, and her fingers unfurled, inviting him to touch. “You already paid for tonight, Stella.”

Her hand fisted shut, and she turned to face the door. “I wanted to talk to you about that. Please come in.”

---

After returning her shoes to their place in her coat closet, Stella padded past her beloved Steinway to her dining room, enjoying the feel of the cool hardwood on her aching feet. Michael followed behind her quietly, and she suspected he was noting how barren the space was.

No centerpiece adorned her dining room table. No artfully arranged place settings, either. There was nothing but . . . she didn’t know what kind of wood the table was made of, but it was soft. She ran her fingers over the satiny surface as she walked to the far end of the table where she usually sat. The chairs surrounding the dining table were the only ones in her entire house.

“Did you just move in?” he asked.

She pulled a chair out for him and rubbed her elbow awkwardly. “Not really.”

Instead of sitting down, he strode into the adjoining kitchen with his hands in his pockets, inspecting the gas range, the stainless-steel refrigerating units, and whatever else she had in the echoing space. Cold, gray, and cavernous, the kitchen was her least favorite room in her house. At least, it usually was.

It became a different place with Michael in it. The ambience turned intimate and inviting, and the low-hanging lights twinkled more like stars than energy-efficient LEDs. It no longer felt lonely.

“What does ‘not really’ mean? A month ago? Two?” He aimed a teasing grin at her as he asked, “A year?”

“Five years.”

His face went slack, and he stared at her house with new eyes. “So you like it empty like this?”

She shrugged. “I’m at the office most of the time, so it doesn’t bother me. Here, I have a bed, a nice TV, and really fast Internet.”

He shook his head and chuckled. “The essentials.”

“Is that too strange?” Like being a late talker or getting overstimulated at clubs?

“No, I think I like it,” he said with a smile. “You could use some art, though, and a couch or two. Maybe a coffee table. You don’t need much more than that.”

A knot formed in her throat. At that precise moment in time, when she had him standing in her kitchen, in her house, she felt like she didn’t need anything else in the whole world. And their time together was ending soon.

She wasn’t ready for that to happen.

“Would you mind sitting so we can talk?” she asked.

With a serious nod, he rounded the oversized center island and sat in the chair she’d pulled out. His proximity drew her like a magnet, and she seated herself before she could do something distracting like touch him. She needed to stay focused. Maybe if she spoke very eloquently, he’d agree to her new plan.

She rested jittery hands on the tabletop, and within seconds, her fingers started tapping.

A warm hand slid over hers and squeezed. “You never need to be nervous with me. You know that, right?”

When he didn’t remove his hand, she analyzed the way he made her feel. This was a casual, uninvited touch, the kind that normally made her want to crawl into herself. But all she registered right now was Michael’s warmth and the roughness of his skin, his weight. She didn’t understand it, but her body accepted him. Only him.

The realization made her mind sharpen with determination, and she gathered her courage and plowed ahead. “I’m issuing you a new proposal.”

He tilted his head in a measured way. “You mean you want to extend our lessons beyond next Friday?”

“I mean I don’t want lessons anymore. Our time together tonight—both the good parts and the . . . not-so-good parts—made me realize a few things. While I’m bad at sex, I’m even worse at relationships. I think I’m better off spending my time working on that. Before today, I never shared ice cream with someone or held hands while I walked down a sidewalk. I never had a dinner conversation that wasn’t filled with long stretches of painful silence or those embarrassing moments when I accidentally offend people and drive them away.”

He ran his thumb over her knuckles before he considered her with an unwavering gaze. “I didn’t see any relationship problems—except for when you tried to abandon me, but if I’d actually been kissing her, I would have deserved it. You did fine tonight.”

“That’s because I was with you.”

He thought that over for a pensive moment. “Maybe it’s because you feel like you’re in control when you’re with me. Because you’re paying me, there’s less pressure, and you can relax.”

“That’s not it at all. I relax with you because of the way you treat me, because you’re you,” she said with certainty.

His eyebrows drew together, and he went still for several breaths. “Stella, you shouldn’t tell me things like that.”

“Why? It’s true.”

Emotions crossed his face faster than she could read them. He shook his head, swallowed. A smile hinted at the edge of his lips before he withdrew his hand from hers to rub his jaw. He cleared his throat, but his voice still came out rough when he said, “Tell me about this new proposal.”

She stared down at the back of her hand, missing the warmth of his touch. “I want you to teach me how to be in a relationship. Not the sex part, but the together part. Like tonight. The talking and the sharing and the holding hands. New things are scary for me, but with you, I can handle them and even enjoy them. I want to hire you to be my full-time practice boyfriend.”

His lips parted, but he didn’t speak for the longest time. “What do you mean, ‘not the sex part’?”

“I want to take the sex out. I don’t want to be like that woman at the club and force you to be intimate with me. My hope is that if I get good enough at the together part of a relationship, a man won’t mind working on the sex part with me.”

“Who said anything about forcing?” he asked with narrowed eyes. “Everything I’ve done with you up to now has been voluntary.”

She suppressed a grimace and laced her fingers together so she couldn’t tap them. “The next time a man kisses me, I need him to do it because he wants to.” Without a monetary incentive. After seeing Michael with his ex-client, everything they’d done thus far left an unsavory taste in her mouth. Her reasoning when hiring an escort to teach her sex had been oversimplified. “I know you weren’t initially interested in doing repeat sessions, and my new proposal would require even more face time. Because of that, I’m willing to pay you fifty thousand dollars up front for the first month. Maybe we could try this for three to six months—at the same rate? Is that a good time frame for a practice relationship? Everything is negotiable, of course. I don’t know what the industry standard is for this type of arrangement.”

“Fifty thousand . . .” He shook his head like he was questioning his hearing. “Stella, I can’t—”

“Before you say no, think about it,” she said as her heart rate jumped. “Please.”

He pushed away from the table and got to his feet. “I need some time.”

“Of course.” She stood up and held her breath, nervous, unsure what to do. “As much as you need.”

Wrapping a hand around her upper arm, he took a half step toward her. He leaned down a few inches before he caught himself. Eyes intent on her mouth, he outlined the edges of her lips with his fingertips, sending shivers of awareness outward. “I’ll tell you by next Friday. Is that okay?”

“That’s fine.”

He bit his teeth into his bottom lip like he was thinking about kissing her, and her own lips tingled in response. “Good night, then, Stella.”

“Good night, Michael.”

In a state of breathless numbness, she watched as he let himself out.