“Oh.”

She looked so horrified, Michael couldn’t help laughing. “I confess to liking it.” Which was the truth, and unlike him. Cuddling was an obligatory thing he did for his clients because he understood they needed it. He usually spent the time counting the seconds until he could leave and go home to shower. Holding Stella had been nothing like that. They hadn’t had sex, so there’d been nothing to wash away, and the trusting way she’d curled into him had made him feel things he didn’t want to think about. Especially when she found it so distasteful. His irritation increased even further.

“Where does this leave us with regard to the lessons? How do we proceed when my limitations are such big roadblocks? By focusing on you, I thought I’d found a way around my problems.”

“We’re not going to go around your problems. We’re going to go through them.”

She crossed her arms and tapped out an unusual rhythm with her fingertips on her elbow. “How?”

“We’re going to . . . unlock you.” That made him sound like an arrogant jackass, but he hadn’t gotten those five-star reviews by luck alone. When he’d lost his virginity at the ripe age of eighteen, he’d discovered he had a natural talent for fucking. Going pro had taken his skills to a whole new level.

“I don’t think that’s possible.” She slanted her lips like she was listening to a used-car salesman.

“Did you think you’d like kissing?” And she had liked it—once she’d gotten over the pilot fish thing. There was hope for her. Girls didn’t do that weak-in-the-knees, fainting heroine stuff when they weren’t into sex. He just had to figure her out.

She tapped one of the foreplay boxes. “What happens if you try everything and I don’t like it? We’re under a pretty extreme time constraint.”

“I don’t think it’ll come to that.” But if it did, they’d deal with it then.

After a long stretch of silence, she said, “Let’s try it your way, then.”

8

Once the hotel door shut behind them, Michael toed off his shoes and ambled to the windows. He opened the drapes and was presented with a fine view of the medical building next door, the Palo Alto Medical Foundation. It reminded him of his mom, bills, responsibilities, and escorting commissions. Not really what he wanted to think about right now.

He yanked the drapes shut and turned around, locating Stella standing at the foot of the bed. She looked away from him and fiddled with the folded sheets of paper in her hands. Her lesson plans.

He imagined himself shredding them into confetti. He couldn’t explain it, but he detested those lists. Instead of acting on the fantasy, he approached her, took the papers, and set them carefully on the nightstand. He found a narrow silver pen in the nightstand’s drawer and put it on top of Lesson One. If she was clearheaded enough to check boxes tonight, he needed to analyze his technique. He dimmed the bedside lights.

“How should I—what should I—maybe I—” She gripped the collar of her shirt. “Should I undress?”

“I don’t know. It’s not in the lesson plan.” Once the words were out, he wanted to take them back. Her lists annoyed the hell out of him, but he didn’t need to belittle her. “I’m sor—”

“You’re right. I didn’t think to include that.” She hurried past him to the nightstand. After she considered the list for a moment, she bent down and picked up the pen, demonstrating the only reason why a woman should wear a pencil skirt: to show off the perfectly rounded curves of her fine ass.

That had to be why it took so long for her cluelessness to register. She hadn’t caught his rudeness or his sarcasm. Maybe she was one of those book-smart people who didn’t know how to socialize, and he was being too hard on her. “If I told you your lesson plans are insulting, what would you do?” he asked quietly.

She looked at him over her shoulder with alarmed eyes. “Are there parts I should reword? I’d be happy to change things.” She turned back to the lesson plan and skimmed her fingers over the lines at a thoughtful pace.

The ball of irritation in his chest loosened. He couldn’t be annoyed with her when she didn’t understand.

She worried the inside of her lip and tapped her fingers on the table with increasing speed before sending him an anxious look. “Should I have written something other than Performance Review? I hope you know when I wrote that, I meant my performance. There’s nothing wrong with your performance. Even if there were, I wouldn’t know. I’m not qualified in any way to judge—”

Before she could work herself into another panic attack, he said, “It was just a hypothetical question. Forget about it.”

She seemed confused for a second, but she blinked the look away and released a relieved breath. “Oh, okay.” After adjusting her glasses, she turned back to her papers and neatly wrote Stella’s in front of each iteration of Performance Review.

That was a good reminder. This was about helping with Stella’s performance. That was it. So what if she wasn’t viewing this as the fulfillment of secret fantasies like his other clients did? He needed to take his own advice and stop thinking.

When she flipped to the second page in the pile, he shrugged out of his jacket, draped it over the arm of a chair, and unbuttoned his shirt. Tugging the tails free, he sat on the bed next to Stella. She snuck a quick glance at him, and her gaze dropped to the portion of skin revealed by his open shirt. The pen paused in midscrawl, clattered to the tabletop.

He smiled with satisfaction. Not so clinical now.

She squared her shoulders before she lifted her hands to her collar. Buttons came undone at a painstaking pace, and white fabric fluttered to the floor, followed by her gray skirt. The set of her jaw was determined as she let him look at her. And look he did.

He usually preferred women with bigger breasts, lusher hips, and rounded thighs. He liked their softness, the way they filled his hands. That was not Stella. Everything about her was modest. Wearing only a flesh-toned bra and panties, her petite body was composed of elegant shoulders and arms, a little waist that flared to gently curved hips, and shapely legs with delicate ankles. She wasn’t what he’d thought he’d always wanted, but she was perfect.

“Take your bra off.” His voice came out rougher than he intended, but he couldn’t help it. He was dying to see the rest of her. She might not have fantasized about their time together, but he had.

Down at her sides, her hands fisted. “Is that necessary? They’re not my best feature. They’re small.”

“Yes, it’s necessary. Men like to see them even when they’re small.” And touch them. God, he wanted to touch them.

She grimaced, looking like she wanted to argue with him. When she reached behind herself and slid her bra off, he caught his breath.

Then he bit his lip as he grinned. Stella didn’t seem to know it, but she had the kind of nipples men and babies dreamed about. Rosy-tinted areolas gave way to extravagantly protruding tips that—no question about it—had to stay pointed 24/7, hot or cold, rain or shine. Stella Lane, conservative economist, had porn star nipples. And he wanted them in his mouth.

“What now?” she asked in a near whisper.

He slipped his shirt off and tossed it on the far side of the bed. “I think you get to check a box.”

She peeled her eyes from his chest and stared at him like he’d spoken another language. After several hard blinks, she shook her head and said, “Right.”

Leaning over, she checked a box at the top of the list. She adjusted her glasses and paused. The glasses came off, and she pulled the tie from her hair and shook out the mass so it framed her face. Vulnerable brown eyes searched his before she focused on the wall to the side.

The air seeped from his lungs as his internal organs melted and the rest of him hardened. So gorgeous.

And scared. How did he ease her fear?

“Let me hold you.”

She inched as close as she could get without actually touching him.

He suppressed a smile. “It might help if you sat on my lap.”

Biting her lip, she crawled onto him and straddled his hips. Fuck, so close. That part of her, opened wide. He went hard in an instant but forced himself to take things slowly. This was about Stella. He expected her to sit stiff as a board until he thought up some kind of sorcery to make her relax, but she immediately settled in close and rested her cheek against his shoulder. When his arms encircled her, she released a ragged sigh and went boneless.

Seconds stretched into minutes, and he let himself savor the moment—not speaking, not fucking, not doing anything, just being with someone. The room was so quiet he heard the cars driving by outside. Talking voices passed their room, receded.

“Are you falling asleep again?” he asked finally.

“No.”

“Good.” He ran his fingertips down the length of her arm and smiled when goose bumps rippled outward. Nuzzling her neck, he breathed in the soft scent of her skin and kissed the sweet spot just behind her jaw. Her lips called to him, but instead of trespassing, he sucked on her earlobe and bit it, startling a shaky sigh from her.

“This is foreplay?” The breathy quality of her voice sent satisfaction curling through him.

“It is.” Even though he knew the answer, he asked against her ear, “Do you like it?”

She shivered and burrowed closer to him as additional goose bumps dotted her skin. “Yes, but it’s not what I expected.”

“What did you expect?”