Michael yanked her back down and kissed her nape. “Not yet.”

“I’m gross. I have to get clean. I—”

He sucked on her neck and pulled her hips back as he rocked forward, making her achingly aware of the firm flesh prodding against the backs of her thighs through his boxers.

Her body went into total system failure. Her limbs weakened. Between her thighs, she flushed and tingled with wanting. The intensity of her desire frightened and embarrassed her. She needed to be in control of herself and her body. Control was gone.

“Good morning.” His voice was a husky rasp that sent shivers down her spine.

“G-good mor—” A hand dipped inside her bra and cupped her breast. He stroked the tip until it ached and pinched, sending a burst of sensation straight to her core. When he headed downward, smoothing a hand over her belly, her stomach muscles clenched.

“I want to touch you here.” He palmed her sex with a bold grasp, and the heat of his touch spread through the cotton of her panties, searing her.

She gripped his wrist, fully intending to pull him away, but her hands refused to cooperate. His forearm was firm with defined muscle, his skin smooth, utterly distracting.

“Is that permission?” he whispered.

She’d given him permission last night. She wanted this, but she didn’t know how to handle this side of herself. Her body told her to say yes. Her mind told her to say no.

Her body won the fight, and her hips arched against his hand. He edged the crotch of her panties aside. He kissed her nape as he traced the slick entrance to her body with his fingertips. A sharp breath tore from her lungs. Panic and pleasure collided.

“You’re wet already, Stella. You’re like a Lamborghini. Zero to sixty in two point seven seconds.”

“You like Lamborghinis?” She tried desperately to cling to coherent thought. She needed to think at all times, to weigh her actions and her words. When she let go, she always made mistakes. She did the wrong thing, hurt people, mortified herself.

He continued touching her lightly, trailing around and around her opening in maddening circles. His teeth scraped against her neck before he licked and kissed her. Goose bumps spread over her skin.

“Yes, I like them. No, don’t get me one,” he said.

“Why not?” She rubbed her feet against his shins, dug her fingernails into his arm. Push him away. Pull him closer. Regain control. Let go.

“It doesn’t suit my lifestyle, and my mom would be very, very curious how I got it.” He emphasized the word very with barely there strokes over her clitoris. Her sex spasmed and trembled at the edge of release.

He bit her earlobe. “You’re about to go off, aren’t you? That’s all it took.”

“It’s because I’ve been fantasizing about you ever since last Friday.” Oh God, what had she just said?

He removed his touch and sat up. His expression was soft as he brushed tendrils of hair away from her face. “What does Fantasy Michael do?”

“Everything.”

He laughed before his eyes went intense. “Does he make you come with his mouth? Real Michael wants to do that.”

She squirmed as the need to please him warred with her inhibitions. That was one thing Fantasy Michael hadn’t done. “I’m more interested in giving oral sex than receiving it.”

“Maybe we should work on it,” he said in an unusually subdued tone. “I’m not the only guy who loves going down on women.”

She sank her teeth into her lip and fisted the sheets. Women. Plural. For a regular man, that meant anywhere from one to ten, maybe twenty. For Michael . . . hundreds. It might even be thousands, for all she knew. A new type of anxiety weighed down on her. Could she possibly measure up against all of his past clients?

“I don’t want to disgust you.”

“You won’t.”

“How do I make it good for you? Are some women better at receiving oral sex than others? What do they do?” She badly wanted to be good at it. She wanted to blow all the others out of the water—but there had been so many of them.

“What is going on in that beautiful brain of yours?” he asked in bafflement.

“I just—I want—I need—I think—”

“No more thinking,” he said as he touched a thumb to her lips.

He ran warm hands from her shoulders down to her wrists, interlaced their fingers and squeezed their palms together. Her muscles tensed as she worried she wasn’t responding the right way. What was she supposed to do? Now that she understood he wanted her to feel pleasure, she wanted to give it to him, wanted to make him happy.

“Stella, you’re locking up on me.” His eyes searched hers, worried now.

“I’m sorry.” She felt the sweat between their hands and fingers and winced. Her heart pounded. She was screwing this up.

He gathered her in his arms and held her, smoothing a hand through her hair in slow sweeps. “This is because of oral sex? We don’t have to have it.”

Stella pressed her forehead to his neck and breathed in his scent. By slow degrees, she relaxed into his embrace. “I’m very competitive.”

He brushed a kiss against her temple. “Okay, but how does that factor into anything?”

“It means I want to please you more than all your other clients have.”

“Stella, I’m the one who’s being paid to please here.”

“I’m not paying you for sex anymore, remember?”

He made a frustrated growling sound and held her tighter. “What am I going to do with you? I have you hot and naked in my arms, and you’re still not ready.”

She sighed and rested against him. She idly traced the dragon scales on his bicep. “We could floss, brush, shower, and dress.”

He threw the covers off. “Let’s do it, then.”

• • •

“Don’t you have any casual clothes?”

Michael swept her damp hair to the side and kissed her neck as she stared at her wardrobe, trying to make her clothing selection for the day.

“I didn’t need them when I started working, so I gave them all away,” she said.

“You had them, though? Or were they all knee-length skirts and button-downs?” As he spoke, his arms stole around her bathrobe-clad waist and hugged her to his naked chest. Her body couldn’t decide if it wanted to relax or stiffen.

She suspected he was seducing her. It was almost working. It was definitely making her mind fuzzy, but that was a good thing. He was distracting her from her headache and the fact that she was terribly off-schedule today, something that normally filled her with irritation and frustration until she could start over and do things right.

“They were skirts and button-downs. How do you know me so well?”

His hot breath fanned over her ear as he chuckled. “You are my favorite puzzle lately. I want to see you in sundresses, Stella.”

“I don’t have any.”

“It’s Sunday. We could go shopping.”

She turned around, feeling a spike of anxiety at the thought of going out in public, going somewhere new, and worst of all, trying on itchy, scratchy clothes that were probably dusted with rat feces from warehouse floors. “Can you make me sundresses? I was serious when I said I wanted custom Michael designs. I’ll have to get anything I buy seriously altered before I can wear it, anyway.”

Instead of answering, he pulled a pink shirt off its hanger and inspected the inside seams. “French seams. The fabric is . . .” He rubbed it between his fingers. “It’s plain cotton.”

“I love cotton. Silk, too. I don’t mind synthetic fabrics like acrylic and Lycra, as long as they’re soft, but I can’t stand crisp denim or wool or cashmere or angora.”

A pleased smile curved over his mouth as he continued to check out the construction of her shirt. “My practice girlfriend might know more about textiles than I do. Impressive.”

His compliment made her feel warm and bubbly, but her mind snagged on her “practice girlfriend” title. She didn’t like it—namely the “practice” half—but she knew she had to be realistic about what she could and couldn’t have. Better to focus on the irony of her tactile defensiveness leading them to a common interest. She restrained herself from reading off fabric types and qualities like an encyclopedia.

He hung her shirt back up neatly and stepped in front of her, resting his hands on her hips. “I really want you in sundresses, Stella. I love the pencil skirts. They do fantastic things to one of my favorite parts of you, but they’ve also been torturing me.”

“How? Why?”

“They don’t let me do this.” Watching her with heated eyes, he drew the end of her bathrobe up. It made a brushing sound against his jeans as he bared her thighs to the cool air. His palm scraped up the outside of her leg, paused at her hip, and reached behind her to squeeze her rear, making need shock through her body.

The brown curls between her thighs were visible, and she caught him eyeing them darkly. Without asking, without hesitating, without giving her time to think, he slipped his hand over her hip and down to her pelvis. Daring fingertips threaded through the hair and massaged the peak of her sex.

Her skin burned where he touched her, and her knees weakened. She braced herself on his shoulders.

“That’s my girl,” he whispered as he leaned down to kiss her.

The taste of his clean mouth was heavenly, and a high-pitched sound hummed from her throat as she kissed him back. She tried to kiss him as well as he’d taught her, but she couldn’t concentrate. His fingers were doing diabolical things to her. It was all she could do to stand, and she wasn’t doing a good job of it. Each stroke of his fingers melted her a little more. She was starting to tremble.