“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.

Without breaking the kiss, he picked her up and carried her to the bed. The feel of her back sinking into the down blankets brought her to reality. They were finally going to do this. Sex. Without structure, without a plan. She was going to be bad at it, and he’d have to show her what to fix, how to improve, and she’d try very hard to take the criticism in stride even though it humiliated—

He tore her bathrobe open, and his mouth fastened on her nipple, drawing deeply. She arched into him with a gasp that turned into a moan when his hand slid between her thighs again and stroked her. Her sex clenched so hard it hurt.

“Shhhhhh,” he whispered against her breast.

One long finger slipped into her, and grateful sighs and murmurs tumbled from her lips. That was exactly what she needed. He worked a second finger in, and the stretching sensation had her head falling back. No, this was what she needed. Her heels dug into the bed as she pushed into the penetration. His fingers eased in and out, curling against her to breathtaking effect.

When he removed his touch, she couldn’t bite back a protesting sound. “Michael, more, I—”

He lifted his glistening fingers to his lips and sucked them into his mouth. The intensity of his eyes coupled with his devilish grin had her bunching the blankets in her hands as her core tightened on itself.

The caresses resumed with deep, slow thrusts. It was good, so good, but he wasn’t touching her where she needed it. Her hips writhed as she tried to relieve the growing ache. When he withdrew again, she stroked her hands down her stomach in rampant frustration, but her own touch did nothing to excite her.

He gripped her knees, pulled them apart to bare her sex to his eyes. His chest expanded on a sharp inhalation, and his dragon tattoo rippled. His throat worked on a loud swallow. “I should have known you’d have the prettiest little—”