The Kiss Quotient(15)

“I should get that.” She slipped inside, sat on the edge of the bed, and pressed the talk button on her phone with a shaky thumb. “Hello?”

“Stella dear, your father’s—oh, hold on a second.” Her father’s deep voice rumbled on the other end, and Stella held the phone away from her ear as her parents discussed golf and lunch plans.

Michael approached her with a fluid-limbed gait. “I need to go, but we’re on for next Friday.”

“Next Friday,” she confirmed with a nod.

Instead of leaving immediately as she expected, he leaned down and brushed a fleeting kiss to her mouth. “Good-bye, Stella.”

She watched his departure in a dazed state. They were meeting again. In a week.

“Who was that?” Even with the phone several inches from her ear, Stella could hear her mother’s surprise.

“That was . . . Michael.” A breathless kind of nervousness filled her. She might like it that her mother had discovered her male visitor.

A brief silence ensued, followed by, “Stella dear, did you spend the night with a man?”

“It’s not what you think. We didn’t do anything. Other than kissing.” The best kissing of Stella’s life.

“Well, why ever not?”

Stella’s mouth worked without issuing words.

“You’re a mature adult, and you make good choices. Now, tell me all about this Michael.”





{ CHAP+ER }





6



Destroy. Defeat. Deceive.

Michael scanned his partner’s black-clad form for weaknesses he could exploit. Right now, during the heat of the match, was the only time he gave free rein to the base, selfish instincts he battled daily. And it felt so fucking good.

No matter how hard he fought against it, at his core, he was just like his dad. The badness had been passed down in his blood.

He shoved and went for a head shot. When his partner’s sword rose to block the strike, Michael pushed for that extra burst of speed and arched his weapon down. The tip of his sword cracked against his partner’s side.

Clean point. Match over.

Everyone bowed and set their swords on the blue matted floor before kneeling. Michael hated this part of class, not because it meant practice was ending, but because it was time to remove his armor and return to his normal self.

This was the beauty of apparel. A suit transformed you into a certain kind of person. A T-shirt, a different kind of person. Black nightmare armor that hid your face behind an ominous metal cage, yet a different kind of person. The gear weighed thirty pounds, but he always felt lighter when he wore it.

As he shed layers, cold air touched his skin, and reality crept back into his head. Heavy thoughts stacked one upon the other like bricks, returning him to his regular burdened state. Responsibilities and obligations. Bills. Family. His day job. His night job.

After class officially ended, he put his gear in its place on the shelf along the back wall. Space was tight as fuck with five guys in the cramped changing room, and he didn’t feel like waiting around, so he slipped his uniform off in the hallway. Nothing half the women in California hadn’t already seen.

Two high school girls giggled and hurried into the women’s room, and he rolled his eyes as he yanked a pair of jeans over his boxer briefs. Michael Larsen: now serving half the women in California plus two.

“We’re probably going to have a bunch of new girl members next week now,” said a voice Michael recognized as belonging to Quan, Michael’s cousin and sparring partner.

“I’ll let you teach them their strikes,” Michael said as he retrieved a wrinkled T-shirt from his duffel bag and straightened.

“They might be disappointed.”

“Whatever.” He yanked his shirt on, trying and failing to ignore their contrasting reflections in the full-length mirror hanging on the wall.

Lots of girls went for Quan. With his buzzed head and the dense tattoos covering his arms and neck, he rocked that badass Asian drug lord image. You wouldn’t guess he was paying his way through business school while helping his parents at their restaurant. Michael, on the other hand, was a pretty boy.

It wasn’t a bad problem to have—it was paying the bills, after all—but people’s responses got boring. Well, except for a certain economist someone’s response. Stella’s attraction to him had been obvious, but she hadn’t looked at him like he was an expensive cut of meat. She’d looked at him like she saw no one else. He couldn’t forget the way she’d kissed him once he’d earned her trust, the way she’d melted and—

When Michael caught the direction of his thoughts, he mentally punched himself in the dick. She was his client, and she had issues. It was fucked up to think of their sessions like this.

“If we have new students, I’ll teach them. I don’t mind,” Khai, Quan’s younger brother, offered. He still wore his uniform and practiced running strikes in front of the mirror, his pace fast but steady, like a machine.

Quan rolled his eyes. “He never minds. Even when they throw themselves at him. You should have seen the last one. She asked him out to dinner, and he said, ‘No, thanks, I already ate.’ ‘Dessert then?’ ‘No, I don’t eat dessert after class.’ ‘Coffee?’ ‘That will keep me up, and I have work tomorrow.’”