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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 driv
eway 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.”
