He froze. “Wait a minute.” She had to stop talking.
“If sex were your profession, we wouldn’t be having this conversation,” he said. “And if you think I want to have sex with a symbol, you don’t know me as well as I thought you did.”
“But—”
“I want you, Kace. Just you.”
“You want the me you think I am in the bedroom.”
“Until the last two days, I’ve tried my best not to think of you in the bedroom.”
“I’m not that good.”
He shook his head. Looked her straight in the eye, because he wanted there to be no mistake about what he was about to tell her. “I. Don’t. Care.” He enunciated very clearly. “I’m not here to have a good time, Kacey. I’m here to explore another facet to our relationship and only because it’s calling out to both of us. I’m not doing it for me. Or just for you, either. I’m doing it because it’s a mutual thing.”
She nodded but still looked doubtful. “It’s just... I don’t really know what to do to...please you,” she said. “And I want to. Please you. So badly.”
She wasn’t getting it. Or he wasn’t. “Being with you pleases me, Kacey.”
“I know.” She sounded more frustrated than anything. “And you are making this about as embarrassing as it gets.” She glared at him, but held his gaze, too. “I’ve only slept with two men in my entire life,” she told him. “And neither was anything to write home about. It wasn’t spectacular at all. Or anything like I pretend on television. I liked it fine. I felt some things. But...” She looked away, and then back. “Now you see the problem?”
He wanted to whoop out loud. If he’d been more like her he would have. But he was Mike Valentine. The man who’d learned self-control as a way to maintain his san
ity when the pain—both emotional and physical—had come close to being more than he could bear.
“Actually, I don’t,” he said, grinning full out. “If you think it’s a problem that I’ve had more lovers than you have, then you’re sadly misinformed,” he told her. “If I’d allowed myself to have a fantasy about you, that would pretty much be it,” he said, looking her straight in the eye. “I want the real you, Kacey. This gives me a chance to meet you, before too much experience shaped you into something different.”
“You’ve had more lovers than I have.” She considered a moment. “Exactly how many are we talking about here?”
And that was what happened when he pushed forward without assessing. He ended up with both feet in his mouth.
“Not that many.” It wasn’t polite to ask, he might have pointed out. But the way she was sticking her chin out, glaring at him, was such a turn-on he couldn’t stop things now.
“How many?”
“It’s not like I keep notches on my bedpost.” And most of them had been before the accident.
“Michael?”
“I love you, Kace,” he said. As a friend. He trusted her to know that. “Can we please have sex now?” Leaning forward, he kissed her, long and slow. Softly. Tasting wine. And tongue. Tasting Kacey.
No food, ever, would top that taste.
CHAPTER THIRTY-TWO
HIS BODY WAS utter perfection. As Kacey lay beneath Michael on her bed, ready to receive him for the first time, all she could see was brightness around him. Illumination from the moonlight streaming in through the open windows.
She was so hot for him she was getting impatient. And yet loving every single moment that he drew this out.
His lips had caressed every part of her body, his fingers working their own magic. She’d been on the cusp of the most exquisite explosion on several occasions, and each time he’d brought her back from the brink. Only to drive her right back there again.
The most incredible moments came from simply touching him. Fingers were not an erogenous zone, but when she touched him between his legs, her own body flooded with excitement. With need.
As she spread her legs for him to position himself between them, she was at the point of no return.
And then he turned her over so she was on top of him.
“You’re in control, Kacey,” he told her, his voice deliciously throaty, his eyes hooded with need, but the words completely serious.