The Kiss Quotient (The Kiss Quotient 1)

Her palm sweated so badly she didn’t know how he could stand touching her, let alone act like it was the most normal thing in the world. Oddly, she’d handled foreplay better than this—up until the end, that was—and she’d been naked for that. She couldn’t blame her reaction on her usual aversion to touch. She liked Michael’s touch.

As she and Michael walked down the busy San Francisco sidewalk hand-in-hand, passersby smiled at them. An old man in a newsboy cap winked at her.

They thought she and Michael were a couple.

Stella would have laughed if she didn’t feel like she was somehow taking part in a duplicitous charade. A gaggle of party girls in low-cut dresses flocked by, giving Michael double takes, then triple takes as they giggled into their hands and whispered to one another. They glanced at Stella with open envy that she enjoyed even as she knew she didn’t deserve it. Wearing a slate-gray suit and black oxford shirt, he was particularly scrumptious-looking tonight.

“Here it is.” Michael released her hand and held open the door for her as she walked into the old-fashioned gelato shop. Black and white tiles checkered the floor. Pink chandeliers illuminated display freezers filled with gelato and toppings. “What’s your flavor?”

She could barely think about ice cream with his hand resting at the base of her spine like that. Did he know he was doing it? She’d seen men do that with their girlfriends. Stella wasn’t a girlfriend.

“Mint chocolate chip,” she said.

“Really? That’s my favorite, too. I’ll get something else, then, so we can try something new.” He idly rubbed her waist as he considered the gelato flavors, and her body heated with awareness.

“Wait, what do you mean by ‘we’?”

A mischievous grin curved on his lips. “You don’t want to share with me?”

The college-aged girl behind the counter stared at Stella like she’d kicked a puppy.

“No, that’s not it.” Not entirely. After all the kissing they’d done, she knew it was silly to worry about germ transference. The fact was she’d made a detailed analysis of ice cream flavors, and she’d decided this one was the best in existence. “I just know what I like.”

“We’ll see about that.” He tapped on the display case. “Mint chocolate chip for her and green tea for me.”

Stella wanted to pay, but he dug bills out of his wallet before she could pry the credit card out from the bodice of her sapphire-blue sheath dress. Once they were seated at a black wrought-iron table by the window, he dipped his spoon into his gelato, tasted it, and grinned a slow, wide grin as he slipped the clean spoon from his mouth and scooped out more.

“Oh, that’s just ridiculous,” she said. “You look like you’re auditioning for a Häagen-Dazs commercial. No one smiles like that after eating ice cream.”

He laughed. “It really is good.” His grin was out in full force, and, God forbid, did he have a dimple?

“Now, I have to try it.” She lowered her spoon toward his bowl.

“Ah, ah, ah.” Instead of letting her scoop up some herself, he held his spoon to her lips. Her eyes jumped to his, and conflicting thoughts skittered through her mind.

She shouldn’t do it. This was too intimate. It was crossing a line of some kind. It felt too much like dating—which they weren’t.

It was just gelato. Just his spoon. He might take it as rejection if she didn’t do it, and she could never, ever in a thousand years hurt him, not even in a trivial way.

She parted her lips and let him feed her the gelato. Her heart knocked around her chest like a pinball as sweet green tea melted on her tongue. He watched her with expectation, oblivious to his effect on her.

“Okay, it’s good.” She tried to sound casual. This didn’t mean anything. This wasn’t a date. She was just another of his clients. Keep a cool head. She stabbed her spoon into her gelato.

“I told you so.”

“I still like mine best.” She put a spoonful of mint chocolate chip in her mouth. The complex combination of vanilla and mint exploded on her palate. Bits of chocolate crunched between her teeth. Perfection.

“Let me try it.”

She held her bowl out toward him, but he didn’t put his spoon in it. He trailed his fingers over her jaw as he tipped her head back and sealed his lips over hers. His tongue speared into her mouth, and the salt of him mixed with the flavor of the ice cream. She didn’t know if she was mortified, shocked, aroused, or all three.

With a lingering lick on her bottom lip, he pulled away and grinned, his dark eyes intense and hazy.

“I can’t believe you did that.” Flustered, she tried to scoop herself another spoonful. Her white plastic spoon skittered onto the tabletop.

She grabbed for it, but his hands wrapped around hers. In the next instant, he was kissing her again—sweet, closed-mouth kisses that still felt scandalous. And too delicious to resist. The gelato shop dropped away. The people disappeared. In that moment, it was just her and Michael, the taste of ice cream, and their slowly warming lips.

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