Page 27 of Sherwood
“You waited to get dressed,” he said, his hand reaching out to run along the flat lapel of my robe. “Good.”
I nodded as his fingers drifted lower, ghosting over my stiffening nipples over the silk and then finding the knot of the robe’s belt and hooking his fingers behind it. With an embarrassingly small motion, he was able to yank me close—close enough that I could see the individual eyelashes framing his pale winter-sky eyes.
“Is it still okay?” he asked. “If I dress you for tonight?”
Yes, and please dress me every night for the rest of time.
“Yes,” I murmured as I blinked up at him. This close, I could see that his mouth was softer than it looked at first. The sharp geometry of it belied the subtle curves of his lips, the oh-so-slight upward tilt at the very edges, as if God had given him a mouth for boyish smiles and dangerous smirks and Rafe had simply chosen to brood with it instead. “I like the idea of you dressing me.”
His hand tightened around my belt before he let go and turned to shut the front door. “Me too,” he replied. “Will you show me what clothes you have?”
On the beach when he’d suggested the idea for tonight’s scene to me, he’d asked if he could dress me for it too. “It’s okay if the answer is no,” he’d said. He’d still been braced over me then, his thighs and arms caging me deliciously on the sand, and his erection pressing hard into my stomach. “Helping you dress will be blurring the lines between us, bringing our interactions outside the structure of a scene.”
“And this isn’t?” I’d asked, and he’d searched my face.
“You’re right. I’m already blurring the lines with you.”
“Blur them. Sir.”
And so now here we were, blurring all sorts of lines as he walked through my house to my bedroom and into my walk-in closet, ready to thumb through my clothes to see what I should be wearing when I was tied and spread for anyone who happened to be at the club tonight.
Rafe looked through my closet with a brisk but hungry efficiency that made me wet to watch. He’d flip past several things only to stop at one and bring it to his nose. His fingers would trail over the fabric and then he’d find its hem, testing how much access the dress would give him, before returning it to its place and moving on to the next. Finally, he stopped at a red one—a filmy, sleeveless number with a deep V neckline and a high slit up the side.
“This one,” he said with complete certainty.
“Are you sure you wouldn’t rather I wear something…I don’t know…kinkier?”
He pulled the hanger from the rod and rehung it on a hook fastened to the closet door. “Do you think you should show up to the club wearing PVC and a harness?”
I laughed. “I mean, a little. This dress is very colorful.”
“It’s very Marian Fitzwalter, and Marian Fitzwalter gets me hard. Come here.”
I approached him, and again he hauled me close by the knot of my belt, his eyes bent to his work as he untied the fabric and made short work of my robe. When he saw the lacy black bra and panties I wore underneath, his eyes darkened.
“If I had my way, I would take these pretty underthings off with my teeth. But alas, we are limited on time this evening. May I take these off?”
I had no objection to him undressing me, but the idea of showing up to the club without panties felt scandalous somehow. Which was silly, since the whole point was to expose myself to everyone anyway, but still.
Correctly interpreting my look, Rafe said, “I want your cunt available right away. And Marian, as much as I enjoy all these expensive knickers of yours, I want you naked under your clothes whenever we meet, unless you’ve come from work or unless I specify otherwise. Understood?”
Oh, I understood. And when he framed it like that, I never wanted to wear underwear again.
“Consider them gone, sir,” I said, and he smiled. Without another word, he tugged the panties off my hips and down to my ankles, where he carefully guided my feet out of the lace. Then he unhooked my bra and exposed my breasts to the cool air of the room.
When he finished, he folded the lingerie into a neat pile and set it on my bed. Though his demeanor remained cool and reserved, I heard his inhale as he looked at my naked body in its entirety. But his control remained intact, and he turned to take the dress off its hanger.
“Tell me about the past few days,” he said. “I want to know how you’ve been feeling.”
I groaned. “Part of the allure of kink for me is that I want you to tell me how to feel.”
A low laugh. “I suppose that’s its own answer. Arms up.”
I obeyed, and he settled the dress over me without disturbing my hair, which I’d already styled.
“It’s been the same since we talked last,” I finally answered. He guided the dress down around my hips and then smoothed the skirt. His touch was a strange combination of preemptory and comforting. “We’re acquiring a biofuel company, mostly for their algal products and ongoing R&D. However, they’ve been earning the money to fund their algal research by producing ethanol made from corn too, which is environmentally problematic. But objectively lucrative. Some in my company want to divest from the ethanol products immediately, and some think we should keep them, becausesomeoneis going to make ethanol, and at least if it’s us, we can use that money to do good things.”
Rafe swept the hair off my neck and draped it carefully over my shoulder. “And what do you think? And remember you are to be honest with me. I’m not interested in what you believe youshouldthink.”
