Page 78 of Praised
He groaned, digging his chin into my chest and shooing a sharp look up at me, but when I arched a brow, his face once again softened.
“Thank you,” he whispered. “For whatever it is.”
“Let’s get you rinsed off.”
Rose threaded our hands together and followed me into the en suite. He started to pop open the buttons of his shirt, but I stopped him with a quiet click of my tongue. HIs hands fell to his sides with a sigh, and I started the shower before turning back to him and picking up where he’d left off.
“I like being around you, Rose,” I whispered, working my way down to his waist. “I like being inside of you, and I like it very much when you’re inside of me.”
I tugged the tails of his shirt up and out of his pants, then slid the sleeves down his arms and past his wrists. The shirt fell to the floor, and the flush on his cheeks rushed down toward his throat and his chest. I plucked at his belt, then the button and fly of his black chinos.
“I like the quiet moments when we’re just together too,” I said, somehow sensing the question about whether I was only with him for sex hanging on the tip of his tongue.
He swallowed audibly as his pants fell to his ankles, revealing a pair of relatively simple but still silky, black panties. I licked my lips, almost losing my train of thought as I traced my finger over the ridged outline of his half-soft cock.
God, he was perfect. There were only two things that could make him better so far as I was concerned. One of which being the blessing of my friends. Their approval was far from a deal breaker for me because, as I’d told Rose more than once, I was already all in with Rose. The other, of course, being some degree of submission from him.
I’d been careful to tread far more carefully around that road than the rest, and the way he’d opened up to me the day before had proven that to be the right decision. I wouldn’t go so far as to call Rose skittish, at least not anymore. But he doubted my affection, sometimes doubted my sincerity. His ex had hurt him, that much was clear. Thankfully, I had no issue cleaning up the mess and picking up the pieces.
Every time Rose shut up and let me pour praise over him, he brightened and healed, and I was happy to see it. Even happier to be part of the cause of it. But I hadn’t asked him to kneel, hadn’t asked him to call me Sir. We’d danced around it, talked about the implications of the power exchange, but to me, it felt like there was still a bridge to cross there.
Rose hummed, walking his fingers up my chest until they reached my mouth where I kissed the pads of his fingers. He traced my lower lip and I darted out my tongue to lick it, which earned me a sharp and surprised intake of breath.
“There’s something else,” he said. “Something you’re not saying in there. I can hear it between the words. In the quiet.”
“I think a lot about the first night we met. The first time we kissed.”
Regretfully, I pulled his panties down to his knees. Rose braced himself against my shoulder and stepped out of the silk, leaving him naked and exposed. His skin was nearly as white as the marble countertop behind him, washed out and pale. I balled up his underwear, raising them to my nose and taking a deep inhale.
“That’s gross,” he murmured, shaking his head and staring down at his feet. “They’re sweaty. I’ve been working all day.”
“You think I don’t love that?”
I had half a mind to shove the balled-up material into my mouth so I could taste it, but that wasn’t what I had planned for the night and if I was late getting us to Rapture, I didn’t doubt for one second that my friends and their respective dates would herd themselves over to my house and let themselves in without knocking.
“I love the way you taste,” I told him, putting the underwear into my pocket instead. “The way you feel and the way you smell. The way you sound when you call me Sir, even if you don’t mean it in the ways that I want you to mean it.”
He hummed at that, an indecipherable sound.
I helped him into the shower, leaving the door open so I could keep my hands on him. He tried to protest as the spray rained down onto the dark hunter green of my shirt, but I didn’t care. I washed Rose thoroughly; then I shampooed his hair and rinsed him properly off. Once he was clean and had quit trying to argue with me, I wrapped him in a towel and let him dry himself in peace.
I’d gone shopping for him earlier in the evening, hoping he wouldn’t protest over any of the things I’d wanted him to have. They were just as much for me as for him, I was ready to remind him, and I wasn’t in the business of depriving myself of anything I wanted.
Rose found me in the bedroom, sitting on the edge of the bed beside the bag that held his gift. He eyed me thoughtfully from the doorway, backlit and glowing like an angel. Even though we were leaving soon, I had the fireplace on because I knew he liked it. I watched him drop the towel in the bathroom and pad across the room, the orange sparks from the fire casting him in a much more sinful glow than the white of the bathroom had allowed.
Without a word, I watched him shift his weight and straighten his spine, right his shoulders. He tipped his chin and tilted his head, like he was an impervious king staring down at his subjects, and it should have had me desperate to flip the roles, but I found that I liked the watchfulness, the dominance.
The pull between Rose and me would keep me honest.
“Would you kneel forme?” he asked, voice barely louder than a whisper over the crackle of the fireplace.
I’d do far more than kneel for him, I realized, a rush of adrenaline curling around my spine and almost sending me straight to his feet.
“If that was what you wanted.”
My shirt was still wet from the shower, the water cooling and sending shivers down my arms. Rose took a step forward, then another and another and he was between my spread legs, fingers deftly working their way down the button front until I was naked from the waist up.
“What doyouwant?” he asked, tracing his fingers over my shoulders. He was so close I could touch him, so I wrapped my hands around his waist and kissed his stomach, slow and wet.
