“Almost there,” I told her, and she nodded.
Finally, she was fully corseted, and I stepped back, grateful that I was wearing a giant, heavy robe and she couldn’t see my body’s response to lacing her up.
“What are these?” she asked me, turning around to show me two ties dangling from the front of the corset. “Should we tie these too?”
“Ah, yes,” I said. “It’s the bust drawstring. It fits the corset better to your chest.” There was no way to tie the drawstring without my fingers being in dangerously close proximity to her breasts, so I didn’t move to help her until she pouted at me again.
“I’m afraid of doing it wrong,” she admitted, and then jerked her chin down at her chest in invitation.
“Are you sure?” I asked, my heart thudding against my chest. I felt fifteen years old. What grown-ass adult has palpitations at the prospect of tying a bow?
Bee smiled up at me, her deep green eyes sparkling. “I promise it’s okay—I ask people to do shit like this all the time. For the modeling,” she added quickly.
“Right,” I said. “Modeling. Okay, one sec.” I stepped closerto her, reaching up to the drawstring, which hung from the top center of her corset. We’d cinched the thing tight enough that her breasts were plumped above the top, and when I moved my hands to tie the knot of the bow, my knuckles brushed against the warm curves of her breasts.
She sucked in a breath at the same time I did, and our eyes met. I could have drowned in her eyes just then, because they were open, so very open, and soft and curious. There was no wariness in them right now, no walls.
Only her.
Without breaking our stare, I finished tying the drawstring in a little bow, my fingers caressing over her skin twice more before I was finished.
“There,” I said quietly. “All corseted up.”
She looked up at me for a moment more, and then her face registered a blip of panic. “Shit!” she exclaimed, turning toward the table where the rest of her costume was draped. “I’m supposed to wear stockings too. There’s no way I’m going to be able to bend in this thing enough to put the stockings on.”
“I can help,” I heard myself offering. “I can help you put them on.”
She looked back at me over her shoulder, her pink lower lip caught between her teeth. I could see the indecision on her face—the necessity of it all warring with something else I couldn’t decipher—and then she nodded. “Yeah, that would be great. Sorry.”
“Totally fine,” I said, trying to stay cool and not have a heart attack. “Luca will just owe us all a drink tonight.”
“Definitely,” she said. “Should I stand here or—”
“Actually,” I said, “if you could sit on the table, that would probably be easiest.”
“Table,” she said. “Right.”
While I tried to focus on anything other than the fact that I was about to put stockings on my wet-dream girl, Bee perched herself on the edge of the table and then grabbed the stockings, which she held out for me to take.
Our fingers touched as I took them, and I was proud of their steadiness. Proud, that is, until she spread her legs so that I could help her more easily, and then I felt a slow shaking all over my body, like every muscle was trembling from the sheer proximity to her.
“I think Luca got them from his stash,” Bee said after a minute, and I realized that I’d been staring down at the stockings as I gathered my breath. “I know they’re not historically accurate, but they’ll fit me, and there shouldn’t be much more than a glimpse of them on camera anyway.”
She was nervous, maybe. She was rambling in a way she didn’t normally, running her words together instead of delivering them with her usual cheeky, confident edge.
“These will be fine,” I said, and I did mean it, but also I could be about to roll fuchsia fishnets up her legs and I would still be reassuring her because I didn’t want her to change her mind. I didn’t want this surreal, wonderful moment to end.
I slid the stockings through my hands—they were thigh highs with stretchy lace at the tops—and then looked at her, where she sat on the table, her legs spread and her corset exaggerating every breath she took.
It looked like she was breathless, but that couldn’t be it, shecouldn’t actually be trying to catch her breath around me. It had to be the corset. Right?
I slowly got to one knee, which dropped me down to where I could more easily tuck her foot into the stocking. Her toenails were painted a delicate lavender, and I wanted to kiss them. Kiss her toes and the arch of her foot and the knob of her ankle, and then trail my mouth with slow kisses all the way up her leg...
Why hadn’t I used that gingerbread lotion, again? Why had I thought that starving myself of orgasms would make this any easier? Because there wasnothingeasy about this. About kneeling between Bianca von Honey’s legs while she was in her panties and pretending it didn’t affect me in the least.
I tucked my lip between my teeth and worked open a stocking so that I could slide it over her foot. Her breathing stuttered as I did, as I worked the silky fabric over the top of her foot and the curve of her heel, as I carefully smoothed it up her calf and then over her knee. She reached for the top of the stocking as I rolled it into place, her hands tangling over mine, which were now trapped between the soft skin of her thigh and the weave of the lace. I looked up at her, and she looked down at me, neither of us seeming to breathe.
She didn’t tell me that she could fix the top of the stocking herself. She didn’t push my hands away.
