The Muse

LILY

“Just so we’re clear,” I say, arms crossed, standing in the middle of his studio at nine o’clock at night, “my job title is personal assistant. Not fitting model. If you need someone to stand on that platform, call your favourite model, Maaike. She’d cross an ocean for the privilege.”

Rafael doesn’t look up from the bolt of fabric he’s unrolling. “I don’t have favourites.” He drapes the ivory silk over his cutting table, smoothing a single wrinkle with his palm. “And Maaike is in Rotterdam until Thursday.”

“How tragic for you.”

“Indeed, very devastating.” He picks up his measuring tape. A long, worn, cream-coloured thing that looks like it has been passed down through generations. “Now, stand on the platform.”

No ‘please’. The word doesn’t exist in the four languages Rafael Lancaster speaks. This man probably came out of the womb issuing directives.

I give him my most obedient look, drop my chin, and let out two short barks. “Woof. Woof.” I step onto the platform. “Yes, master, as you wish.”

The corner of his mouth twitches into that smirk. the one he uses instead of laughing because laughing would be beneath him. “Behave.”

“We both know you’d be bored if I did.”

He doesn’t argue, which is its own kind of answer.

Rafael circles me slowly, the tape trailing from one hand, while I’m standing in the centre of his empire of silk and pins and half-dressed mannequins, wearing nothing but a simple lace bra and knickers. I’m surrounded on all sides by bolts of fabric in colours that probably have names like ‘Coquelicot’, a bright orange-red. Or ‘Goose Turd Green’, another name for a yellow-green colour because someone in 17th-century England thought that an original name would bring in more customers. The worktable on my right by the window is buried under pattern pieces weighted down with pincushions shaped like tomatoes. Rafael is building the sample dress directly on my body so the measurements gave to be exact.

Strictly professional, he said, which I keep repeating to myself like a mantra, and which would be considerably easier to hold onto if my bra weren’t an ultra thin, pale, and utterly useless scrap of cotton that the studio’s air conditioning is currently making its business to expose as such.

I brace for the awkwardness. I wait for the sensible part of my brain to kick in, to remind me who he is, who I am, and what’s at stake.

But it doesn’t come. Instead, something hotter and far more reckless coils in my stomach, and I hate how much I want to feed it.

Whatever is currently happening in my bloodstream is a terrible idea.

For fuck’s sake, he’s not only my boss, but also my father’s, and my father has given this place twenty-four years, and Dad’s the reason I have this job at all, and if I torch it by climbing my employer like a trellis, I will have to change my entire identity and move to a country on a completely different continent.

He’s thirty-two and I’m twenty-four, and while eight years is nothing scandalous, it’s enough that he’s a person with a decade of a career and I’m still getting rejection emails from companies I’ve applied to four months ago. The power difference is enormous.

I want him to fuck me.

Hard.

Every reason I shouldn’t want him just adds heat to the fact that I do, like pouring gasoline on an already dangerous fire.

“Shoulders back,” he murmurs.

I straighten, my spine a rigid line against the cool air of the studio. He starts at my shoulders, stretching the tape from one point to the other, and his fingers trail along my collarbone with far more attention than the measurement requires.

The real problem is his hands. I can handle his perfect face. The sharp jaw that looks like it was carved with a chisel. The dark eyes that seem to absorb light rather than reflect it. Cheekbones so defined they could cut paper.

I’ve spent months watching his hands work, sketching designs with charcoal that smudges under his thumb, pinning silk to mannequins, gesturing through fittings with finger that somehow never fumble, fixing a seam in thirty seconds with a single fluid motion that took an intern an hour to unpick and redo. Hands like that make a person start having inappropriate thoughts during business hours about what his fingers would feel like tracing the lines of a body instead of a hem.

And now those hands are on me. Each place they land leaves a small bright ache, like a match struck and blown out.

“Arms up,” he says.

I lift them. Rafael brings the measuring tape around my ribcage, just beneath the lace of my bra. His knuckles press lightly against my skin as he reads the number, his touch innocent yet so intimate in this charged space between us. He’s standing so close I can smell the cedar and bergamot in his cologne. I see the faint line of concentration between his brows, a tiny furrow that makes me want to reach up and smooth it away with my thumb.

He’s your boss, a voice in my head warns.

I know.

He’s Dad’s boss too.

I know!

He’s arrogant, cocky, impossible, and has perimenopausal mood swings.

And yet here I am, standing very still so he won’t notice that my breathing has changed.

“Don’t move,” he murmurs, his hands moving higher, sliding the tape up to measure my bust.

I bite my lip, trying to stifle the gasp that escapes when his knuckles graze the underside of my breast. He freezes and his dark, sinful eyes flick up to meet mine.

“Sorry,” he mutters, but there’s no remorse in that tone. My nipples harden under my bra, pressing against the thin fabric as if begging for his touch.

“It’s fine,” I whisper, my voice coming out breathy. My heart is pounding so hard I’m sure he can hear it. I can’t stop staring at his full, fucking perfect lips that I’ve imagined against mine more times than I care to admit.

“You… might need to redo that measurement,” I say. “Just to be sure.”

His eyes darken, and something shifts in him like a predator catching the scent of prey. He steps closer without saying a single word, invading my space until I can feel the heat radiating off his body. His hand slips under the tape, fingers skimming over the curve of my breast, and I swear I stopped breathing for a second.

“Like this?” He asks, his thumb brushing over my nipple. I moan before I can stop myself and his lips twitch, a fucking smirk tugging at the corner of his mouth.

“Yeah,” I breathe, my body melting into his touch. “Just like that.”

His grip tightens, squeezing me now like he owns me, and maybe he does, because I don’t stop him. I squirm, my breath coming in jagged gasps, as his other hand slides up my inner thigh.

“Size seems right,” he whispers. “But let me… double-check.”

And then his mouth crashes onto mine, hungry and filthy, his tongue plunging into me. I groan, fingers tangling in his hair, tugging hard as his teeth sink into my bottom lip. I’m arching into him as his thumb circles my nipple harder and faster, teasing the stiff bud through the fabric until I’m whimpering between open-mouthed kisses.

His free hand gropes my arse, grinding my hips against the sudden, unmistakable hardness in his slacks. I rock against him shamelessly, chasing the pressure, fucking his thigh like the desperate bitch that I am.

His palm sears my skin, shoving the bra up to grab my bare breast, pinching my nipple between his fingers.

“Fuck, Rafael—” I choke out, breaking the kiss just to pant against his mouth.

“You have no idea what you just started,” he whispers. His hand comes up to my jaw and there’s nothing tentative in the way he tilts my face up. “If you want to play, we play by my rules.” His thumb drags along my bottom lip, watching me the entire time. “Tell me to stop, and I stop. Say nothing, and I won’t.”

“I’m not going to tell you to stop.”

“No,” he agrees, low and certain. “I didn’t think you would.”

He kisses me again. I gasp into his mouth and he uses it to deepen the kiss until my knees forget their one job.

I grab his shirt to stay upright and he makes a low sound, walking me backwards until my shoulder blades meet the cool wall behind the platform. He cages me there with one arm, kissing me like he intends to make this last exactly as long as he wants it to and not a second less.

“Rafael—”

“Quiet.” He says against my jaw, teeth grazing skin, and I feel the command settle low in my stomach. “I’m not finished.”

His mouth finds the sensitive spot below my ear and I dig my nails into his shoulders, and when he finally comes back up to my mouth, I meet him halfway, matching him now instead of just being the receiving partner. The kiss turns messier and hungrier.

When he pulls back, far enough to look at me, his breathing is as wrecked as mine, and his composure is nowhere in sight.

“Well,” I manage. “That escalated.”

“Mm, you started it.”

“You brushed my breast with your knuckles.”

“And it worked, didn’t it?” He smirks, smug again already, his hand still fisted in my hair like he isn’t quite ready to let go yet. “So I’d call that a successful strategy.”

“Don’t get used to it.”

“I fully intend to get used to it.” His forehead drops to mine. “Repeatedly. Thoroughly. However often it takes.”

I should step back and put my clothes on, walk out of his studio, and pretend this entire evening never happened. I’m his employee. My father built his entire career in this building.

I don’t move.

If I can’t have him properly, and we both know I can’t, then I’ll take this instead. His hands and mouth on me, exactly like this. As long as I get to feel wanted by him, even temporarily and in secret, even knowing it can only end one way.

“This is a terrible idea,” I say, my hands still fisted in his shirt.

“Easily the worst idea I’ve had this year,” he agrees and kisses me again before I can argue the point any further.

So, to recap: I just kissed my boss, who kissed me back, in his private studio in my underwear, with no exit strategy, and three months into the only place that would take me.

Well. Fucking worth it.