Page 15 of Reign

“Yes, but are you—”

“Stop there and take your clothes off.”

“But your next appointment—”

Without taking his dark eyes off of hers, Maxence reached over and pushed a button on his phone. “Hold all my calls and appointments.” He lifted his finger off the phone.

Through the speaker of the phone, a woman’s voice said, “Yes, sir.”

Maxence said to Dree, “Clothes off, right now.”

Dree unzipped her dress down the back and tugged it off over her head. She held out the dress with two fingers—her scarlet manicure glinting against the dark fabric—at an arm’s length and let it drop onto the floor.

The navy-blue fabric fell like a waterfall to the thick Oriental rug and lay there like a deep pool.

He wasn’t watching the fabric. His gaze didn’t move from her fingers.

Dust motes danced in a beam of sunlight from the windows behind Maxence.

He didn’t move.

Dree took a step.

“All your clothes, right now.”

She unhooked her bra and added it to the pile on the floor. Her breasts, which were always a little pendulous because of their size, felt swollen as if she could feel Maxence’s gaze slither on her skin like a tongue.

Nudging her shoes off her feet with her toes was next, and her beige pumps lay beside her navy-blue dress on the floor. Maxence was as still as a brass statue as she hooked her thumbs in the sides of her panties and tugged them down over her hips. The white lace dropped to her ankles, and she stepped out.

Now that she was completely naked and grateful that this office was never chilly, she began to walk toward him.

“On your hands and knees.”

Maxence was usually in control when they had sex, and she usually felt afterward like she was his little sex doll he’d played with for a few hours at a time.

That wasn’t a problem. It was just the way she felt.

But crawling was a level of subservience he hadn’t asked of her yet, so she paused.

Maxence didn’t move. He didn’t raise an eyebrow. His lips did not twitch in a smile or anything else. His finger did not tap the desk. He simply waited for her to obey him.

And she did.

Dree lowered herself to her knees and put her hands on the antique carpet, cream with ornate blue and gold swirls under her fingers.

The sunlight from the window touched her bare back, warming her skin.

Dree crawled to the desk and stopped in front of it.

The centuries-old rug under her hands was in perfect condition and appeared brand-new except for the exquisite attention to details that no machine-manufactured rug could have copied.

The office chair creaked, and soft footfalls padded around the desk. Brown leather shoe tips appeared at the corner of her vision, but Dree stared straight down at the carpeting.

The tips of his shoes did not move, and Dree didn’t either.

She did hear the whisper of leather on fabric.

Dree curled her fingers into the carpet, her heart pounding in her chest.