64. Natalie

64

NATALIE

C hristmas cheer looks like a fleet of men and women in black cargo pants and long-sleeved black t-shirts standing on Adam’s front porch with all manner of festive goodies. The team from the decorating company has turned up bright and early on a Saturday morning to transform his palatial home into a winter wonderland, and I can’t wait. It’s already the second Saturday in December, which in my eyes means at least a week lost when we could have been enjoying the decorations.

I’m going to make him keep them up for weeks and weeks after Christmas.

When Adam handed me his iPad on his jet last week and gave me carte blanche, let’s just say I took him at his word. I rapidly upgraded his pathetic gesture of ‘a tree in the hallway’ to a full festive programme including, but not limited to, a colour scheme for each area of the ground floor, scent design by room, and intricate projection mapping across the mansion’s facade.

I’m so excited !

While I’m here to make sure everything goes smoothly and that the team is clear on how to execute on their brief, I’m also in danger of getting in the way. I take tea and coffee orders and relay these to Toby, who’s on duty today, and then proceed to spend a couple of hours floating around the house as I watch the magic come to life.

It’s a huge brief, but the decoration company has sent a big team, so they make fast work of it. I sit on my beloved grass-green chaise longue in the hallway, hugging my mug of tea to my chest—the mug is Hermès, naturally—while four people light and dress the crazy twelve-foot tree that’s taken the place of the flower-bearing table in the centre of the space and another three assemble a garland on the sweeping bannister that incorporates holly, ivy, eucalyptus and feathery fronds of fir.

Finally, they weave in white fairy lights and white and silver baubles, in keeping with the theme we’ve chosen for the entrance hall. By the time they’ve finished dressing the tree in the same colours and have added impeccably wrapped white and silver fake gifts underneath, the space looks incredible: truly magical and outrageously festive.

We— I —opted for cool colours in the drawing room where I first sat and fumed as Dr Dyson examined me. In keeping with the grey tones of the furnishings and linen walls, the tree in there and the garland on the mantelpiece are both decked out in dusky pink and pewter tones, while the ornaments have an old-world feel.

But the favourite is my beloved library. I mean, it’s Adam’s library, obviously. It’s just that it’s beloved of me . The bookshelves’ eau de nil and dull gold accents were too dreamy not to exploit, so I gave the design team a simple, one-word brief: Ladurée. As an ode to the luxury French macaron brand, they’ve used sugared-almond pastels in here, bedecking every piece of greenery with duck-egg blue and pale pink velvet ribbons and pastel decorations. They’ve even found some baubles shaped like macarons .

If I thought Adam’s home was beautiful before, as a canvas for Christmas it makes me want to sink to my knees in sheer delight. Now I just need to track down the master of the house and drag him around his new festive wonderland.

I finally locate him in his basement gym. It’s incredible down here—he has a gym, a lap pool, full-on hammam with infrared sauna, steam room and experience showers (the citronella mist one is my favourite) and his beloved ice bath. He escaped a couple of hours ago to work on some secret project for his company, ostensibly to get out of the decorators’ way but really, I suspect, to give me free rein as I oversaw the project.

Boy, am I glad I tracked him down.

I slump against the door frame, arms folded, as I take in what feels like my own private viewing of Magic Mike . Adam is doing pull ups on some contraption with a high bar—I have no idea what the name for it is, and I don’t care, because my boyfriend is wearing nothing but a pair of black athletic shorts and footwear, and holy fucking shit.

The sheen of sweat on him. The muscles. The way his damp hair is raked back off his face. Jesus Christ. I watch as he pulls himself up again. Every single muscle in his body ripples. Those shoulders of his are fucking huge. Veins pop along his biceps and forearms. His glorious pecs contract. He’s bloody ridiculous. There’s something so obscenely male about this show he’s putting on: the effort, the grunts as he hoists himself up and lowers himself as slowly as possible .

I realise I’m a cliché, but seeing him like this makes me want to go full cavewoman and scream mine!

He grins at me with effort. ‘See something you like?’ he huffs out.

‘Hell, yes.’ I stroll towards him, eyeing up the damp trail of dark hair disappearing into his shorts.

‘How are the decorations looking?’

‘What decorations?’ I deadpan, stopping in front of him as he lowers himself, inch by trembling inch.

He grunts out a laugh that quickly turns more anguished as I smooth my palm down the slickness of his abs.

‘Careful,’ he warns as he pulls himself up again. I keep my hand where it is and smirk, pleased with myself, as his body brushes upwards against it so I’m basically palming his cock. Mmm. I gaze up at him through my eyelashes. He hasn’t taken his eyes off me, either. It’s evident just what an impressive feat this is, in terms of self-discipline as much as physical strength.

Not that that’s any surprise. Adam Wright is a man who will pour blood, sweat and tears into getting what he wants, and that’s as much of a turn-on for me as is the fine physical specimen he makes.

I keep my hand where it is, pressing against him. I swear, he fills out slightly against me in return.

‘How many reps do you have left?’ I ask innocently, batting my eyelashes.

I squeeze.

‘Fuck,’ he grits out. ‘I’m done.’ He lets himself drop to the ground, and I take a step back on instinct. I don’t want a tonne of hard, muscular man landing on my socked toes. But before I can react further, he’s hooking an arm around me and hauling me against his soaking wet body. His breath is ragged, his tone ominous, as he continues, ‘And you’re going to get it.’

My hands go to his deliciously slick shoulders. ‘Oh yeah?’

‘Yep.’ He spins me around and, with a hand clamped around the back of my neck, frogmarches me towards the island in the centre of the gym. It’s more of a decorative depository than anything else, crafted from a gorgeous chunk of matte black marble. The niches in its sides house dozens of rolled-up towels—even though Adam’s the only person I know who works out in here—and on its smooth surface stand a big white bowl of oranges and a jug of iced cucumber water for his lordship.

We come to stand in front of it, my hips touching its smooth edge, and his hand bears down on the back of my neck. ‘Bend over, sweetheart.’ The way he says the endearment sounds more foreboding than affectionate, and I absolutely love it.

‘Here?’ I protest feebly. ‘What if someone comes in?’

‘I’d like to see them fucking try. Now. ’

I’m not sure there’s anything better than a man treating you like his plaything in the bedroom (or gym, for that matter) and a princess everywhere else. In the past week or more, his behaviour has intensified on both fronts. I feel like the early signs of Winky’s thaw have given both of us the confidence to lean into this relationship, to invest in it, just as my, ahem, ‘positive’ reaction to him getting rougher and more stern with me in bed has ignited something in him that he’s been needing to unleash.

And Adam Wright unleashing himself on me is all I want. So if he’s seeing and acting on all these shameless green lights I’ve been flashing at him, then I couldn’t be happier .

But back to the rapidly hardening dick that’s grinding into the cleft between my arse cheeks. This house is so wonderfully cosy that I’m in just a yoga vest and pants with a loose, cloud-like cashmere sweater that’s fallen off one shoulder. Now one hand is digging into my hip as the other strokes down my neck and between my shoulder blades.

‘Be a very good girl,’ he croons, his dick flexing against me, ‘and I’ll let you come quickly.’

The unspoken threat if I’m not a very good girl hangs in the air between us, thick as treacle.

Hmm. Decisions, decisions.

I’m bent at a right angle, my arms cactused either side of my head on the smooth marble, my cheek pressed to its surface. I can feel the stone’s coolness at my front and my boyfriend’s wet heat at my back. When he seems happy that I won’t move, he strokes my hair before hooking his fingers into both sides of my waistband.

‘Let’s take a look at what you’ve got for me,’ he says, and I groan. Why oh why is the act of being bent over by this guy so he can peel my yoga pants and thong off and look his fill so fucking much of a turn on?