“I’ll need you to strip right off,” said Maxine briskly. “Chop chop. Milan, come and have a look at the rails with me. I have some ideas, but I’ll need your input.”
Lydia took a deep breath. She was expected to stand naked in front of this intimidating woman? A woman, moreover, who had dressed the immaculate Tilda Fox-Boyce? She felt small and inconsequential, an inferior shop dummy, but she began to tug off her parka all the same.
“Don’t worry about Maxine,” said Milan over his shoulder, fingering a pile of corsets. “She has seen every beautiful woman in London out of her clothes.”
But I’m not beautiful, thought Lydia woefully.
“And you are beautiful,” said Milan, as if reading her thoughts. “You just need some help to bring it out.”
She gasped, flushed and suddenly felt super-confident.
The hiking boots, woolly socks, cheap jeans and fleece were soon piled neatly on a chair, leaving Lydia shivering in sensible cotton underwear. She was very aware of the congealed essences from her cinema adventure that stained the gusset of her knickers.
Milan and Maxine emerged from the clothing jungle, laden with pieces. They exchanged a glance and smiled while Lydia hugged herself, trying to forget that she was nearly naked.
“You will be a dream to dress,” exclaimed Maxine. “A lovely figure, and perfect skin.” She put down the clothes and reached out a bony finger, touching Lydia’s cheek. “English rose. You can carry off so many colours.”
Lydia, who mainly wore brown and blue, simply raised her eyebrows.
“Thanks,” she said.
“Simple white cotton suits you, but we’re not about dressing down here. We’re about glamming up. So take off those undies, my dear, and let’s find that sex kitten inside the shy girl.”
There isn’t one, thought Lydia reflexively, but then she had to reconsider. What shy girl would have sex with a man while his male lover looked on, cock in hand? What shy girl would let herself be fingered to orgasm in a public cinema? She had never known this side of her existed, but it was there, and now it had seen the light it wasn’t going back inside.
“I’ll do it for you, if you like,” offered Milan, stepping up behind her and unhooking the bra.
“Don’t—” She shivered, afraid for a moment that he was going to caress her breasts in front of Maxine, but he simply took the bra off and added it to the jumble of drab clothes she had already removed.
His hands whipped her knickers down with brisk efficiency. She hugged herself, trying to cover her tendrils of pubic hair, embarrassed at the hopelessly amateur job of clipping and shaping them she had done before her date. She was going to have to investigate wax, as much as the idea dismayed her.
“I know a marvellous beautician just around the corner,” said Maxine airily.
Lydia wanted to curl up and die. She stepped out of the knickers.
“Is okay,” said Milan unexpectedly. “I prefer a woman to look like a woman. Is natural, there’s nothing wrong with it.”
Lydia turned and beamed at him, adoring him one more percentage point, bringing the total to at least three hundred and forty five per cent.
“Well, it’s not the fashion, but to each their own,” murmured Maxine, rummaging through a pile of the wispiest, silkiest things Lydia had ever seen. She alighted on a pair of knickers that gave the illusion of transparency, and were only visible because of the printed birds of paradise in brilliant blue and gold and the scalloped lace edging. “What do you think of these?”
She opened her mouth to speak, but it was Milan’s opinion Maxine canvassed, not Lydia’s.
He picked them up.
“They weigh nothing,” he remarked. “I like that. She can have them.”
Putting them on was like having her legs breathed on. The silk fluttered upwards and came to rest about her hips, but she could barely feel the tissue-thin fabric. It was the closest to going commando achievable with underwear and it looked so pretty, as if her own skin bore the exquisite pattern of the birds.
“Turn around,” instructed Maxine, and Lydia twirled, self-conscious as she presented her bottom to the stylist and her lover, but unable to defy them.
“Lovely,” said Milan.
The matching bra was of a heavier silk, the cups just crossing her nipples teasingly while the same scalloped lace covered the rest of her breasts.
“We also have a suspender,” said Maxine. She clipped the gauzy silky belt on, then, once Lydia had put them on, attached it to five-denier, nude, seamed stockings.
“Walk up and down,” said Milan. “Up to that mirror. Look at yourself.”