Iris blinked at him, Manon's soft green stare peering at him in something of a daze. "I'm sorry," she said, still giving him that doe-like, dumb expression. Manon rarely looked dumb, but the maid was meticulous and did poorly in a startle. She liked to plan for everything. This was why she often failed in small, but spectacular, ways when Kedrick was in a rush. It was frustrating for them both in various ways. When he had both her arms in his grasp, she did not see the telegraph for what it was and bobbled along when he shook her. How ridiculously out of sorts she got when she made these little messes. Really, it was the particular flaw of her personality that made it easy for her to remain in Kedrick's employ. She'd come to him with a lot of dreams and half-baked confidence.<br/><br/>"I didn't mean to," she said, and it was both Iris and the maid amending. "I'll clean it--" she did not get to finish the offer, breath captured by his lips. She seemed to try though, a muffled sound against his tongue. The pale spring stare, which was so light it had been unnerving the first time they'd met, went wide before her lashes kissed her cheeks. Darling Manon. She was the sort of girl who might have fantasized about this sort of thing. Sweet dreams for a woman with questionable taste. Iris understood this to be the case, so far as her master's psyche was concerned, and the nymph did not heed any other reality. So, Manon melted into the taste of his kiss and sighed through her nose in something like relief. Perhaps she took this as and answer to her confession. Had she not, standing naked before him, admitted that she had thought of him often?<br/><br/>It was all remarkably sweet, in so much as things could be pure when the woman was standing nude against his fine tailoring. It was a bit of a fairy tale, the maid and her master, and Iris had preserved that romantic sentiment the way her blood suggested Manon must. A thin belief, but a belief nonetheless. Maybe Kedrick liked to scoff at the way his practical maid failed to know herself, as well? It was the kind of hypocrisy that might have suited him well before Iris had been planted in home.<br/><br/>None of that mattered, of course. What mattered was the way she fell in utter shock, betrayed the way his sweet sister had been betrayed when he'd torn her dress and tossed her to the floor. Iris was gaining such wonderful experience, falling the ways he'd find pleasing. Self-torment for his pleasure was not beyond her articulation, and the nymph fell to the slick tile with a scramble and a prayer. She looked like she was offering to play the pet, on her hands and knees before him. It was Manon's half-delighted dismay that she exhaled, when his shoe pushed her back and lower so that her knees splayed wide and she looked like she was trying at presentation.<br/><br/>The nymph winced his pretty maid's face as the cooking instruments clattered, mouth moving like she was suffocating from the shock of his inquiry. "Which one?" she repeated. The tools lay in disarray around her, wood and metal and plastic with such remarkable potential when applied beyond the culinary arts. It was the sort of thing Manon--Kedrick's Manon--must have considered when her romantic inclinations veered sordid. "I..." she glanced around herself a little frantically, and then grabbed quickly at two implements.  A large metal spatula and a  small paring knife. She looked worried when she stared up at him. "Is this... correct?" she asked him, and Manon's expression was genuinely fretting while Iris waited for her blood to sing.