by Penny Jordan
‘Clive knows what he’s doing. He’s a millionaire,’ Zoe interrupted him cheerfully. ‘And,’ she added with emphasis, ‘he didn’t get that way just by chance and with good luck.’
‘Come on,’ Ben urged her. ‘I’m hungry…’
‘Let’s just have another look at the pool,’ Zoe pleaded with him.
Ben shook his head, but he still followed her back down the path they had just taken, pausing with her as she stood entranced by the sight of a small kite’s tail of ducklings following their mother across its placid surface.
‘Oh, just look at them, aren’t they gorgeous?’
‘Gorgeous,’ Ben echoed, keeping his face straight as he mused, ‘Henri had a recipe for duckling. It—’
He yelped as Zoe aimed a small thump at his arm, and whispered teasingly in her ear, ‘Ducklings… are you sure they’re not really swans?’
Zoe made a face at him.
They talked the whole thing through excitedly as they drove away half an hour later. All right, so the house was badly affected by damp in places, and certainly, having looked at the rooms, she had been forced to agree with Ben’s original comment that until they had planning permission for a conversion and extension of the stable block to provide more realistic accommodation, they could not hope to open the house as a hotel; but even Ben had had to agree that the place had potential.
Zoe sighed ecstatically.
She could see it all now: the house, carefully and sympathetically renovated, the new block perfectly in keeping with the original building, a large sunny conservatory added which could be used as an extra alfresco-type dining-room, the lawn perfectly manicured, sweeping down to the copse and its pretty hidden pool, the formal walkways and borders filled with the colour and scent of traditional summer flowers… What a setting it would make for summer weddings; the lawns were more than large enough for even the largest of marquees. Her imagination took fire; the weddings became charity balls, prestige events, the busy but very elegant reception area filled with eager visitors whom the smiling, very well-trained receptionist was having diplomatically to turn away. Tatler and Harpers mentioned them in their ‘dining out’ columns and they were inundated with floods of bookings…
Ben was in such popular demand that he was contemplating his own small cookery school in a new purpose-built block tucked away discreetly in the grounds…
She heaved a deep ecstatic sigh of pleasure and excitement.
She could see it all… everything they had ever talked about, dreamed about. Perhaps they might even expand, open a second restaurant… perhaps a château in France… But this place, their first hotel, would always remain special to them.
And one day, when they were old and about to retire, they would look back and she would remind Ben of how pessimistic he had been, of how needlessly he had agonised and worried.
‘Mmm…’ she heard Ben murmuring sexily in her ear. ‘Bet I know what you’re thinking about.’
She laughed as she shook her head, and told him with a grin, ‘Bet you don’t.’
* * *
‘Is this it?’
Ben gave a small grimace as he stopped the car next to the hotel entrance.
To either side of the drive where once there must have been the kind of ‘natural’ rolling parkland beloved of Capability Brown there now stretched a golf course, all raw patches of earth and vistas which contained only unrealistically posed clumps of golfers instead of majestic stands of specimen trees.
‘This course was probably designed in the days before they had to design them around existing landscape features,’ Zoe pointed out.
‘It does look pretty off-putting, though, doesn’t it?’ he said.
‘Mmm… Unless of course you happen to be a golfer; but why on earth couldn’t they put the course out of sight of the hotel’s main entrance?’
‘Are you sure this is the only place in the area that we’re going to have to compete with?’ he asked her thoughtfully.
‘As far as I can tell.’
‘Mind you, there’s still that good food rating,’ Ben pointed out as they parked the car in front of the hotel.
Inside, the reception area was cramped into what was obviously a sectioned-off portion of what had originally been a much larger room. The conversion had altered the room’s proportions in a way that gave the reception area a boxed-in, unwelcoming feel to it, a mistake they were most definitely not going to make, Zoe assured herself as she contrasted its layout to the one she was mentally planning for Broughton House.
The reception desk was unattended, even though they could hear the sound of voices from the office area behind it—and so presumably could the people within it hear them.
In the end, Zoe had to ring the bell provided a couple of times, before a very young and rather flustered girl appeared.
She had to go through the registrations twice before she found their names, her manner changing slightly as she found them and commented with some surprise, ‘Oh, you’re booked into our special suite.’
‘Are we?’ Ben whispered to Zoe as she turned away from them.
‘Clive’s idea,’ she whispered back. ‘He said I was to book the most expensive suite they had so that we’d know exactly what we were competing with.’
‘Well, I don’t care how it advertises itself,’ Ben told her. ‘This place is no country retreat. It’s more of a business complex-cum-conference centre.’
‘It does have a large leisure complex attached to it,’ Zoe pointed out fairly. ‘Something we haven’t even considered.’
‘Nor do we intend to,’ Ben countered firmly.
The girl behind the reception desk had found their key, but she seemed to be having trouble locating someone to take them and their luggage up to their rooms.
‘I’m sorry,’ she apologised, ‘but we’ve got a conference on and we’re rather short-staffed.’
‘Permanently short-staffed would probably have been a better description,’ Zoe murmured to Ben when she had eventually found someone to take them to their room.
It wasn’t the girl’s fault, she acknowledged; she was very young, probably only a part-timer. The hotel was several miles from the nearest village, and presumably had to bus its staff in and out.
The industry was notorious for paying low wages, and probably had a very high turnover of teenagers, who worked part-time for extra money while still at school. It was not part of one of the large chains and therefore probably did not have a thorough training scheme, none of which was very satisfactory from a potential guest’s point of view, she decided as they eventually reached their suite, but very, very gratifying from their own.
Zoe smiled her thanks to the boy who had brought up their bags and waited until Ben had tipped him and he had left before delivering her professional opinion of his services.
‘Mmm… very amateurish,’ Ben agreed, asking her, ‘And what is madam’s opinion of her room?’
Zoe pulled a small face.
The sitting-room they were standing in was comfortably if somewhat unoriginally furnished with vast swaths of floral chintz, its décor an unenterprising mixture of pink and green.
‘Pretty, but rather overdone.’
‘Mmm… pretty sickly, I would have called it,’ Ben corrected her. ‘Let’s go and have a look at the bedroom.’
The bedroom echoed the same colour scheme as the sitting-room, and they had, as Zoe pointed out fair-mindedly, been given a double bed as she had requested, and the view from their window, while it incorporated the golf course, did extend further afield to include some of the surrounding countryside.
‘It’s the bathroom I want to see, though,’ she announced mysteriously, moving away from Ben to push open the en-suite bathroom door.
‘Why?’ Ben questioned her. ‘What’s so interesting about a bathroom? Ah…’ He paused, standing behind her.
‘It’s a jacuzzi,’ Zoe told him unnecessarily.
‘So I can see,’ he agreed drily. ‘No wonder that g
irl on the reception desk gave us such a funny look. This suite is probably normally reserved by ageing businessmen accompanied by their secretaries.’
‘Clive said we were to book their most expensive suite,’ Zoe pointed out virtuously.
‘Well, I hope you don’t imagine that our hotel…’
‘Aha! So it is going to be a hotel and not just a restaurant,’ Zoe pounced.
‘It could be, but it won’t have bedrooms equipped with those things.’
‘Not the bedrooms,’ Zoe agreed.
Ben looked at her. ‘What exactly does that mean?’
She turned towards him, and slowly started to unfasten the top buttons of his shirt.
‘Well, you never know, do you?’ she said slowly. ‘We could always have one in our own private quarters.’
‘Could we? What on earth for?’ Ben asked her, but he was mumbling the words rather than saying them as Zoe wrapped her arms around him and started kissing him.
* * *
An hour later, when Ben was complaining that he was beginning to look and feel like a wrinkled prune, Zoe smiled lazily at him and said thoughtfully, ‘Do you suppose it’s true that these jets are strong enough to give…’ She broke off, laughing, as Ben grabbed hold of her and hauled her to her feet, lifting her out of the water.
‘Right now what I’m interested in is my dinner,’ he told her firmly.
He paused as Zoe ran her fingernails against his skin and bent her head to playfully nibble his ear.
‘Mmm… What time did you book dinner for?’ he asked her indistinctly as his hand cupped her breast and the sensation of their damp bodies moving together caused Zoe to make a soft murmur of appreciation.
‘Half-past eight,’ she told him.
Making love with Zoe had right from the start always been something very special to him, Ben acknowledged later as her body relaxed into a luxuriously sensual appreciation of the orgasm she had just uninhibitedly enjoyed.
It had taken him a while though to get used to her open acceptance and appreciation of her sensuality, to her joyful enjoyment of it; to the way she felt no inhibitions, no reservations about showing him, sharing with him what she was feeling.
Zoe was not promiscuous, although at first he had wondered, even judged her openness as a sign that she might be; he had not realised then, in those early days, that the ease and delight with which she had instigated their lovemaking came not from a wealth of varied previous experience but from a much more simple and natural awareness of her own needs and desires.
In fact, he had discovered later that she had far less experience than he had imagined, much, much less than he had had himself, and that in wanting them to be lovers she was simply expressing physically her emotional reaction to him. Zoe had shown him an aspect to sex he had never previously known existed, a special shining beauty and purity in it, which others might think was at odds with her obvious enjoyment of the physical side of their relationship, but which he had come to recognise was a very rare form of honesty and trust.
Through her, he had gradually let go of his own inhibitions to discard the destructive sexual attitudes he had collected during his teens when girls who did ‘it’ were easy, and those who didn’t too much hard work. Girls who did were for having fun with, those who didn’t for marrying.
Zoe had taught him to see things from a very different perspective, to accept that a woman had a right to control her own sexuality and to feel free to enjoy it.
And Zoe did enjoy it. And through her enjoyment gave a very special and rare form of pleasure to him, he acknowledged as she kissed him sleepily and snuggled up to him.
‘Oh, no, you don’t,’ he warned her, disengaging himself from her and giving her a small shake. ‘We’re not here to enjoy ourselves. It’s eight o’clock and dinner’s booked for half-past—remember?’
Zoe laughed and rolled on to her side, watching him. He had a wonderful body, she reflected as she studied him through half-closed eyes. His skin was firm and golden, warm both to look at and touch, his arms hard and well-muscled, and strong enough not just to hold her, but to pick her up as well. She smiled to herself at her own foolish femininity in finding that knowledge a small turn-on, but it was sexy knowing that the arms that held her were also strong enough to hold her safe.
Safe? From what? She laughed to herself as she sat up.
It had taken her a long time to coax Ben to be as relaxed and confident about this kind of shared intimacy as he was now. She could still remember a time when the moment they had finished making love he would reach for his clothes. Now…
She looked up at him as she ran a teasing fingertip along his thigh.
‘Oh, no, you don’t,’ he checked her, covering her hand with his own and removing it as he reminded her mock sternly. ‘Not this time. Dinner…’
Zoe pouted. ‘How can you even think of food, when instead you could…?’
She paused deliberately, looking at him through her lashes, making Ben laugh even though he refused to give in to her teasing, getting off the bed, and collecting clean clothes as he headed for the bathroom.
‘I’m a chef—that’s how,’ he told her. ‘Oh, no,’ he added as Zoe started to follow him. ‘This time you can wait until I’ve finished. I’m not risking going in there with you. Not with that damned jacuzzi…’
‘Coward,’ Zoe called out after him mildly, as she stretched luxuriously on the bed.
Her body felt deliriously satisfied, sleek and relaxed, still warm from the intimacy of Ben’s, still…
She touched her stomach lightly, smiling to herself, and then her smile widened into a blissful grin as she reflected on the sheer perfection of the day.
The house had been wonderful, everything she had imagined and more. Or at least it would be once it had been renovated, the kitchen redesigned, the new extension built.
She rolled over, breathing out a small ecstatic sigh of quiet happiness.
She was still lying there when Ben emerged from the bathroom, his hair damp, his skin glowing from the shower. It must be all that lifting and carrying of heavy sacks of food that had developed those powerful muscles that lay so tautly beneath the sleek healthiness of his skin, Zoe reflected appreciatively. She liked the way his body hair grew across his chest, and then arrowed narrowly downwards over his belly. Those Fifties women who had sighed over male film stars who had been instructed to shave off such evidence of their masculinity hadn’t known what they were missing, she decided dreamily.
She loved the way the silky fineness of Ben’s body hair felt against her fingertips and her breasts; sometimes, to tease him, she tugged tormentingly at it with her teeth, making him yelp in protest.
She smiled secretly to herself, remembering the occasion he had been tempted to retaliate, and what had followed; that had been in the early days of their relationship and she remembered how he had told her tautly afterwards how he had never known until then just what degree of intensity of sexual pleasure it was possible for him to experience in that kind of intimacy.
Now neither her body nor its responses held any secrets from him.
It didn’t bother her that their sexual roles were reversed from what was generally and romantically considered the ‘norm’; that she had originally been the one to initiate sex between them and that she had also been the one to draw him deeper into its shared intimacies; in fact she rather liked it, enjoying the sense of equality and rapport it gave her.
‘You’ve got fifteen minutes,’ Ben told her firmly.
Obligingly she got up, and headed for the bathroom; for all her teasing and playfulness, underneath she was just as conscious as he was of the real purpose of their stay here. What was even more important was that he knew she was aware of it as well. But of course, being Ben, he couldn’t resist chivvying her, worrying around her like a sheepdog ever anxious about the potential silliness of its flock.
She liked that about him too, she admitted as she showered and then quickly dried herself. She had alwa
ys prided herself on her independence, and fiercely rejected anyone, but especially any male, who attempted to control or curtail it, and yet there was something almost perversely reassuring, some deep-seated core of feminine instinct, not for her own preservation but for the preservation of the seeds of life she carried within her that made her feel reassured by Ben’s conscientious worrying even while she teased him for it.
She paused in the act of drying her body to frown as she made a closer inspection of her own idle thoughts, but then, as she heard Ben calling out impatiently to her, she shrugged and dismissed them, hurrying into clean underclothes.
* * *
From a culinary point of view the meal was a disaster on a scale which could only be described as heroic. From the standpoint of a potential competitor it was a wonderful, mind-blowing, exhilarating confirmation of all that Zoe had been impressing upon Ben since Clive had first floated his offer to back them.
How could they be anything other than successful if this was their only competition? Zoe queried in exultation, watching Ben’s expression as he tasted his soup.
They had had to wait until nine o’clock to be shown to their table by an obviously nervous waitress. The dining-room was half empty, the empty tables destroying any atmosphere the room might otherwise have had.
They were very busy with the people from the conference, the waitress told Zoe apologetically when she commented on the absence of other diners and the length of time they had had to wait for their meal.
The soup was described over-lavishly on the menu as ‘A thick, home-made, nourishing soup of garden-grown vegetables, enhanced by the chef’s special free-range chicken stock, and embellished with croutons from our own home-made bread’…
‘The vegetables are canned and not fresh,’ Ben exclaimed in disgust after just one spoonful, ‘and as for the stock… Whatever it is, it isn’t chicken, and I should know.’
‘Sarah Bernstein, I know,’ Zoe said, asking him cheerfully, ‘Oh, Ben, is it really that bad?’