The Brynthwaite Boys - Season One - Part One

by Merry Farmer

  True to his predictions, he came hard in less than a minute. His body was so primed and ready for an orgasm that it rushed over him, causing him to cry out as his body convulsed with pleasure. The release left him senseless and weak, but filled with a sense of well-being that nothing else gave him. It was pitiful that it had come so fast and was already leaving him. As the rush subsided, he relaxed over top of Flossie, cock still inside of her, more at peace than he’d been in months. His muscles unclenched, and his breathing gradually slowed. At last, he was calm, the demons fed and sated, and for this small moment, he could feel free.

  It was only when he realized that he could be crushing Flossie, his head tucked into the softness of the pillow beside hers with the scent of her hair in his nose, that he began to tense again. He started to move off of her, shame creeping back over him.

  “No,” she gasped, tightening her arms around him.

  A jolt of shock that felt distant in his post-coital state jarred him. “No?”

  He had already shifted to his side, so she followed him, keeping her arms around him as she draped a leg over his. They were still intimately joined.

  “You were so relaxed just after,” she said, her voice small.

  “Spent,” he sighed. “It won’t last. It never does.”

  “I liked it.”

  He focused on her eyes, finally seeing her now that what was done was done. She wore her soul in the blue depths of those eyes, and right then her soul was filled with compassion. He didn’t deserve it, not after what he’d just done to her. Hell, he was still inside of her, though if he didn’t ameliorate that situation quickly, the condom would have no point.

  In spite of her protest, he slipped out of her, reaching beneath the covers to remove the condom. He twisted away from her to deposit it on the floor—where he would retrieve it for cleaning later—and to wipe any remaining semen on the sheets. Then he fell to his back as reality pressed down on him once more, as it did after every cheap encounter.

  With one difference. Unlike the whores of his past, Flossie did not get out of bed to collect her money and be gone. She rested on her side, one arm under her head, her black hair flowing around her head and shoulders like a halo. She watched him, as if waiting for him to make a move. He twisted to study her in return, his heart thudding with shame and longing. He wanted to reach out and touch her, to stroke her face and explore the curves of her that his desperation had not allowed him before. He just wanted to hold her, but fear and the horrific realization that he was already growing hard with desire for her again kept him frozen.

  She frowned. “Your face just changed. What is it?”

  He swallowed, debating whether it would be possible to lie to her.

  He decided it wouldn’t just be impossible, it would be pointless.

  “I already want you again,” he confessed.

  A moment of surprise twitched across her face. Then she surged against him, taking him back into her arms.

  “Does it usually come upon you again so soon after satisfaction?” she asked.

  He wanted to laugh at her ability to make such a question seem so innocent. “No, not usually,” he said.

  “Perhaps it is because of the newness of it,” she suggested.

  “Perhaps.” It could be that or it could be that now that he had a taste of her, he wanted to gorge on her. For all their so-called noble efforts, they could have just made his problem much, much worse.

  She surprised him by stretching over him and reaching for the bedside table. The friction of her soft body across his rough and weary one only pushed his desire higher. She took another of the condoms, removed its envelope, and handed it to him.

  “You have quite a few of these,” she said. “We’ll use as many as you need to in order to find peace tonight.”

  “Flossie.” He said her name as a denial and as a prayer, and most of all as an endearment. “You can’t just lie there and let me use you over and over tonight.”

  “I can and I will,” she said.

  “But who knows how long it could take? If you heard me in the churchyard, then you know that this thing that possesses me is not some simple lust that can be easily sated.”

  “You’re bound to exhaust yourself at some point.”

  She was teasing him. At a time like this, in the position she was in—naked, in his bed, while his erection was growing by the second, and the condom was in his hand—she was teasing him.

  “Flossie, you are going to regret this.” Regret it and hate him as the monster he was.

  And yet, she smiled. “You’re a handsome man, Mr. Throckmorton, and you have a well-formed body. Do you imagine that men are the only creatures who experience desire?”

  “I….” His jaw dropped open. He was not even going to try to interpret what she could mean by that. There were London whores whose job it was to satisfy men who had grown exhausted of the intensity of his body’s demands. Flossie couldn’t possibly know what she was talking about.

  “I said I would help you, sir, and I intend to,” she went on. “Let’s face this together, one impulse at a time.”

  The burst of emotion that fluttered through his chest was so intense that he didn’t dare name it. He reached between the sheets, between their bodies, to roll the fresh condom on. The clock on his bureau said only twenty past twelve. He would give himself until three o’clock, no matter how many times it took or how unsatisfied he was at the end of it, then he would send Flossie away. If he could.

  As he pulled her into his arms and positioned himself between her legs again, kissing her with the barest fraction more control this time, he had the pervasive feeling that he may never be able to send Flossie away from him. Forever.

  Episode Four - A Grand To-Do

  Flossie

  Let it never be said that Flossie Stowe did not take her responsibilities seriously. She took them very seriously, even when those responsibilities were of a unique and peculiar nature.

  “You can’t tell, can you?” Jason Throckmorton asked her as he stood in front of the tall mirror in his bedroom, tucking his shirt into his trousers.

  “Not at all,” Flossie assured him. She reached into his wardrobe and selected a midnight blue waistcoat with scarlet worked through it. “No one would think it the least bit peculiar for you to sneak up to your room to bathe and change clothes for the opening ceremonies this evening.”

  “Yes, but that’s not what I came up here for, is it.” He sent her a frank, almost comically concerned look through the mirror, fitting his suspenders over his shoulders. “And not that waistcoat. I want to wear the black one.”

  Flossie shook her head. “The black is too somber for a hotel opening. The blue is stronger, and the touch of scarlet suggests boldness.”

  “All right, all right then.” He brushed away his defeated objections with a nervous wave of his hand. He studied himself in the mirror as Flossie held the waistcoat up from behind for him to shrug into. “And you’re certain that no one saw you slip up here behind me?”

  “No one,” she said, leaving him to do up the buttons himself. She stepped around him to fetch his newest coat, freshly back from the cleaners, from where it was draped over the arm of the chair. “I was upstairs helping guests. They’ve been arriving in droves this afternoon.” She treated him to an excited grin in the mirror.

  Jason—she should really still be thinking of him as Mr. Throckmorton, but she just couldn’t, not after everything they’d shared in the past week—broke into an excited grin of his own, his eyes flashing like a child on Christmas morn.

  “It’s finally happening,” he sighed with satisfaction.

  He turned to his wardrobe and selected a maroon cravat from the rack of neck-ware, arranged by color. Halfway through looping it around his neck, he faced Flossie and raised his eyebrows, asking for her opinion. Flossie nodded in approval at his choice. He resumed tying the cravat.

  “It doesn’t matter how many hotels I have or how many openings I’ve
been to, each one is thrilling. But this one more than all the others combined.”

  “Oh?” Flossie crossed to Jason’s bureau, selecting a pin for his cravat, then walking it over to hand to him. “What’s so special about this one?”

  “I’m home,” he said with passion. “I left Brynthwaite twenty years ago, an orphan and a near pauper, forced to learn business any way I could and to claw my way to the top, and I am returning a conquering hero, a self-made man, someone to look up to.”

  The pride with which he addressed himself in the mirror tickled Flossie and brightened the smile on her face. She liked Jason. She liked everything about him, from his cherished pride to his quick mind to his bold attitude toward life. She even liked his crippling insecurity and his inability to sit still for five minutes on end. It made him more human somehow. He may have lashed himself with the whip of self-loathing before and after each time he took her into his bed to relieve himself, but Flossie liked him even more for every one of those encounters. They made him heartbreakingly vulnerable, which made her feel as though she had a purpose far more important than any labor she’d ever done.

  And it didn’t hurt that he had a fine, pleasing body that, contrary to what he had attested that first night, he did know how to use to pleasure a woman. She may not have lost herself in ecstasy with him yet, but the potential was most definitely there.

  “Flossie.”

  “Hmm?” She shook herself out of her heated thoughts, cheeks reddening.

  Jason fixed her with a stare that told her he knew where her mind had gone and wasn’t sure he approved. It wasn’t difficult to read her, seeing as her gaze had rested on his unmade bed, sheets still bunched from their recent activity.

  “My coat.”

  With a bold grin that told him he was in on her secret and that she enjoyed it, she held up his coat. He shrugged into it, fitting it over his shoulders. Flossie brushed those shoulders and the back, then moved to stand in front of him, doing up his buttons.

  “How do I look?” Jason asked, stepping back and both surveying himself in the mirror and glancing hopefully to her.

  “Perfect,” Flossie answered.

  “No…bulges?”

  She stepped closer to him, laying a hand on his cheek. “Of course not. There shouldn’t be for hours after that.” Her glance flickered to the bed.

  He met her eyes with a sheepish grin. Sheepish was a huge improvement from ashamed or pained, where they had been a week ago.

  “It’s a good thing I picked out uniforms for my staff with high collars,” he said, raising a hand and touching the line of Flossie’s jaw for only a second. “It’ll hide that mark.”

  He arched a brow with a look that was somewhere between proud and scolding, possibly even teasing. Indeed, she did have a rather large red spot lower on her neck, but that was from the night before. The fact that he could tease her about it—even if that light-heartedness evaporated in seconds, only to be replaced by renewed anxiety—was good.

  “It all comes down to this,” he said, turning square to the mirror and standing straight. “The final test.”

  “The final test this time,” Flossie corrected him. She took a moment to check her own appearance and, satisfied that she was put-together straight, let out a breath. “Well, I’d better leave first and get back to work.”

  “Yes, you better had.” Jason nodded, resuming his businesslike exterior.

  “You’ll do fine, sir,” she said, giving his arm a squeeze. “Everything will run smoothly, you’ll see.”

  He sent her a look that was heavy with doubt. Flossie found herself wanting to kiss his cheek, the way she would with a friend or a loved one. She swallowed that impulse and let go of his arm, reminding herself that he was her employer and turning to march out of the room. She’d made her decision to help Jason Throckmorton with the assumption that they could each get what they needed from the arrangement as coolly and impartially as every encounter she’d had with male staff members at Crestmont Grange, but there was nothing cool or impartial about the cordiality that had existed between her and Jason from the start.

  She told herself that it was best not to think about it too much as she stepped discreetly out of his apartment and into the upstairs hall. Within seconds, she didn’t have time to think about anything but work.

  “You there.” One of the guests flagged her down from the doorway to his room the moment she turned around.

  “Yes, sir?” Flossie walked quickly down the hall to his door. “How can I help you?”

  “What are these infernal things all about the room?” He asked, his grey moustache and whiskers quivering.

  “Which infernal things are you referring to?” She returned his question with a polite smile.

  “These!” The man stepped aside and gestured to the room’s electric lights.

  “Oh,” Flossie laughed. “Those are electric lights, sir.”

  “Well, I don’t want them,” the man said. “Can I be shown to a room without ’em?”

  “I’m afraid you’ll find that all of the rooms at The Dragon’s Head are equipped with the latest in modern technology, sir.”

  “But what about the danger of electrocution?” the man continued to quiver. “Is it safe to touch the walls?”

  “Very safe, sir, I can assure you,” she answered with a smile.

  Down the hall behind her, Jason’s door opened, and he stepped out. To all appearances, he didn’t even see her as he shut the door behind him and strode on to the stairs, but Flossie sensed his awareness of her. She was glad to already be smiling at the hotel guest, for at that moment she wasn’t sure she’d be able to keep herself from smiling at the thought of him.

  “Well, if you say they’re safe,” the guest grumbled. He waved Flossie away and shut the door to his room.

  Flossie turned and headed back up the hall toward the stairs. When she reached the junction of the building’s two wings, just outside of Jason’s door, Dora rushed toward her from the other hallway.

  “Flossie, there you are,” Dora said in a rush. “Do you have any idea where the guest bathrobes are kept?” she continued in a whisper.

  Flossie glanced past Dora’s shoulder to find a young woman peeping out into the hallway, only her head and bare shoulders showing, hair in disarray.

  “They’re in the linen closet at the end of the hall, third shelf down, folded on the right side,” she told Dora.

  Dora let out a breath. “Thank heavens. You’re a life-saver!”

  As Dora pivoted and scurried back down the hall to her guest, Flossie continued on, heading downstairs to the lobby.

  A short line of guests stood at the concierge’s desk, waiting to check in. Behind them, the door to the dining room was closed. Mad preparations were probably going on behind it. The hotel opening was set to consist of a reception in the garden at five o’clock, followed by a formal supper at half past six. Then the guests would retire to the garden again as the sun set to see the fantastical electric lights that Jason had had installed. That was, of course, simply an excuse to shoo guests out of the dining room so that the staff could break their necks to transform it into a ballroom, complete with a small orchestra. Jason was giving them twenty minutes to make the change. Flossie was determined to execute it within fifteen. Once set, the guests would be invited back in for a ball that would, if all went well, be the crowning glory of the day’s festivities.

  If they could pull it off. The clock in the lobby was just about to strike four.

  “Oh no, no, no. I specifically asked for a room with a view of the lake.” A middle-aged gentleman had his nose turned up as he addressed Samuel at the desk.

  “It says here that you’ve reserved a garden room,” Samuel told him.

  Flossie started toward the desk, but the dining room door cracked open, and the new head cook peeked out. She was a middle-aged woman, as round as she was tall. Her hair was hidden by a white cap similar to the one Flossie wore. The cook gestured to Flossie, and she
changed directions to go to her.

  “What is it, Mrs. Wood?” Flossie whispered, checking over her shoulder to be sure none of the guests took notice of her.

  “There’s been a mishap with the ovens,” Mrs. Wood murmured, lips hardly moving.

  Flossie’s heart caught in her throat. It was only a matter of time before something like this happened. At least Jason was nowhere in earshot. She’d keep this from him if she could.

  “What mishap?” Flossie asked.

  “That flighty little kitchen maid, Nan, was flirting with that bellboy, Frank. She was so wrapped up in talking to him, that she forgot to add more fuel to the fire, and one of the ovens went out. It was some time before we discovered the problem.”

  Flossie searched the lobby for young Frank. He was there, or rather halfway up the stairs with suitcases under each arm, a stately couple following behind.

  “Then there must be some sort of mistake,” the man at the desk was still arguing with Samuel.

  “I am very sorry, sir, but there is not,” Samuel replied. His back was ramrod straight and he wore a perfectly serene expression, but he was flushed.

  Flossie turned back to Mrs. Wood. “Have the ovens been lit now?”

  “Yes, they have, and everything that needs to be put in is in. But it’ll mean a delay of at least fifteen minutes come supper time,” she said.

  “Good. It’s the best we can do,” Flossie said.

  “Shouldn’t Mr. Throckmorton be told?” Mrs. Wood asked. “Where is the man anyhow?”

  “I’m not sure,” Flossie said, “but I’ll find him and tell him.” Or not. Mrs. Wood didn’t need to know that.

  She gave Flossie a quick, sly smile. “I know who truly keeps this clock ticking. Mr. Throckmorton was a smart one to give you the responsibility he’s given you.”

  A sliver of alarm zinged down Flossie’s back. The more she stood out, the more people would be inclined to ask questions. The more they asked questions, the more Jason risked embarrassment. Then again, she didn’t have it in her to hold back when someone handed her the reins and said go.