For Better for Worse

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.