by Merry Farmer
Flossie
Finishing the day’s work at a decent hour was such an unusual occurrence, that when Flossie found herself standing in the storeroom with everything set up for the following day and no loose ends dangling at merely half-past nine, she hardly knew what to do with herself. Enough of her fellow staff members were still awake that it would provoke comments if she simply walked up to Jason’s door and waltzed on in, but after watching him squirm and huff and suffer so much throughout the afternoon, she couldn’t imagine being anywhere else.
So, her arms full of fresh linens, she made her way up to his apartment and knocked softly on the door instead of letting herself in. Anyone passing would think she was, well, a maid.
Jason threw open the door with a frown. “Why are you knocking?”
“The sheets you asked for, sir,” she said, lips twitching at the game, and walked past him. As soon as he shut the door and turned to her, she said. “Well, I couldn’t be seen to pay a social call on my employer, now could I?”
“Yes, of course, of course,” he answered, pacing away from the door.
He didn’t stop there. Like a tiger with the scent of blood, he continued to pace the main room of his apartment, running a shaking hand through his hair. Flossie put her linens on a side table.
“What’s wrong?” She followed him, intent on stopping his restlessness as soon as she caught him.
“Everything,” he said, avoiding her reach on the first pass. “The suicide in London, the house party, the cares and concerns.”
He turned back, and this time she managed to reach out and grasp his arm, holding him to one spot. Still, he rubbed his free hand over his face, avoiding her eyes, breath shallow.
Before she could ask what was wrong a second time, he burst out with, “I’m sorry, Flossie. I’m so sorry.”
“It’s nothing,” she managed a weak laugh, even though her concern for him was growing by the second. “Samuel is a prig. He made more than certain that I knew he had complained about me to you, and that you had vowed to do something about it.”
“What?” For a moment Jason was still. He blinked. “I said nothing of the sort. I told him to shut his trap and get out of my sight.” Another blink and he unwound into a mess all over again. “I shouldn’t have snapped at him. Now I’ll have mutinous employees to deal with. I can’t cope with this. I can’t.”
“You’re worrying me, sir,” she said, squeezing his arm tighter. What is truly the matter?”
“I can’t think,” he answered with barely a beat. “I can’t breathe. My body betrays me. I…I….” He turned to face her fully, grabbing her arm with his free hand. “I have to confess.”
“What is it?” Flossie didn’t know whether to laugh or shake him or fly into a panic. The emotion in his eyes was too intense for her to put just one word to it.
He lowered his head and swallowed. “One of Lady Elizabeth’s house guests is a Lady Stratton.”
He didn’t go on.
“Yes, I know,” Flossie said. “Polly has been giving me regular updates of all of the goings on at Huntingdon Hall.”
Jason’s eyes snapped up to meet hers. A moment later, he cringed. “Did she tell you that Lady Stratton and I….”
He didn’t need to finish. A flash of something close to jealousy shot through Flossie’s limbs. Of course the women Jason had carried on with before were actual, real people and not just flights of fancy, but two in one day?
“So?” she said, outwardly far more nonchalant than she felt.
Jason cringed, clearly tearing himself up inside. “So…she propositioned me at the hospital.”
There was more to the story. Much, much more.
“And?” she prompted.
Jason let go of her, taking a step back. He studied her, eyes narrowed in confusion. “You’re not…upset?”
The way he said it, the slight tilt of his head, the fear of reprisal in his expression. All at once, Flossie saw the whole thing as a heartbreaking joke.
“No, sir, not at all,” she laughed. She stepped closer to him and lifted to her toes to kiss his cheek. “You are a grown man, fully capable of making his own decisions.”
“But I’m not.” He reacted as though she had slapped him.
“Not what?” She reached for the buttons of his coat, undoing them one by one.
He stood still and let her. “Not capable of making my own decisions,” he said.
She snorted. “You are so. You make decisions in your business dealings. You make decisions in your personal interactions.”
“Hardly,” he retorted.
She glanced up at him, her expression flat with doubt, and pushed his coat off of his shoulders. Sure enough, his trousers were tented, but perhaps not as desperately as they could have been.
“If you want to run off and have an assignation with Lady Stratton, then it’s none of my business,” she said, in spite of the fact that her heart screamed in protest. What right did she have to protest, she argued with herself.
The right of a lover.
She draped Jason’s coat over her arm and gave him a push toward the bedroom. He didn’t budge.
“I don’t want to have an assignation with Lady Stratton,” he told her, equal parts tenderness and desperation in his voice.
“Then don’t,” she answered.
This time when she pushed him, he moved. Even if that movement did somewhat resemble a naughty little boy trudging his way to his punishment. As soon as she had him in his bedroom with his door shut, he shrugged out of his suspenders and sat on the bed to remove his shoes.
“The problem is,” he said as she hung his coat and untied her own apron, “the moment Lady Stratton suggested we rendezvous, I had a reaction.”
Fully convinced there was no way that Jason would actually follow through with the same impulse any other man would have on being offered what all men wanted, Flossie laughed.
“Sir, I believe you are out of danger,” she said, setting aside her apron and starting on the buttons at the back of her dress.
“You wouldn’t say that if you knew what it was like,” he replied, as melancholy as ever. “To have a vital part of you supersede your rational thought, to lose the ability to think at all, is not something I would wish on my worst enemies.” He tossed aside his shoes and started on the buttons of his shirt.
“Do you have enemies, sir?” she asked, stepping out of her dress.
“Myself,” Jason answered.
Flossie crossed her arms over her chemise and shook her head. “Enough of this. I have said it before and I shall say it again. You give yourself far too little credit. You are a strong, courageous, intelligent man.”
His brow flew up. He peeled his shirt up over his torso and threw it aside, then undid his trousers. “What am I supposed to do?” he lamented. “The more forces I feel clawing at me, the less I am able to resist them. The more problems heap on top of me, the less I am able to think my way out of them.”
Flossie sighed in frustration, stepping out of her petticoat. “Fine. You don’t wish to have an assignation with Lady Stratton, then don’t. Furthermore, I forbid you to have any sort of assignation at all.”
He froze in the middle of dropping his trousers. A beat later, he snapped straight, kicking his trousers aside. He stood naked before her…and rather impressive, if she did say so herself.
“You forbid it?” he asked.
He wasn’t angry. Far from it. The closest word Flossie could find to describe the look in his eyes was hope. A shiver of excitement that wasn’t entirely wholesome wriggled down her spine.
“Yes,” she said, pulling herself up to her full height. “I forbid it.”
He was perfectly still. She wasn’t certain he was even breathing.
At last, he said, “Then I won’t.” He blinked as though it was a revelation.
Flossie blew out a breath, shaking her head. She reached for the pins that held her hair up, turning away and crossing to Jason’s bureau to deposi
t them in the dish she used to store them. Behind her, Jason climbed into bed.
“That doesn’t solve the rest of my problems,” he went on, tense and anxious once more. “There’s still the suicide to consider. How on earth am I to react to that? If it appears in the papers, I’m done-for. And with the house party still in progress. Not that I’ve been invited to anything, in spite of my best efforts.”
Flossie rolled her eyes, watching him through the mirror on his bureau. He had both hands threaded through his hair, clutching the sides of his head as though he had a headache.
“It will be all right,” she assured him.
“But what if it’s not?” He kicked at the bedcovers. “You tell me I’m an intelligent man, but I feel as though a fog has rolled in over my mind. I can’t concentrate. Thoughts won’t stay in my head.”
She finished with her hair, shaking it down her back, and spun to face him. “Do you need me to order you to think as well now?” She couldn’t keep a straight face as she said it. Her mouth kept twitching up to a grin, and she wanted to giggle at the ridiculousness of it all. He was behaving like such a child. “Am I to play the role of your schoolmistress and discipline you for bad behavior?”
Half a dozen emotions flashed through his expression at once, from lust to relief to humiliation. “No,” he said at last, settling into a haunted look. “No, I’ve been down that path before, and to be honest, I did not enjoy it.”
She didn’t like it when he spoke as though recalling something from his sordid past that was completely foreign to her, particularly when he said it in such a way that made her wary of ever knowing. He covered his face with his hands and sighed.
“I don’t know what to do,” he fretted. “I just don’t know what to do.”
All at once, Flossie’s patience reached its end. “If you don’t know what to do, then I shall tell you,” she said.
“Tell me what?”
Instead of going to the bed, she marched across the room to his wardrobe. She threw open the door and pulled out the first four of his ties that her hands came across.
“What are you doing?” Jason asked.
“Driving home a point,” she replied.
She turned back to the bed, tossing three of the ties down and reaching for Jason’s hand. She wrapped the tie around his wrist, then tied it to the bedpost.
“Flossie, what is this?” he asked, squirming as she took a second tie and marched around to the other side of the bed.
“I’m tired of you fidgeting and fretting when what you really need to be doing is thinking and acting, and, I might add, listening to me when I tell you that you are capable of conducting your life.”
She reached for his other hand, wrapped the tie around that, and tied it to the other bedpost.
“You don’t need me to order you about and tell you whether or not you should accept the invitation of a former lover.”
She reached across him for another tie, took it to his ankle, and tied that to a post at the foot of the bed. In the process, she yanked him further down across the sheets.
“I am going to keep you here until you admit to me that you are a fully functioning adult, capable of running a hotel empire and a gentleman’s life, do I make myself clear?”
She took the last tie and fastened his remaining ankle to the last bedpost.
When she was done, she took a step back to survey her handiwork. The moment she saw the complete picture she’d created, she slapped a hand to her mouth and laughed for all she was worth. Jason lay spread-eagle, a colorful tie securing him to the four corners of the bed. She had never seen such a ridiculous sight in her life. Her skills with knots left a lot to be desired, and yet, even though she knew one swift tug from any of his limbs would free him, he appeared securely fastened, like Prometheus chained.
A moment later, her giggles stopped abruptly and her heart caught in her throat.
His face had gone slack and every last ounce of tension had drained away. He blinked up at the ceiling, far more lucid than she’d ever seen him. He was silent, his chest rising and falling in a deep, steady rhythm. He was the picture of complete submission.
Without warning, Flossie began to shake. Cold fear squeezed her chest.
“Jason,” she whispered, hardly daring to speak. “Are you well?”
He took in a slow breath. “Perfectly.”
The chills running down Flossie’s spine increased. He hadn’t noticed her use of his given name. “So…do you want me to untie you? It was only a joke.”
“No,” he answered too quickly. “Just give me a moment.”
Now it was her breath that came in shallow gasps, her thoughts that scattered like butterflies in the wind. She took a cautious step toward the bed, studying his face, but dreading what she might find there. Had he gone mad? Had she pushed him over the edge somehow?
But no, as far as she could tell, he had snapped out of whatever restless uncertainty had him in its grip before. He was…peaceful. Instantly. It didn’t make sense to her. Not in the least.
“I can kill two birds with one stone,” he said at last, his voice steady and deep. “Henri will do the best he can with the situation at the Royal Arms, but I will appoint Samuel to assist him remotely. It will enable Samuel to take on a role of delicate responsibility and to learn the importance of discretion. I can leave it in their hands while concentrating on other things.”
“That could work.” Flossie sank to sit on the side of the bed, one hand clasped over her pounding heart. She was afraid to touch him when he looked like that, so powerful and so helpless.
“Lady Stratton will find some other young buck to keep her bed warm. That’s what house parties are for. Heaven knows she has a knack for making friends, and unlike some, she values circumspection.”
“Good?”
“And if I consistently fail to be invited to house party events, I shall simply have to bring the house party events to me. They’re all bound to get bored of the same four walls day in and day out for a month. Lady E. I know will relish the opportunity to get away, and I will provide the needed diversion. I’ll probably entice some future business in the process.”
“No doubt you will.”
Flossie frowned, biting her lip. Through his entire set of pronouncements, not once did Jason attempt to move or wriggle out of his poorly-secured bonds. Oh no, instead he turned his head to her at last with a vague smile.
“This was a brilliant idea.”
Then why do I feel as though I have done something horribly wicked?
“It was?” she said aloud.
“Perfect,” he said. “Remove the body from the equation so that the mind can function.”
For some reason, Flossie felt as though something much, much darker had happened—something she had initiated and was now responsible for.
“Are…are you finished now?” she asked. “Would you like me to untie you?”
He smiled at her with a resignation that swirled through her gut like ice and said, “I believe that’s entirely up to you.”
He would stay trussed up like that all night if she told him to. He’d laid everything in her hands, in her control. This went beyond trust. She wasn’t even sure what name to give it.
“I think that’s enough,” she said, feigning the same joviality she’d felt earlier. “You’ve suffered long enough.”
She rushed around the bed, undoing his bonds as fast as her shaking fingers could manage. When she was finished, she lay the ties on the bureau, shed the rest of her clothes, and climbed into bed with him. He’d searched through the bedside table for one of his French letters as she did, and was ready and sheathed by the time she closed her arms around him.
“Now,” he said with a rejuvenated passion and command that left her trembling for an entirely different set of reasons. “Let’s see if I can’t thank you properly for rescuing me from perdition.”
Episode Seven - A Plan Gone Awry
Lawrence
The sun was ba
rely up, but already Lawrence’s bare back dripped with sweat. His muscles ached as he pounded the hinge he was constructing into shape. Growing up, Marshall had always taken solace in books and learning when he was troubled by something bigger than him. Jason had coped with stress by squirreling himself into the tiniest closets and cubbies to hide up in Brynthwaite Municipal Orphanage’s attic. And Lawrence had hammered things, building or destroying. They had each dealt with the pressures of their young lives in ways that had suited them best. But not even Lawrence’s hardest hammer strokes could soothe the demon of fear in his gut now.
“Are you certain you wouldn’t like more porridge before I put the rest away?” Matty asked, popping her head down from their room at the top of the stairs.
He fought to clear the strain from his expression and to smile up at her. “No, love, I’m fine.”
She returned his smile and disappeared above. As soon as she was gone, Lawrence’s snarl of frustration returned.
He was no closer to solving the mystery of the night Matty had showed up at the forge now than he had been before he made his trip to Grasmere several days ago. He pounded his hammer across the thin strip of heated metal on the anvil, imagining it was Trevor Hoag’s face. All he had managed to do in making the trip to Grasmere was to stir more questions and twice as many doubts. The flex and stretch of his muscles as he worked was as much punishment for handling his investigation so sloppily as for anything else. He’d said too much, stayed too long. Hoag had marked him somehow, and that thought hadn’t left his mind. Not for one second.
Matty came downstairs. The new dress she wore was far more flattering than any of the ones he’d picked from the rag bag at the hospital for her. Or perhaps it was that she’d gained weight, filled out, and found some sort of contentment with him at the forge. She was happy. A blind man could tell that by the way she took the broom from its place by the stairs—as she did every morning—and swept the workshop while humming, all smiles.
