Charlotte, it happened, was very handy with patients. Her innocent air and pretty face put patients at ease, and she had slim, nimble fingers that could go many places the doctor's couldn't. She helped him suture a wound on the first day, and soon was setting bones and lancing boils under his supervision. She was witty and skilled, and the new nurse in town quickly drew in more check ups and new patients than the handsome Doctor Owens ever could by himself. When patients would ask, Charlotte told them she had just moved and was staying a guest room in Doctor Owen's house. This seemed to be a satisfactory explanation for most, and almost everyone assumed Charlotte was open to being courted.
"If I were thirty years younger," leered an old man complaining of earache one afternoon. "Boy, they'd have to lock me up!" Then he'd swatted at Charlotte playfully.
Not all of her would-be suitors were as harmless as him, however. A drunk in his thirties kept coming to the office over the course of a month with a list of baffling symptoms, only to spend the whole time asking Charlotte intrusive questions, making suggestive comments, or "accidentally" brushing his hands across parts of her body. One night, he waited outside the office, unaware that Charlotte wasn't leaving by herself. Douglass' truck was parked out back, but Charlotte needed to lock the door from the outside. After doing so, she turned and ran directly into Richard, who had already taken several large gulps from his flash since his appointment an hour before.
Charlotte backed into the door as he stood in front of her, grinning. He didn't seem to want to move. Charlotte looked around him for anyone on the street---or, better yet, Douglass. She thought about screaming for help, but the drunk saw her think about and shook his head. He moved his dingy suit jacket to show a knife in a leather holster on his hip.
"Let's talk a walk, honey," he said. "Wanna see what's under that dress." He reached out to run a hand from her waist to her hip, and finally to her backside. Charlotte whimpered, her mind racing. When his lips moved to brush against hers, Charlotte let out a screech and swung her head forward.
Her forehead connected with her nose at the same moment Douglass came tearing out of nowhere to tackle Richard. Blood blossomed and ran down his mouth as Douglass shoved him into the dirt and fell on top of him. His fists started to rain down on him and the drunk screamed piteously.
"Douglass, no!" Charlotte hurried over to pull Douglass back. He was shaking Richard, and the drunk man's head was flopping around bonelessly. When he felt Charlotte tug him, he threw the man back on the ground.
"Never come back here," Douglass growled. The man scampered to his feet and ran away, limping and clutching his sides with both hands. Douglass watched him with fury in his eyes until the man crested a small hill and dipped below the horizon.
Charlotte watched Douglass, his body rigid with tension. She was afraid of him, and in the two months she'd been there so far, no one had been aggressive or anything less than friendly. And Douglass had never been so violent. He was silent now, and seemed to have forgotten she was there.
Finally he turned to her and pulled her to him, cradling her face between his hands. "Did he hurt you?" He demanded. Charlotte could only shake her head and look at the blood now staining his collar. He released her face and guided her toward the back with one hand on her shoulder. He looked troubled and deep in thought. He hitched his horses to the coach, loaded his trunk, and got them on the road all without saying anything. He didn't speak until they rolled to a stop in front of the house and its pleasant garden.
"Charlotte," he said, although she was already looking at him.
"Yes?" She said, her heart in her throat.
"It's time for me to tell you something." Douglass looked at the house, where Jane would be readying dinner for their arrival. "That man, Richard, is a friend of a man I know named Zeke Price. He's Jane's father."
Charlotte gasped. "You're not Jane's father?"
Douglass hung his head and took a deep breath. "I'm not even her stepfather. I'm her brother."
If Charlotte hadn't been sitting, she would have swooned. "How do you mean?"
"My mother had me young, and had Jane when she met her last husband. Zeke is wild. He gets drunk, and he smokes opiates. He hurts women, including my mother, when she's with him. But I won't let them get Jane. She's bright and happy and deserves a chance, and she'll never have it if my mother finds her."
"So what does Richard have to do with this?"
"I go by my middle name here. My first name is Charles. I took care to dress differently and even keep a beard so there's less chance of someone recognizing me. I went to medical school away from my hometown, and I even learned to walk different. “He looked at his hands, bloodied from punching the drunk. “But my temper did used to get me in trouble. I saw Richard recognize me. I saw the knowledge in his eyes. He's gonna call Zeke, and let him know where I am, and if they're close, they could already be coming for us." He looked at her fearfully. "I shouldn't have brought you into this."
Charlotte felt her heart swell in her chest. "I'm to be your wife, aren't I?" She said carefully. She opened the door to her coach and hopped out. "I'm still staying."
Douglass scrambled out after her and pulled her into another frustratingly intimate hug. His body was trembling, but his eyes were dry and hard. She breathed in his scent, distracted momentarily by his warmth and heady aroma. He squeezed her a little longer this time, then she surprised him by kissing his cheek tenderly.
He released her, but kept his hands on her waist. Her hands were around his shoulders, and she peered up into his sky blue gaze, trying to untangle the jumble of heat, panic, and determination. He was looking at her mouth, and without thinking she glanced at his in time to see him lick his lips. A thrill of desire ran through her body, and then a frisson of fear: now that she knew he was truly unattached, there was nothing stopping her from unlocking the chest of emotion where she had been storing her growing fondness and embarrassingly strong lust. She inched forward, and his arms pulled her tighter, gently, as if she would break. Then, almost as gently, he pressed his lips to hers. It turned passionate and intense as quickly as it began, and Charlotte pressed her body against his front, plunging her fingers through his thick, wavy hair and drawing desperate sounds of passion from him. He was pressing her against the coach now, hands running up and down her sides, and she leaned into the kiss, finally feeding the nerve endings that had been clamoring for his touch since she arrived.
A blood curdling scream ripped them apart, and they turned toward the house, where the back door was slamming and hurried footsteps could be heard rushing around the back. They looked at each other in terror.
"Jane!"
Douglass tore into the house at top speed toward the sound of sister's shriek.
Charlotte followed him when the feeling returned to his legs, intending to follow him out the back. Then she spied her hunting rifle on top of the main fireplace and snatched it, grabbing a handful of shells to put into one of her apron's pockets. She propelled herself out the backdoor in time to see Douglass fighting with a short, stocky man with big heavy fists like hams. Jane was slumped next to a tree behind them, and Charlotte started to make a beeline for the girl.
When she was about fifty feet away, a woman stepped from behind the tree, and Charlotte stopped in her tracks. She was wearing a black riding habit much like the one Charlotte had seen her in before, and her thick black hair was pulled back into an elegant knot. Her face was jarring, a composite of cruel beauty and piercing blue eyes like a cloudless sky. Charlotte saw now that the woman from the train station---the woman she had bitterly used as a stand in for Douglass' imaginary wife in her fantasies---was about fifteen years older than Douglass himself. Only her eyes betrayed this; her skin and hair were vibrant, her general air youthful.
The woman smiled and eyed the rifle Charlotte carried. "Are you going to use that?" She taunted. "I won't give you another chance." She pulled a pistol from her coat's pocket and pointed it Charlotte before she could move or spea
k.
Douglass was struggling with the man, who had to be Zeke. Zeke was dodging most of his hits, but he was getting tired; he was shorter and not as strong, and relying on his speed to help him win was a bad strategy. It was starting to show.
"Maybe I should just kill you for trying to take my daughter from me," The woman sneered. She walked forward and pressed the barrel of her gun to Charlotte's forehead, smiling. "you think you're a better mother than me? Think you can make my daughter stop loving me?" She was screaming now. "Drop your gun!
Charlotte dropped her rifle and slid it away from her. It landed next to Jane's limp body. Zeke took notice of this and sprang to the side, grabbing the rifle and rolling back to his feet in one swift motion.
"Dammit!" Douglass yelled, and Charlotte's heart sank. He was right. He shouldn't have brought her into this; now they were going to die because of her.
Zeke was smiling, revealing a mouth full of crooked yellow teeth. "Not gon' give you a chance to walk away this time, boy," he growled in a gravelly baritone. "Make sure your legs are just so much spaghetti." He cocked it, and pointed the rifle at Douglass' head. Douglass closed his eyes and sank to his knees.
"Charlotte, if they let you go, please try to get a message to Jane. Tell her I love her. And I'm sorry."
Charlotte was shaking like a leaf, adrenaline coursing through a bod with nowhere to go. "No! Please, don't do this, just leave us alone! Just go!" She ran in front of Douglass, and Zeke took a step back in surprise before remembering he was holding the gun.
"I'll do ya too, girly," he said, amused. "Just stay still. One bullet for the both of ya." He smiled wide and raised the rifle again. Charlotte moved forward as his finger squeezed the trigger---
---and the hammer struck nothing but air.
Zeke' face filled with comic surprise a moment before Charlotte leapt forward and drove her forehead into the man's nose, colliding with him and sending him sailing backwards to land on his back. Blood leaked from the mashed mass of bones of cartilage on his face and he twitched a few times, then was still.
Douglass was moving at the same time, and had wrested the gun from his mother's grip. He turned the gun on her as she fled, and pulled the trigger over and over. The gun clicked dryly, but Douglass kept trying, keeping the barrel trained on his mother as she fled through the woods behind his home.
Charlotte's veins were filled with ice water. She watched him, uncertain of how to react to his sudden surge of violence. Douglass lowered the gun, his eyes empty and unreadable. He walked over to Zeke and pressed two fingers to his neck. Satisfied, he moved to Jane, checking her pulse and then moving her head to his lap. Then he looked up at Charlotte, his eyes thawing to reveal confusion, pain, and wonder.
"You saved me," he said.
Charlotte rushed to him as he dissolved into tears, cradling his face in her hands as he'd done to hers. It seemed like years before. "How will your patients get along without a doctor?"
He laughed, sounding tired and on the edge of hysteria, then grabbed her and kissed her roughly. He pulled her head against his, breathing heavily as his lips massaged hers into opening, and he deepened his kiss.
There was a groan, and they broke apart to see Jane peering up at them groggily. She touched her head gingerly, then looked at the two of them, hand in hand. She offered them a slow, broad smile. Then she spoke.
"About time."
Jane's mother didn't try to turn up, especially after Zeke was picked up by the sheriff. He'd been accused of several assaults and robberies in town, and even though some of them were definitely not committed by him, the town respected Douglass and Charlotte's assurances that he'd done much worse. They put him in the county jail, and arranged to send him to a prison. He seemed to have suffered some brain damage during the fight, which Charlotte wasn't sorry for.
Two months after, Douglass shyly proposed to Charlotte over a dinner he asked Jane to help him plan. Jane was as excited as he was, and Charlotte tearfully accepted. They were married in the nearest large town, and her parents took the train from Virginia Beach all the way to California. They oohed and aahed over Jane, accepting the odd arrangement warmly and with genuine affection. Charlotte's mother was overjoyed that she had a sort of surrogate grandchild, and Jane warmed to the older woman's affections.
Charlotte convinced him to let her return to school---he was apprehensive about the course load for nurse training, but she scolded him for underestimating her.
"Who saved your life, eh?" she would tease.
"Truthfully, I just want more of you to myself," he would mutter, and cover her face in kisses. "Besides, I want you to have time for Jane. Once she's grown, she'll probably want to leave the nest." Douglass admitted this last sadly one day after they'd returned from their honeymoon.
"Then we'll start populating the nest," Charlotte said casually. Douglass stopped kissing her and stepped back.
"Really?" He asked. "You...want children with me?" His eyes were careful, but Charlotte could see the shine of excitement.
"Maybe a child," Charlotte said quickly. "One."
His face broke into a grin that lifted her heart to the sky. "I love you," he whispered before kissing her softly.
"I love you too," said Charlotte.
There was a playful gagging sound from the kitchen, and they both laughed. "I love you too!" Charlotte called, and Jane squealed from the other room. She came tearing around the corner with hands sticky from flour after making cookies. Douglass watched her leap into Charlotte's embrace with warm eyes and a secretive smile. Charlotte wondered what he was thinking, then dismissed the thought. She didn't need to wonder. She knew.
THE END
Teambuilding Temptations
Diane thought about the trip that she was taking with the office folks by the lake. She was new in the company but had not really been looking forward to the trip. It was meant to be some sort of team building weekend event and being the big bodied woman that she was, it did not make her very comfortable, although she had to admit that there were quite a few hot guys at the office that she surely wouldn’t mind getting her hands on. At twenty-two, Diane Miller was a marketing executive with one of the most successful media companies in Miami, although she had been at the company for less than a month. She was really enjoying her time at the Pinewood Media Company and was especially fluttered by all of the handsome young guys that worked there, although she knew that they would probably never want anything to do with a bigger woman like her, preferring the other model-like women that were in plenty.
Sitting up on her elbow on the bed, she looked over at Andy, her boyfriend, still sleeping soundly with a stupid grin on his face. He was probably grinning because of all the love making they’d done through most of the night. He was a good guy. They met while they were still in college, and the one thing that she always liked about him was the fact that he had an insatiable appetite for sex and a remarkably big cock to go with it. Diane had an aggressive appetite for sex too, and it had begun back in the day when she was nineteen, and one of her father’s friends had taken advantage of them being alone and seduced her. His name was Mario, and she had known him from when she was a very young girl, and as she had transformed into a teenager, her body beginning to transform into a woman,
It seemed like as soon as she turned nineteen, she noticed Mario starting to look at her in strange ways, and many a time when nobody else was looking, she would find him staring at her breasts longingly. To her surprise, this would set off a spark within her, since she also found him sort of attractive. He started giving her a lot of attention and even started buying her somewhat extravagant gifts. His attention came at the right time, because most of the guys during her freshman year at college had considered her a fat slob, ignoring her and even making fun of her at times. One afternoon she went to Mario's place after he invited her over to get some movies that he had rented. When she got there, his wife was not around and he was scooting around in boxers, a thick hard love rod in hi
s pants forming a tent within as soon as she walked in the door. She had felt an overwhelming sense of arousal, one that she had never experienced before, coursing through her body, and she had found herself getting wet in all the right places, her body beginning to throb with desire.
“Mario, umm, are you a little excited?” she asked, her hands trembling as she pointed at his crotch as he sat on the couch next to him.
“This joystick, honey, is the key to pleasure, come on, touch it,” he said, moving closer to her and taking a hold of her hand to place it onto the thickness, rubbing it over the pecker.
“Mario…” she muttered, her blood rushing through her body like a race car.
“It is okay, honey, touch it, do you like it?” he asked, and Diane could barely think straight as she nodded, her whole body alight with fire, a fire so intense she felt the need to have the cock inside her right away, breaking all the rules. She wanted it to break her virginity and pleasured her all the way into womanhood.
She slipped her hand into the waist of the boxers and wound her fingers around his cock, her fingers barely able to circle it, as she began jerking it up and down, wondering how it would feel inside her pussy.
ROMANCE: His Reluctant Heart (Historical Western Victorian Romance) (Historical Mail Order Bride Romance Fantasy Short Stories) Page 121
