‘Psycho down,’ roared Ethan, so forcefully that Izzy nearly hit the floor too with the weight of the order.
Psycho did as he was told, immediately lying down mere inches from Izzy’s feet. His tail was wagging furiously, which seemed to propel him nearer.
‘Psycho?’ Izzy laughed, falling to her knees and stroking the huge head.
‘It’s kind of an ironic name – he was tiny when I first had him and literally scared of his own shadow. Plus he had a fascination with pulling the shower curtain back whilst I was in there so it was either Psycho, after the film, or Peeping Tom. Go on Psycho.’
Psycho stood up, his whole body wagging with excitement, then he turned round and sat on Izzy’s lap so he could be stroked more thoroughly.
‘Yeah, he has no idea how big he is, he still thinks he’s lap sized. Come here, you great oaf.’
Psycho leapt up and ran back towards Ethan and Izzy’s heart soared a little at the clear affection he had for his dog.
‘Come on through, you can tell me your ideas for the house while I’m cooking dinner. And I’ll get us both some pain killers, my head is still throbbing.’
*
‘No, no way,’ Ethan said, as he dug into a large piece of steak.
‘You’re not thinking about this clearly.’
Ethan topped up her glass of red wine. ‘We’ve always done it that way.’
He was so infuriating. ‘Just because that’s the way it’s been done for the last five years, doesn’t mean it has to continue that way. You’re so stubborn.’
He rubbed his head. ‘I’m really wishing we’d skipped dinner and gone straight for the sex instead, it would have been much quieter.’
‘I don’t know, I can be very noisy in bed.’
He choked on his wine. If he wanted to shock her by talking about sex, it wasn’t going to work.
‘Look, you’re giving people the use of the whole house for four hundred pounds. That’s madness. You could barely get a hotel room in London for that and you’re giving people a whole house.’
‘What we offer is quite a specialised service, people want it to be discreet. The Mayor of Chessingburyford doesn’t want to be there with his wife and bump into his next door neighbour or his cleaner or his secretary and their husbands or wives. No one wants to be pounding away at their wife, only to hear another couple going at it above their heads or in the next room. If you’re talking about restricting people to one room, how would the use of the kitchen work, for example? We couldn’t sell that as the only room people could use – people want that as an added extra, to go there after, not to be stuck having sex on the cold marble tops while some other couple are upstairs in the sumptuous comfort of the suite. We only have two bathrooms too, one off the kitchen, one in the suite. The logistics of this aren’t practical. We are not opening a brothel, where we have different people having sex in each room of the house. I know it might not seem like it to you, but my company has a reputation and it’s not just about numbers and how many people we can get into the house at any one time. At the moment this isn’t even an issue, we have two to three bookings a week, it’s not like we ever turn anybody away.’
‘What happens when we become that popular, and we start getting more than seven bookings a week?’
‘I can’t see it taking off to that extent. I’m sorry, whatever your skills and knowledge in marketing and PR, I can’t see that you are going to triple our weekly bookings. But if it does happen, then I would sooner build a cabin – a large annexe on the far side of the grounds so we could have two couples on one day but they would never see each other. But I would have to seriously see a huge surge in our numbers to even consider that. An annexe would cost a lot of money and I’d need to see it was worth spending that.’
Izzy stared down at her steak, she cut a big bite off and chewed it thoughtfully. Ethan was stubborn but he did have a point. But he was damned well going to agree to something tonight.
‘Do you have a cleaner for the house?’
‘Yes.’
‘And you pay her every time she cleans the house, or do you just pay her a salary?’
‘Every time she cleans the house – we get quieter periods and it doesn’t make financial sense to pay her for weeks when she’s not doing any cleaning. We also have busier periods and she deserves to be paid more for those weeks.’
‘And she cleans the whole house each time? She’ll change the bedding too?’
‘Yes.’
‘You see, that’s an extra expense. We could say to our clients they can have access to one bedroom area – either the basement or one of the two bedrooms upstairs – and the other rooms like the kitchen, office, lounge for one fee, say four hundred pounds. Or if they want access to the whole house, they have to pay a larger fee. It’s silly to have to change the bedding on three different beds for one couple, that’s extra work for the cleaner and more laundry fees for you. By limiting them to one bedroom we can pay the cleaner a slightly smaller wage than if she was cleaning the whole house.’
‘And how do you think our cleaner would take to this?’
‘We encourage our clients to have full use of the house but we would charge them extra for it. So most of the time there would be no difference to what the cleaner did or what she got paid but we could save money on those times that only one room was used.’
‘I don’t like it.’
Izzy rolled her eyes. ‘I give up.’
A loud fart sounded from underneath the table and she giggled as it seemed to go on and on. Psycho remained unfazed by his sudden outburst.
‘That’s our cue to leave, I think.’ Ethan stood up. ‘We have about five seconds until the fallout of that fart hits us. Quick, run to the lounge.’
Izzy stood up, grabbed her glass of wine and ran to the lounge.
‘Don’t look back, I’m right behind you,’ Ethan said, hot on her heels.
Psycho clearly thought this was a brilliant game and chased after them, barking his glorious deep bark.
As Izzy plonked herself down on the sofa, Psycho threw himself down at her feet, and the smell of the fart that he’d clearly brought with him hit her square in the nose.
‘Oh god.’ Izzy held her hand over her nose as she stroked him.
‘Is it bad?’
Tears sprang to Izzy’s eyes with the putrid stench. ‘I can taste it.’
Ethan laughed. ‘Psycho here.’
Psycho immediately got up and launched himself at Ethan, thankfully taking most of the smell with him. Ethan sat down and Psycho leapt up to curl up next to him, as much as a dog the size of a horse could curl up.
‘How’s your back?’
‘Fine – it feels a bit achy, I’m not sure what happened there. How’s your head, how are you feeling?’
‘It’s fine, just a little scratch. No dizziness or sickness, I promise.’ Ethan focused his attention on scratching Psycho’s ears for a moment before returning his unwavering gaze to her. ‘Tell me, why do you care so much?’
Her