A Nice Girl’s Limits Read online

  A NICE GIRL’S LIMITS

  MANDY JAY

  Copyright © 2019 by Mandy Jay

  All rights reserved.

  No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any electronic or mechanical means, including information storage and retrieval systems, without written permission from the author, except for the use of brief quotations in a book review.

  This book is intended for entertainment purposes only and is a work of fiction. Any mention of famous personas, television shows, radio shows, newspapers, magazines, products or anything in the public domain should not be viewed as an endorsement of the author or from the author.

  The characters and stories created in this book are fictional. Any similarities between real people or events is purely coincidental.

  Contact: Mandy Jay

  Email: [email protected]

  Website: www.mandyjaybooks.com

  CONTENTS

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 17

  Chapter 18

  Chapter 19

  Chapter 20

  Chapter 21

  Chapter 22

  About the Author

  Also by Mandy Jay

  CHAPTER 1

  The Birch Hotel was a nice place to rest your head. It wasn’t overly fancy where you felt like the money they charged their guests was spent on Italian marble sconces that only a small percentage of the population would actually notice or appreciate. Yet, it was fancy enough that it still felt special to spend the night there. The Birch Hotel was simply a nice hotel.

  That’s why Mary Riley fit in so well working the front desk at The Birch Hotel. She was simply a nice girl. Her genuine smile had diffused many situations with angered guests. When she apologized for the inconvenience, it felt like she actually meant it. And that’s because she did.

  She wanted every guest that came into The Birch Hotel to have a great experience. Which meant they would return to the hotel, or at the very least, tell their friends about their tremendous experience at the hotel. Nowadays that meant writing a good review on Yelp, Google, or posting flattering pictures on social media. #keepemcomingback was Mary’s motto.

  The more guests the hotel got, the more money the hotel got. Which in turn presented more opportunity for advancement and raises for Mary. That’s why she wanted to work at a family run hotel versus a larger corporation. She genuinely cared about doing good work at her job, and wanted her employer to genuinely care about her being happy at her job. She felt there was a greater chance of that happening where the owner actually knew her name.

  In the same manner that Mary knew the names of all the regulars that stayed at The Birch Hotel. There were the Parkers, a family of four that spent a week at the hotel every spring for family vacation. Ms. Edwards, a tech consultant that had stayed at the hotel at least ten days a month for the past three months. Ms. Edwards tried to explain to Mary one time what it was she actually did, but it clearly went completely over Mary’s head.

  “That look. Right there,” Ms. Edwards explained to her one time. “That’s the reason I’m still single, my dear. Every time I tell a gentleman at dinner what I do, it ends in that look. So, I’ve simply stopped telling people. I had to lie to my last E-harmony date that I was a stripper just so I could get laid. It was mortifying. Not the lie, my dear, the sex.”

  Ms. Edwards would often tell anecdotes about why she was single. Mary played along and laughed. Genuinely laughed because the anecdotes were genuinely amusing, but Mary never really believed Ms. Edwards was single because she couldn’t find a decent man. Mary knew the real reason Ms. Edwards was still single was because that’s what she wanted. She loved her job. Mary could tell by the way Ms. Edwards would talk about it, even if most of the stuff she said did go over Mary’s head.

  Ms. Edwards had a job she loved, got to travel around the world, and was happy with her life. When you find a recipe that works, it’s a risk adding a new ingredient. The other thing that Mary loved about Ms. Edwards was how she seemed to know the regulars of the hotel almost as well as Mary did. She befriended just about every person she met.

  One of the more recent regulars to The Birch Hotel had just walked through the lobby doors, Mr. Kendrick. For the past several months he had come to the hotel almost every weekend. And always with a different woman. A woman that was not his wife. Although, to be fair, Mary had never actually met Mrs. Kendrick so she didn’t know if any of Mr. Kendrick’s flock he had brought to The Birch Hotel were her or not.

  Mr. Kendrick was always friendly when he encountered the hotel staff. He addressed everyone by his or her name if he knew it, and if he didn’t know it, he was quick to introduce himself. “Hello, Mary,” Mr. Kendrick said, greeting Mary with a smile. His white smile was more pronounced due to the dark stubble of his beard. Mr. Kendrick almost always sported a well groomed five o’clock shadow.

  “Welcome back, Mr. Kendrick,” Mary replied, with her own sweet smile.

  Mr. Kendrick quickly handed Mary his credit card, as he was well familiar with hotel protocol by this point. He had been offered to have his credit card stored on file for convenience, but with all the recent hacks of major hotels and email servers, he didn’t feel comfortable having his personal information stored in more places than need be. Mary took the card from Mr. Kendrick and once again noticed his hands. They were hard to miss with how big and thick they were. But the thing that always caught Mary off guard was how callused they were. It was the only part of his persona that wasn’t smooth.

  Mr. Kendrick owned his own construction company. He was a self-made man working his way up from the bottom. That was what Mary admired most about him. She hoped to be like him in fifteen to twenty years, albeit less hairy and more faithful. She wanted to own a hotel chain, or at least be in charge of running one. Mary aspired to work her way up from the bottom rung of the ladder all the way to top.

  After Mary entered all of Mr. Kendrick’s information, he gathered his belongings and made his way to the elevators. He glanced back at her. His big brown-eyes seemed to suck the surrounding light out of the room, which only drew more attention to them. His eyes penetrated hers across the lobby with seductive suggestions and promises of ultimate satisfaction.

  Mary was so transfixed on Mr. Kendrick’s hypnotizing stare that it took a second for her to register that someone was speaking to her. “Oh my God, do you see that?” Mary’s front desk co-worker, Ashley, asked her from the adjacent computer.

  Obviously Mary wasn’t just imaging this moment in her head. Others could see clear as day the connection she had just shared with Mr. Kendrick. Mary still tried to play it off. “See what?”

  “Oh my God, Mary, you are so oblivious,” Ashley said. “No wonder you’re a virgin.”

  “I’m not a virgin,” Mary informed Ashley, for the one-hundredth time. Ashley loved to tease Mary that she was still a virgin. In Ashley’s mind, anyone that didn’t have sex on a regular basis was a virgin. It’s as if a woman’s hymen grew back if she didn’t have sex every week, according to Ashley’s logic. Mary wasn’t a virgin, but she didn’t have sex as freely as Ashley did.

  “You missed Mr. Kendrick undressing me with his eyes as our souls banged in the lobby,” Ashley finally told Mary.

  Mr. Kendrick’s mesmerizing eyes seemed to have the Mona Lisa effect on women. No matter where a woman
was standing in the room, it always seemed like his eyes were looking right at her. All for the best, Mary thought. Mr. Kendrick was a bad boy, and she preferred nice guys.

  Mary had tried the bad boy thing once. She had a one-night stand with a bad boy on spring break. He was loud, crude, and incredibly hot. She made out with him on the dance floor as he groped her entire body. She was pretty sure half the bar had seen her ass at one point when he reached under her skirt to grab a chunk of it. She decided not to be self-conscious about it at the time. In fact, she actually hoped some of the other men in the room enjoyed the view. Mary told herself that there were at least a handful of guys wishing they could grab a piece her butt for themselves when they saw it.

  Maybe if Mary had stopped there at the bar, her interest in bad boys would’ve continued. The first half of the night was so incredibly hot. She had stopped worrying about other people’s judgment and succumbed to her lascivious desires. It had felt thrilling to not be so self-conscious. But, alas, she went back to the bad boy’s hotel room. She thought if she had that much fun on the dance floor, surely the bedroom would be an even greater experience. She could not have been more wrong.

  Everything happened so fast, and not in a hot, passionate way either. It was more of a drunk, sloppy, having sex just to scratch an itch experience. There wasn’t any real foreplay, unless you count the three seconds he jammed his fingers inside of her to make sure she was wet enough for sex. If that had been the worst part of it all, then maybe Mary wouldn’t have been permanently soured on bad boys. Unfortunately for Mary, that was probably the best part of the whole sexual experience.

  This bad boy of hers jack hammered away on top of Mary like he was trying to drill her onto the bed as a permanent fixture. It was as if he was trying to outrun his own orgasm. In his mind, if he had sex fast enough then maybe he could get her to cum before he couldn’t hold it anymore. All of her hopes for that night were dashed the moment she heard him scream loudly that he had crossed the finish line, alone.

  She had hoped for a new experience. That her bad boy encounter would teach her some new positions, or that he could make her finally appreciate doggystyle. She always preferred missionary and feared it made her boring in bed. She couldn’t help that she liked it. The angle, the closeness, the feeling of a man’s weight resting on top of her, it was all very intoxicating. She mainly used doggstyle as a means to get a guy to finish quickly. If she had already climaxed, or if there was no hope of climaxing and she had enough for the night, then it was onwards to fuck like dogs. As for being on top, she was too self-conscious to really enjoy it she had decided.

  Her one-night stand on spring break soured her taste for bad boys going forward. She preferred to stick with the nice guys. At least with a nice guy, he’s, well, nice. Sweet. Romantic. Seems to care about her day and what she thought. At the very least nice guys pretended to care about that stuff, even if they really didn’t.

  It was for those reasons that she didn’t feel the need to venture into the bad boy realm again. Maybe her next experience would’ve been different. She certainly had different sexual experiences with the nice guys she had been with. Some were wonderful lovers. Others were boring duds. Maybe she simply hadn’t met the right bad boy.

  “I’m going to fuck his brains out tonight,” Ashley confessed to Mary, bringing her out of her own head. “He didn’t have a girl with him when he checked in. Which means he’ll be on the prowl tonight.”

  “Too bad you’re working,” Mary said.

  “Oh, I’m getting him before he goes hunting.” Ashley picked up the phone and dialed the kitchen. “Hola, Berto ¿Cómo estás mi corazon? Ashley flirtatiously giggled on the phone while talking with Berto, the kitchen manager. With a few strokes of the keyboard in front of her, Ashley pulled up Mr. Kendrick’s room info. “Can you do me a favor, corazon? Could you let me know when room 504 orders room service? It’s a VIP guest and I was told to make sure it gets my unique personal touch.”

  Mr. Kendrick always ordered room service when he stayed at the hotel. A bottle of champagne, some dark chocolates and fruit were his go-to preference. If he brought a woman with him when he checked in that night, then he ordered room service after they had their first round of sex. Fuel for the next few rounds of the evening, Mary supposed. However, if he entered the hotel alone, then he ordered room service just before he left for the evening. Some drinks and snacks to set the mood upon his arrival was Mary’s best guess. Little did he know that Ashley had already picked out his evening entertainment for him.

  A little less than an hour later the kitchen phoned up to Ashley. “Really? Already?....No that’s okay, Berto. I got it. Thank you, mi corazon,” Ashley hung up the phone and turned to Mary. “Cover me if Doug shows up and I’ll give you every little, filthy detail.”

  “I’ll cover for you if you spare me the details,” Mary retorted. Doug was the hotel general manager, and was currently looking for a new front desk manager. He had interviewed several outside applicants for the job, but also spoke with both Mary and Ashley individually on the possibility of an in-house promotion.

  Mary could knock Ashley out of the picture by telling Doug about Ashley’s rendezvous with Mr. Kendrick that evening. Fooling around with guests was frowned upon at The Birch Hotel. Not as much as fooling around with other staff members though. That was grounds for immediate dismissal. However, that’s not how Mary wanted to earn the job. She felt that her merits alone made her a better candidate than Ashley.

  Ashley was gone in a flash, and returned almost as quickly. There was no possible way that she snuck in a quickie with Mr. Kendrick based on the steam spouting out of her head when Mary saw her. Had Mr. Kendrick rejected her? Maybe he does have standards, Mary thought? Then felt bad for thinking it. Ashley was a very beautiful woman and there were few men in this world that would reject her hourglass frame, long blonde hair, and cute round face.

  “That bitch!” Ashley yelled for everyone to hear, as she reached the front desk.

  “Something tells me there aren’t a lot of details I’ll be missing out on.” Mary couldn’t help but take a little satisfaction from the current situation.

  “You’ll have to ask Caryn.”

  Caryn was one of the housekeepers. And apparently Mr. Kendrick’s guest for the evening.

  CHAPTER 2

  This is not how he had hoped the evening would go. He thought there was a moment that he finally caught the attention of his favorite front desk clerk, Mary. She was always friendly, and could disarm a nuclear bomb with her smile. Her warmth never felt forced, but he also didn’t feel as though he was the only one to receive it. She gave every guest that same feeling. It’s why she was so damn good at her job.

  But that moment by the elevators in the lobby, that was the moment that he thought she might have looked at him in a different light. He thought there was a small opening that he could slip through to get to know her on a more personal level. He had imagined going out that night, but coming home alone. Mary would be wrapping up her shift. They’d chat in the lobby and he would invite her to the hotel bar for a drink. Perhaps even up to his room.

  Though he doubted that Mary would accept such an invitation. While Mary never judged Mr. Kendrick for bringing a different woman to the hotel on each of his visits, at least not to his face, he took an educated guess that she didn’t approve of his philandering. It was very likely that Mary wouldn’t spend any quality time with Mr. Kendrick unless she knew the truth. That he hadn’t been married for quite some time.

  Legally speaking he was still married, but Mr. Kendrick and his wife had been separated for months. It became official in his mind the moment he moved out of the house. The house. Not their house. Not anymore. And the love he experienced with her had left his heart almost a year before that. He hadn’t even realized it. For so long he didn’t want it to be true and refused to recognize his new reality. But just because you don’t believe in something, doesn’t mean it’s not true.

 
Mr. Kendrick believed that when you’re in love with someone it’s like your heart is on a string, and their heart is tied to the other end. You pull each other in, back and forth. No matter where you are in the world, you’re always connected. When their heart hurts, your heart hurts. Often times even more so than theirs does in that moment.

  It’s tough to know the exact moment that the connection gets separated. And even tougher to know how it happened. Did someone in the relationship cut it off themselves? Perhaps someone outside of the relationship split the connection? Sometimes it’s distance that stretches the string past the lengths it’s capable of keeping two people connected. Other times the string gets frayed over time and breaks from the stress of life. The tug of the string he felt from his wife had been broken long before he moved out.

  Mr. Kendrick’s divorce still had some legal hurdles to overcome before it became finalized. Most notably what percentage of his business his ex-wife got to keep. She wanted half, and that was fifty percent more than he was willing to give. She could have the house. The cars. Their cat, and he really loved Gizmo, but his business was the last true love of his life. He wasn’t about to let that suffer the same fate as his marriage.

  Mr. Kendrick wasn’t sure the exact reason he still wore his wedding ring. He figured it was out of habit. It’s not as though he lied about his marriage status to any of the women he had been with since he and his wife split. However, no woman had even bothered to ask about his relationship status either. Maybe that’s the only reason to have a Facebook account, he thought. Relationship status updates. It didn’t matter though. He’d take the ring off when he was ready.

  He thought he was ready to expand upon his relationship with Mary that night, but the housekeeper got in the way of those plans. Her name was Caryn, and like most of the staff at The Birch Hotel, she was always friendly to him. One minute they were talking about the weather, and the next she was making a joke about how dirty his sheets always were. That he owed her for all the extra work it took to change and clean his filthy linen.