Free The Fire Night Ball by Anne Carlisle

inside and out. Try as she might to alter the gloom, she could find no pleasure in the stone mansion or its corporate twin down the road, the Alta Hotel. To her sensibilities, they were stone cold, as was Harry.
    For lovemaking, she preferred the look of one of those old hovels that had once been sheep drover's huts. Now there was a warm, earthy place where a woman might have multiple orgasms with a rough-and-tumble cowboy.
    Much like other rock piles that had been built by wealthy men as a lasting memorial to themselves--Hearst's Castle in California, the Vanderbilts' Biltmore mansion in North Carolina, the Broadmoor Hotel in Colorado--Drake's twin towers stood as monuments to the owner's colossal self-regard.
    In her salad days, she had been courted by descendants of the great Robber Barons and shipping magnates, and she had their number. When one's ancestor had accumulated wealth past all spending it, what was left for a descendant to do? Erection and self-glorification, in one fell swoop: a stone mansion with flags flying from the parapets, a phallic symbol bigger than the next guy's!
    In a way these castles all looked alike, dreary and lightless inside, with Flemish tapestries, twisted dark wood furniture, and names from Olde England. Adapting the word "moor" was a favorite notion, to make the context as bucolic as possible, even when the landscape was about as much fun as a graveyard.
    Enter, the sexual fantasy: lord and master in the guise of a shepherd cavorting amid his flock, frolicking on the green, or an angler with a tight line. At Drake's Roost, the greens were tall stands of grass, tall enough for cattle to get lost in, and there was a stocked bass pond.
    Since they didn't need the money, the robber barons of the 1920's would usually call the rock-pile their "home," at least until their wives were driven stark, raving mad by the dark, cloistered interiors. Their descendants always needed the money, however, so the second or third generation would turn the “family home” into a huge tourist attraction and collect the dough in drips and drabs for perpetuity.
    Drake had built Drake's Roost and then the Alta Hotel, with the help of that SWAT design team from San Francisco, within a mile of each other and on the same rugged, windswept mountainside. Taken together, hardly anyone could claim bragging rights beyond his, not even the Biltmore family. Harry had managed to have his cake and eat it too -- how like Harry!
    However, she had to give the devil and his consort their due. B.L. Zebub's was priceless. If it belonged to anyone but Harry and Marlena, Lila herself would be hanging out there all the time.
    Marlena Bellum (formerly known as "the Dimmer dame" before her separation) had singlehandedly conceived of and created an astonishing over-the-top watering hole. Nothing, not in Wyoming and perhaps not in all the West, could rival B. L. Zebub’s as a hip oasis. Lila freely admitted it to herself: she was green-eyed with jealousy.
    Outside the hotel's walls, the howling wind raged. Inside B. L. Zebub's, all was cozily aristocratic and blatantly sexy. While Lila was tooling around Europe with Marlena's boss--so Lila's inside sources relayed--the redhead had been bribing descendants of an English lord to let her take a peek at the design of a leather-dominated billiard room.
    As a result, the interior walls of B. L. Zebub's were covered in squares of hand-tooled Spanish leather, the design copied from the secret sixteenth-century gentleman's enclave Marlena had visited.
    Also thanks to PAD's young architect, the gleaming hardwood floors of the saloon were cushioned with rare Turkish rugs. The pool-table, hand-built in Philadelphia, featured a scarlet cloth. A music box from 1900 along with the antique humidor graced a corner. Elk and antelope balls festooned the antlers of a collection of stuffed mule deer.
    Overall, the décor came off as a perfect blend of upper-crust hunting lodge and ribald drawing room. To keep