by Cj Howard
Tiffany sauntered over to him in all of her lovely nudity, and knelt down beside him as he lay there on the sofa with Amy astride his body. Tiffany leaned over him and kissed him long and slow, running her tongue over his and biting his lower lip.
“I think that was your wife, but I’m not sure. I didn’t see her come in here. I just saw someone leave and close the door.” She said with a giggle.
Amy leaned down and tried to kiss him, too, but he turned his head away. There was a black hole in the pit of his stomach and he couldn’t figure out what it was from. Amy rubbed her breasts on his chest, teasing and taunting him until he looked at her and she kissed him, and he let her.
He had no reason not to.
***
Light filtered in through the drawing room window and the music still played as loud as it had the night before when Peter woke up. He looked around and saw that both girls were draped over him and all of them were nude. He was hung over and saw three empty bottles of booze lying around them. It had been a party, alright. He heard a noise and realized that the noise was what woke him up. It was a knock. It was coming from the door of the drawing room.
“What?!” he called out. His head pounded mercilessly and he covered his eyes with his hands.
“I want to talk to you when your guests leave,” she said.
His whole body cringed at the sound of the voice. It was ice cold. He opened his eyes and saw Emmaline, standing a few feet away, glaring down at him. He made a quick move to cover himself and discovered that there was no need to cover his lap because Amy’s blonde hair was blanketed over him where she had fallen asleep with her face nestled in his groin. He looked up at Emmaline with panicked eyes and his heart felt as though it would beat right out of his chest.
She stared back into his eyes with an icy glare and waited for him to reply.
“Fine.” It was all he could say. He felt horrible about having her find him with the women, but he owed her no reason or excuse; after all, they were business partners, and that was it. He felt horrible because he had let his lust for her get the better of him and he had imagined her beneath him, above him, wrapped around him as he moved inside of her, and now she was looking at him and he wanted to turn himself inside out and hide.
He kept an indifferent expression on his face and watched her as she turned and stalked out of the room, slamming the door.
The sound woke both girls and when Amy realized where she was, she giggled and grinned at Peter, then turned her head and began to kiss the tip of him and suck on him gently.
He pushed her away and stood up. “Sorry, baby, I’d love to let you have your way with me, but I guess I have a meeting I have to go to. Shower in the bathroom through those doors and help yourselves to anything in the kitchen.”
Emmaline had heard the music coming from the drawing room when she got back from her meeting and went to see what was happening because it had never happened while she had lived in the house. The drawing room was neutral territory for them, but she tended to stay away from it. When she opened the door, she wished she had stayed away from it. She had gone in and found a brunette woman sitting nude in a leather chair with a bottle of liquor, and Peter on the sofa with a blonde on top of him riding him like she was going to win a rodeo belt for it. She honestly felt like she was going to be sick.
She turned and left without a word, but when Peter hadn’t answered her text that morning, she went looking for him and found him with his women at the end of their party. She was livid and hurt, but more than that, she was angry, and he was going to hear everything she had to say.
He walked into his office in a silk robe that was tied at the waist and set a cup of coffee down for her, keeping his own in his hand. “I’m sure you weren’t thrilled to walk in on that. I’m sorry you saw it,” he said, partly sorry and partly not. There was the smallest fraction of him that felt justified, however, as though letting her see what she was missing out on might show her what she could have had if she had only wanted him like he wanted her. The majority of him was ashamed at what she had seen. He didn’t like that she had seen him that way.
“How dare you!” she seethed at him as he looked at her in utter shock. He had never before had to answer to any woman for being with any other women, because he never kept girlfriends or let himself get into a relationship. This was the first time it had happened. “Just…how dare you?”
“How dare I sleep with other women? I’d like to remind you that this marriage is a business arrangement,” he said, coolly.
She felt her fury compounding. “No. How dare you throw caution to the wind and gamble everything we’ve worked for to blow your reputation by screwing a couple of women in our own home! How dare you disrespect everything that I have sacrificed to help you! I have given up living at my home, I gave up my job, I gave up my freedom, I gave up my whole life! Everything! I gave up everything to marry you so that I could help you fix your sullied reputation and enable you to do the work you want to do in this community and what thanks do I get? Right after our highly publicized honeymoon, I get you throwing it all away and sleeping with two women right in our home! How do you think that makes me look?” She raged at him, and he felt his own anger building inside of him.
“So I can’t have any women at all now? What am I supposed to do? I can’t have…” He had almost said he couldn’t have her, but he’d stopped himself just in time. “I can’t have what I want, so I just have to do without it all together? What am I going to do, be celibate for the next three years while we are married?” he shot back at her, frustration taking him over.
“No, I don’t expect you to do that, you are welcome to go be with anyone you want to be with, be with as many as you want to be with, just don’t do it in this state! Don’t do it so publicly with women who will spill the beans to the next available reporter! I can’t fix your reputation if you’re busy running around behind my back destroying it by doing the same things that dragged you down into the mud in the first place! You’re totally negating everything I’m doing! If you’re going to act like this here, then I don’t even see the point of my wasting the next three years here with you, because you’re just going to make my time and efforts useless anyway! I don’t fight losing battles.” She was being very careful about not raising her voice, but it was difficult.
He didn’t know why, but he hated her saying that he could be with anyone. It was obvious that she didn’t care at all. Peter was completely incensed. “I have treated you like gold since you’ve been here, I’ve done everything for you, and worked hard to help you make this arrangement a success, and now I can’t even blow off a little steam in my own home!”
She moved toward him in hopes that a closer proximity might somehow help her get her point across to him. “I don’t care what you do, or who you do it with, I’m just telling you not to do it where you can be seen! Out of state from now on! I didn’t give up everything in my life just so you could make a fool of me! You have said you are grateful for the sacrifices I’ve made for you and you wish there was some way to pay me back for them, well, this is no way to pay me back for all that I have done for you! Why don’t you put someone else besides yourself first, for a change?”
He felt his blood curdle at her words. She was right. He knew she was right. This was no way to repay her and he had said that her sacrifice was something he could never compensate her for. He pressed his lips together and turned away from her.
Peter’s voice grew quiet. “Fine, I’ll leave the state in the future.”
“Good,” she answered behind his back, and then as he turned to look at her, he heard the door close and saw that she was gone.
He fully understood now how so many men were in torment about their relationships. How they loved they women they wanted but had such a hard time being with them. This was one of the reasons why he didn’t want to be in a relationship. It was so much easier to enjoy them and kiss them goodbye. He sighed heavily and sank down into the seat at his
desk. She was complicated and irritating. Confusing and frustrating beyond measure. She was almost indefinable to him.
Emmaline went straight out to the garden and paced through the rows of flowers until she calmed down. He was nothing short of infuriating to her. She couldn’t imagine how she had let herself get into such a convoluted mess as she was in now. Her life had been peaceful and beautiful, living with her grandfather. She had a good job, she worked hard, she had no secrets and she was respectable. Somewhere along the line, she had just gone wrong.
Now it seemed to her that her life was inside out and nothing was what it ought to be. She had more secrets now than she ever had and she was stuck in a marriage with a man who was never going to put anyone else before himself. She tried to stop the tears as they rolled down her cheeks, but she couldn’t. She wept a while, until she was calmed, and then she watched the sunset and hoped he would keep his word.
Chapter5
Emmaline and Peter didn’t see much of each other in the days that followed the fight. Neither one of them really knew what to say to the other, nor did they necessarily want to talk. He was angry and hurt by her cold rejection, and she was frustrated with his thoughtlessness and his selfish actions.
When they did see each other, it was awkward and quiet. She began to wonder when that would change, because she knew that all things do over time, but living practically alone in a huge house was going to be hard on her, and she hoped that they could at least be friends, because three years of solitude would be too much for her to handle well.
Peter was experiencing a phenomenon he had never known before. He was heart hurt over her reaction to him. He had acted out, partly hoping to make her jealous, while hoping to show her that he was just fine with her not wanting him, and hoping to elicit some sort of response from her, some feelings of desire toward him, but none of that happened. All he had managed to do was incur her anger over his selfishness and he felt that all she had seen was his darker side. There was a growing bitterness in him about it.
He was sitting in his office one morning, about a week after it had happened, still fresh and raw in him, when Nelson walked in and Peter snapped at him a few times before Nelson, who had worked with Peter for a long time and knew him fairly well, sat down and asked off-handedly, “How are things going with the city? Are we able to move the project forward at all yet?”
Peter’s eyes narrowed. “No. We aren’t any further along with the city. They want more meetings, they want more paperwork, and they want more money. They want more time with Tristan to go over everything, and he suggested that I become more of a silent partner for this deal just so we can get it through all the red tape. I accidentally sleep with the Governor’s wife once, and this is the hassle I face afterward. Luckily, his re-election campaign is weak and I don’t think we’ll have him in office much longer. Hopefully his replacement will want to see this refurbishment happen sooner than later.”
Nelson watched him and then asked lightly, “How is it going with Emmaline?”
Peter scowled. “Not well at all. She is cold and quiet, she might as well be an ice-queen! I can’t believe I married anyone at all, let alone her!”
Nelson took a deep breath and said in a low tone, “Sir, we agreed that she would be a wife in name only and that it would be a business deal. You aren’t talking about physical relations with her, are you?”
Peter caught himself and felt heat flush his face. He turned away from Nelson and focused on the papers laid out across the table he was standing over. He had meant physical relations. He’d been torn over wanting her and feeling angry with her for that need not being reciprocated by her, but it seemed clear that the frost between them was not going to thaw anytime in the future and it weighed on his heart and his mind that she was in the same house, just down the hall, and he could not go to her; he could not touch and have what was not offered to him, but what he wanted so badly. “No, of course not, Nelson,” he lied. “I mean that she and I have our differences of opinion when it comes to my being with other women. I run hot blooded. You know that, she knows that, I think that everyone must know that, but she wants to curtail my physical activity with other women here in my own home, and not only that, here in my own city. In my own state as well! She is insisting that I go out of state anytime I want to indulge in some physical release. I can’t go running off to some other state every time I want a woman or two for the night. That’s bad for business.” He stalked around the table and splayed his hands on the table, looking over the papers there, but not seeing them. “I could have women come right to the house, but she won’t hear of it. If I want some company, I have to leave the state for it! When did she assume any kind of authority over my life? When did I allow that to happen?” He grew more irritated speaking his thoughts out loud.
Nelson nodded thoughtfully and walked over to the table, also pretending to look at the papers, but not really seeing them. “Sir, she isn’t wrong about that. It would look absolutely horrific for you if you were to have women coming to the house here where your wife is and be caught having an affair with them. Especially because she is so likeable. It’s the same in town, if anyone in the city caught you and knew who you were, it would be disastrous. We have our hands full just trying to rectify the damage that was done by your situation with the Governor’s wife, but to destroy all that we have managed to rebuild through your marriage by cheating on your wife, at least in the public eye, would be a devastating blow to your reputation that I’m not sure you could recover from.”
Peter grew angry. “Well, what am I supposed to do then? Just forgo women unless I happen to be out of town?”
Nelson rubbed his chin. “No, sir, of course not. I could arrange out of town trips for you two or three times a month if you like. It’s just a change of protocol, if you choose to look at it that way.”
“It’s a pain! What in the world ever made me think that getting married would be a good idea? I could have kept my old reputation and lived the way I wanted to for the rest of my life instead of answering to a woman who isn’t even a real wife! I can’t believe I did this! I probably ought to look at having it annulled. What a disaster!” he grumbled loudly.
Nelson shook his head. “Sir, you did it to enable you to move forward with your business plans. It’s much bigger than just you being allowed personal freedom. It’s the improvement of the community and the betterment of an area of the city that we all love and that brings enormous tourism in. It’s the acquisition of wealth and prosperity.”
Peter looked up at Nelson. “I have plenty of wealth and prosperity, Nelson, I’m a billionaire, but you do have a point about the city.”
Nelson continued. “If you think broadly about it, sir, you really have the best of both worlds. You have a beautiful, intelligent, kind, and thoughtful public wife who has considerably improved your reputation, and enabled you to further your project more than you could have without her. She has been out working with several programs and groups in the city and your name is shining because of it. You have the ability to go and enjoy other women as often as you like, so long as you do it away from the place you are tidying up, that being your home and your city. It’s really not a bad situation, sir. I can arrange to have the jet ready to take you anywhere you’d like to go a few times a month and that may alleviate some of the tension you’re feeling. Things are heading in the right direction, and that’s just what we want to happen. We shouldn’t risk damaging the progress we’ve made, and we have made some, sir.”
Peter knew he was right. He couldn’t very well admit that the real rub was that he wasn’t able to have Emmaline, the only woman he really wanted, in this state or out of it. He realized that he was probably going to have to make some sacrifices himself and listen to them both. He would have to fly out of the state for personal leave from his marriage. It was ridiculous, but it was the only way it would work, and Nelson was right about the progress they had made. He couldn’t really afford a regression after they had c
ome so far, even though it wasn’t far enough. He sighed and sat in the chair at his desk.
“Alright. Figure something out for me. Maybe three day trips, perhaps three times a month. We’ll see how that works out. Plan them for states far from Louisiana, though. I can’t have locals who may be traveling notice me and come back with tales.” He felt defeated and dejected. Sacrifice did not sit well with him, but in the back of his mind he could hear Emmaline’s words and his own back to her, and he knew that she was making the same sacrifice, except she wasn’t leaving the state for conjugal visits with random lovers, and he was. He hated the guilt that came with feeling selfish; they were emotions he had never felt before and he didn’t like them.
“Very good, sir. I’ll take care of it and get it arranged for you.” Nelson replied.
***
Two weeks later, Emmaline was relaxing in her room when she got a phone call from her grandfather, Henri. She was excited to hear from him until she heard his voice.
Henri sounded weak and tired. “Hello, my baby girl,” he said in a thin voice.
She drew her breath in and held it. “What’s wrong? You sound like you don’t feel too well!” Her hand flew to her heart, and her fingers curled.
“Well, little one, I’m not doing too well. I didn’t want to say anything at first, but it’s getting worse and I need your help, if you can do it,” he said quietly. She knew he would never ask for help unless he really needed it and though she would love to help him with anything, he liked for her to have her own space and freedom. She knew that it must be bad if he had gotten to a point where he was actually asking for help.
“Of course, I’ll be right there!” she said and hung up the phone. Her thoughts were a blur as panic rose in her and adrenaline coursed through her veins. She threw several pieces of clothing into a suitcase and some bags and carried them down the hall to the foyer, where she saw Nelson coming out of Peter’s office. He took one look at her and rushed to her.