Chapter 1
Brett Chambers (34) was restless. That distinct feeling was not unfamiliar, being six days since he'd last had sex.
He and Mrs Michaels had parted amicably, ending their brief and mutually satisfying relationship. Her husband, a seismic engineering consultant, had been due to return home in a couple of days from working in Peru for eleven weeks.
The final moment for Brett had been memorable. Sylvia stood at the front entrance of the glass-studded steel-framed home cupping her sizeable left breast under her flimsy dress, and sobbed, "I love you."
That made him feel sympathetic for a few moments until he thought she'd get over that quickly. She'd soon be greeting her older husband home, probably being thrown on the bed lustfully.
After all, Sylvia aged 34 was a striking young woman entering her prime, and she knew it. She also was aware that 'everybody' including her parents considered her to be a trophy wife of an internationally lauded engineer, who specialised in consulting on-site development and design of high-rise buildings in earthquake-prone territories.
Brett grinned. Sylvia had often displayed earthquake-like tremors when getting off massively during sex, especially when being banged by him on the dining table domestically during or immediately after dinner or during weekend lunch.
He headed for the Sydney Harbour Bridge to proceed to his bachelor pad in 'the heart of the city', aware it was Friday. Experience had taught him that any time from midday Friday was the prime time of the week to make pre-sex contact with nubile women, and older women, too.
Brett occasionally had sex with older females but he targeted females aged eighteen to thirty, estimated.
He wasn't particularly judgemental about whether they looked ripe for the plucking, because like ripe fruit, the lushest pickings could be a disappointment. If they appeared neat and tidy, they usually were neat and tidy persons, and that was a rough guide, very rough. Oh, and they tended to all appeared fit and sporty in personality,
He focused on the way they initially looked at him. If the look signalled 'admiration', he'd think hello, and guess that she probably possessed at least a smattering of supressed passion behind that flicker of interest. Mutual passion, as almost every adult knew, was a prerequisite for great sex.
After leaving high school, Brett had obtained a degree in journalism with the intention of becoming a wild life photo-journalist travelling the word on highly-paid assignments. But that didn't eventuate. He found that highly paid assignments went to photo-journalists with an international reputation. That meant he'd need to build a reputation in some other branch of journalism and then make the switch to wildlife coverage.
Another early discovery was jobs for photo-journalists in any branch of journalism were hard to come by. He thought bugger, get on with it mate.
Brett became employed as a reporter on a large newspaper after requesting a job interview just as the newspaper was preparing, according to his 'insider' contacts, to launch a recruitment campaign across several departments.
In those days, reporters were prohibited from using a camera by union demarcation demands, meaning he could be either a reporter or a photographer, but not both. That senseless ruling began disappearing as worker unionism lost much of its power from the 1970s.
Advancing in experience and seniority, Brett then found his niche, first as a crime reporter, and three years later as a newspaper social columnist. He left journalism two years ago to become personal assistant to his father in his large construction company. His father was losing personal vitality due to cancer and lasted only five months after Brett came aboard.
Brett's mother decided to sell the business and it was snapped up by multi-national construction company.
Brett's mother gave him, her only surviving child, most of the large amount of money that she gained from sales plus her late husband's ridiculously expensive limo. She moved into in a retirement village saying she wouldn't require much money to live comfortable for the remainder of her life as she had amassed huge money from the sale of the family's home at Kurraba Point overlooking the harbour and across to downtown Sydney.
Happy to receive such a huge windfall, Brett didn't know what to do with it, and so invested most of it and moved to a vacated penthouse on the top floor of the building he lived in after having it extensively remodelled and updated to suit his tastes. He now also owned the apartment building with ground-level shops along its frontage.
Left with little to do, he felt the need to befriend a woman to enter a 'no fuss' relationship, preferable of short duration or perhaps they might weld together for the longer term. Who knew?
* * *
After leaving the classy Mrs Michaels, Brett had been playing golf, tennis, going fishing and playing more golf for several weeks. He'd cleared his mail box in the foyer as he usually did once a fortnight and found a half a dozen bills plus a note dated five days earlier. The note read:
Hi, I'm from Perth and am temporarily renting the Willis' apartment next to yours while they are touring Southern Africa for the next five months. Knock me up for coffee when you return. Veronica Lees.
Knock her up?
He frowned, thinking it was a bit premature using such wording but it suggested that Veronica was of the younger generation than his mother's and friends that were accused of buggering up the language. Then again, she may have loosely used that expression to say he only had to knock and she would come to the door in much the same way someone might casually say 'look me up sometime'.
There were other possibilities, too.
One that he liked was this Veronica may have had the wicked thought that if he looked acceptable, he just might get lucky. Oh, perhaps it was merely a Western Australia idiom that meant something else altogether that was unfamiliar to Aussies living on the east coast, with Sydney being just over 2000 miles from Perth by direct air travel.
There was no answer to his knock and Brett returned and taped a notice to the door inviting Veronica to dinner at 7.00 that evening, and to dress 'however'. He signed the note, 'Charming Brett' and added a postscript 'Please accept.'
He then made a phone order for his weekly food and other household supplies and paid the premium price for delivery within two hours guaranteed.
The courier arrived with Brett's order and said there was a note taped to the door and Brett retrieved it.
When the four boxes from the courier's trolly were on the kitchen bench. Brett signed the delivery form as shipment received being intact and acceptable condition and signed again in the space for confirmation that it had been a timely delivery. Well, delivery in one hour and seven minutes since he'd placed the order was certainly timely, and impressive for delivery in the traffic-congested central metro area.
He smelt the note from the door and nodded, catching the scent of classy perfume that indicated it was from a female who was bound to be Veronica. He was feeling fairly positive about Veronica, despite sight unseen or as question mark hanging over mutual compatibility. The note read:
Hi, we'll meet at 7.00 this evening at last. I'm just back from spending several days exploring an awesome part of Australia beyond the Blue Mountains and really experienced the sense of part of our country's colonial past and something of the hardship farmers experience in such a semi-arid expanse of pretty flat territory. Mind you, much of Western Australia is like that as well.
I enjoyed wonderful hospitality of the Tablelands I think the area is called, that included catching up with three former school friends, all now married with young children. The kids' mothers were my fellow boarders at secondary level schooling at Perth College. Veronica.
Well, well. That short message that possibly placed Victoria and him on the cusp of something good, even spectacular, had told him a something. It suggested she was well educated, expressed herself well, was capable of deserving enduring warm friendship from school-mates. With all three of her school mates married with children, that suggested Veronica could be aged between, err. 24 to 30. Then again that was just a hopeful guess. She could be 40-plus.
She was likely to be 27, he mused, having calculated her as being halfway between aged 24 and 30. She was likely to consider that was puerile thinking, much like pissing into the wind and the peeing person stupidly hoping that it wouldn't be swept back on to him, um , or rather unlikely her.
"Omigod," he marvelled, aloud. "All that thinking connected to a potential fling involving so far merely two skimpy notes? Great Scott!"
Unpacking the delivered boxes, Brett wondered why he was somehow associating Veronica with urinating into the wind? Christ, he mused, his trouble was he spent too much of his time alone while not yet being enfeebled. He needed to find worthy employment.
Fortunately, at that moment, he dropped a jar of olives and caught it just above his feet that changed his thinking into how fit he was, how fast he could react and how well he could catch. OMG, was he distantly related to Superman?