Annette Goes Undercover

He said we shouldn't work for the same company -- Graham, that's my husband -- to which he added, and this did NOT go down well with me, that I'd be rubbish as an undercover investigator in any case. Bloody cheek! But Mr Balfour, Graham's boss -- Balfour's Investigation Agency, 'Nothing too big for our close-knit team of highly trained professionals' -- said there was nothing to it. That I could learn all I needed to learn in an afternoon. It was only 'surveillance' after all. Whatever 'surveillance' was! He offered to give me a try. I was still smarting from Graham's crack that I would be crap at the job, so jumped at the chance. And now here I was, ten days later, on undercover 'surveillance', which I have since learned is just a fancy name for watching a bloke. Not just 'on surveillance' but doing so damn well that here and now, on my first assignment, I'd manage to talk myself into the target's hotel room!

Fast learner, or what?

"Get as close as you can to the target," Mr Balfour had briefed me, as Graham sat in the background and smirked, as if I didn't stand a chance. "Watch what he does, who he sees, any details you gather is a bonus. Give us a clue to who he's working with, and I'll give you a bonus."

"How much?" Graham had snapped, quick as a flash.

"Fifty quid," came the immediate response.

Graham had smirked some more at that. "Fat chance," he sneered dismissively.

But here I was, in the target's hotel room. Just about as close as I could get! The only drawback, the only 'fly in the ointment' as it were, was that while we were coming up in the elevator I had a sudden sense, as his eyes did a leisurely tour of my more feminine parts, that the reason he was inviting me up to his hotel bedroom was because he thought I was something I wasn't. I was beginning to think he might actually imagine I was 'on the game', as I think they put it, and this had me just a tad concerned, as you can imagine.

What if he wanted ... you know. THAT? What would I tell him then? "Sorry, Mr Zitsky, I'm not really a hooker. I'm actually a 'surveillance operative' for Balfour's Investigation Agency. What I'm doing right now is working on assignment for Fillspool Mills, the local company you are trying to buy out, digging for dirt on you, and/or the company you head, so that the widely spread family shareholders of The Mills will reject your offer of a buy-out."

I couldn't see such a response having a very good outcome!

"So what'll it be," said Zitsky, the target, late thirties, big, impressive looking guy over by the minibar. "Gin, Whisky, Vodka?"

"Aaah ..." What was the right thing to do here? "Vodka would be nice," I found myself saying, before I had worked out the right thing to do.

"With tonic, okay?" he asked.

He was very polite. Perhaps I was wrong about the guy. Perhaps he didn't think I was a hooker at all. Just a pleasant person he had met in the lobby.

"That would be lovely," I replied, referring I think to the tonic idea.

I had been sitting in the lobby lounge for the simple reason that HE was sitting in the lobby lounge. I was to watch him, Mr Balfour had explained, in order to see whom he might meet. But then he caught me -- Zitsky did -- watching him. At least I suppose he had. Why else would he have smiled? When I smiled back -- what else could I do, after all -- he picked up his coffee and came over to join me at my table. I could hardly tell him to go away. I was meant to watch him, after all. Surely, I reasoned to myself, thinking quickly, it would be easier for me to watch him with him sitting here, with me, at my table, than with him sitting half way across the lobby? That's how I figured it, at any rate.

After some verbal to-ing and fro-ing -- me trying unsuccessfully to think up clever things to ask that would let me know what he was doing, and who he was planning to meet, while he gave my legs a thorough going over with his eyes, (my skirt was very short, another of Balfour's ideas: 'Look sexy, and no-one will think you're undercover,' he'd assured me). After a bit more idle chat Zitsky asked me if I would like to join him in his room. He said it would be quieter than the lobby. And in fairness to him, there was a lot of noise in the lobby. From road works just outside. So -- and as I say, this was surveillance and he was the target -- I had responded, "Fine, why not!" So here we were. Up in his room.

I was dressed in a pale lemon suit. Chosen because the skirt was short and made me look sexy, because my legs are long and agreeably shaped -- or so men tend to tell me. The jacket is a short box jacket with a neckline that plunges, just a tad. I was wearing heels, three inch, silver, with ankle straps. And charcoal self-supporting stockings. My hair was up. My earrings were dangly silver things that Graham had bought me in Faro, in Portugal, last year. He presented them to me for my twenty-first birthday, at a place called Chicken Louie's, out of town.

When I turned up for duty earlier today, at Balfour's Investigation Agency just after lunch, dressed as I've described -- it was my first assignment and I was nervous -- Mr Balfour said I looked, 'Mouth-wateringly gorgeous. Chic as all heck!' Whatever that meant. Mr Balfour is apt to exaggerate. Then he added that I was, 'Absolutely ideal for the part,' which did my shaky self-confidence no end of good. Then he went on to brief me on Zitsky, the target, and what I had to do.

So here I was now, doing it.

"Thank you," I took the drink from Zitsky.

Zitski was broad and big but his face was round and boyish. Except for his eyes, that is. His eyes were a little bit disconcerting. The sort of eyes you felt missed very little. The sort of eyes you perhaps didn't want wandering your legs and revealing neckline as his had started to do, as soon as he sat me on the sofa, by the window, facing the bed.

"So," he said, sitting down next to me, eyes still at work on the bits of me that showed. "Tell me about Felsham."

That's where we were. Felsham. The Felsham Arms hotel, Room 507, to be precise. It was one of their better rooms, top floor. It is not a huge hotel. Felsham is not a huge town.

"Well ..." I started, not sure where to start. Then, finding my tongue and a kernel of inventiveness, I launched into a rather nervous spiel, about Felsham, the town. The town in which Fillspool Mills was based. It's history, the sights, what it was known for, and, of course, 'The Mills' themselves -- as they are known locally. (Fillspool Mills are the biggest employer for miles around.)

As I was telling him this his eyes continued to roam up and down my legs as if he found them more interesting that what I was saying. My skirt was ludicrously short, as I've said, and the sofa was one of these low ones, so a lot of my legs was showing. I tried crossing them, one over the other, thinking perhaps that might help, though how I thought it would I've no idea. In fact it made it worse. Of the leg I'd crossed I was now flaunting even more by having crossed it. Exposing the band of flowers around the top of my stocking. But having crossed it, I could hardly immediately uncross it. Could I? It might make him suspicious. Or worse. And I didn't want that. Not on surveillance. It would sort of defeat the object of the exercise.

"So you work in the hotel?" he said, cutting across my mounting embarrassment, regarding legs, and apparently boring travelogue, regarding Felsham.

"Not ..." how could I put this, "... actually ... IN ... the hotel," I explained/stammered.

"I meant, you use the hotel as a base?" he said, eyes on the plunge of my neckline and the bulge of my breasts that I knew were within. I am pretty well 'stacked', I am told, as I think the expression goes, but being relatively inexperienced in such matters -- other than with Graham, and even that, not hugely, (we went to the local school together, kind of taught each other, so to speak,) I have not had a lot to compare with. "The lobby, I meant," he amended, perhaps because I hadn't gone on to explain what I meant, whatever that was. "Where you work from, is it?" he pressed.

How could I put this? I could see what he was starting to think. I could also see he was starting to become just a tad impatient with me. Either that or he was starting to think I was dense. So I said, "You could say that, yes."

Graham says I tend to think too much before I speak. It makes people impatient, he says. I made a mental note to try to avoid making my target 'impatient'.

"I haven't seen you there before," he said, looking at me, , in a manner that I was starting to suspect, was just a little ... suspect.

"I've been away," I said quickly, the cold snout of panic probing icily into my chest. I didn't want to blow my first assignment but nor did I want to be thought of as something I was not. Not that I really knew what a hooker was. Well, of course I knew what a hooker WAS ... but not what it was 'like', if you see what I mean. In terms of how a hooker might behave, I mean. Like in a situation such as this. What did they do? Say? Demand? Expect? I really had no idea. I doubt if I had ever knowingly seen a hooker in the flesh. Ever! Which gives you some idea of what Felsham is like. We're a very provincial town. I don't think the church choir, with whom I spend a lot of time -- especially with Christmas on the way -- has many hookers actively as members. The hours would clash, I think. Rehearsals being in the evenings.

"Where have you been?" he asked, putting his hand on my knee.

"On ... holiday," I said. Both of us watching his hand.

"Really?" he said, starting to stroke me.

"Yes." I was starting to sound as I was starting to feel. Concerned, and a little embarrassed.

"Where did you go," he asked, trailing his fingertips up my leg in the direction of my lemon yellow skirt.

"Blackpool," I said, not thinking, keeping my hands out the way, keeping my eyes on his hand, on my leg, wondering if I should be uncrossing them, or something. What was the form? What would a hooker do?

"Did you have a good time in Blackpool," he asked.

His fingertips had reached the hem of my skirt, moved leisurely in towards the middle where my legs met, and were now toying casually with the line of contact.

"Did I ..." (What?) I had forgotten the question.

"Enjoy Blackpool," he provided, as if sensing I had. (Forgotten the question.) Our eyes were fixed on his fingertips. They were trailing up and down the line of contact of two charcoal stockinged legs. Down towards the knee, still neatly crossed. Back up towards the high lemon hem of my short yellow skirt.

"Ah ... Um .... Yes," I said, mesmerised by his hand as it came against the hem of my skirt, and kept on going.

"Never visited Blackpool myself," he said absently, clearly more interested in my legs and the stocking's bands of flowers that were coming into view than my mythical visit to Blackpool.

"It's ... um," I said vaguely, "... nice," I finished, aimlessly, trying not to clench my fists, (held well out the way,) as I watched the slowly rising hem of yellow skirt bare more of the flowers round the top of my stockings, then a band of creamy skin.

"How much do you charge?" came next, as his fingers ran over the skin at the top of my stockings.

"Five hundred," I said, for some obscure reason uncrossing my legs, plucking the figure from somewhere. I had no idea what the going rate was. I was not even sure what rate we were talking about! But I had, by now, pretty much accepted that the reason I was in his room was not because I was a hot-shot surveillance genius. It was because he wanted into my pants. Five hundred, (of course,) would scare him off!

"Dollars, or Pounds?" he asked calmly, knocking my theory for six, cupping my pudenda and giving it a squeeze.

"Pounds," I stammered nervously as my pelvis kicked back from his touch and my hands almost grabbed his wrist. I was flabbergasted that so much money could possibly be considered appropriate for ... for what? ... for something as routine as sex? Graham and I have been married nine months. We still do it four times a week. Sometimes five, if the Rovers are playing away. Graham is gate-keeper for Felsham Rovers football team. Beer after the match doesn't help his performance in bed, so we don't even try if the Rovers are playing at home that week-end.

Zitsky leaned back and whistled through his teeth. "Wow!" he said, continuing to feel what I had within the crotch of my flimsy red thong -- pillar box red, like the equally flimsy bra I wore -- yet more of my 'sexy' attire.

All that I haven't described to you is the hair-fine chain around my waist ... there! now you know what I wore as intimately as Zitsky was trying to find out.

"Pretty high class prices!" Zitsky remarked.

"Pretty high class merchandise," I shot back at him, nervous as hell but hiding it well behind this show of high bravado.

He shrugged, then smiled. And then, to my well-concealed relief, removed his hand from between my legs and leaned away from me.

"Okay, let's have a look at the merchandise," he said, easing himself into the corner of the sofa. "If it's that high class it must be worth it. Up you get."

What did he mean, 'Up I get?' Then it clicked. He figured I was a hooker, and was actually willing to pay my absurd price, if I looked okay. He wanted to see if I did. View the merchandise prior to sale, sort of thing. But was it as simple as that?

And what if he thought I WAS worth it!

Before I had figured out where this was going, or even what I was doing, I found a look of casual confidence, (or something,) from somewhere, pasted it onto my face, and was rising from the sofa in a manner I felt a fine courtesan might -- if a fine courtesan ever found herself in this particular room, of this particular hotel, in like circumstances. But once I was up on my three inch heels, with their neat ankle straps, and the high cut back, legs nicely sculpted by the effort, hem prettily high on legs I knew were good to look at, I started to question what might come next.

My problem was this, I thought to myself as my hands went to the buttons of my jacket and started to undo them from the top: I had actually never removed my clothes in front of a man before, desiring that he'll dislike what he sees when he sees it. It is usually the other way around. But in this case, that's what I was doing. For if he liked what he saw ... what came next?

What do you think?

Exactly!

See the problem?

I should add, of course, lest you get the wrong idea about me -- having loosed one button and now moving on to the second -- I have rarely removed my clothes in front of men, period. Let's say three times in my life. Maybe four. Three different men, I mean. Or maybe four. (One I am not sure I should include.) Yet here I was -- three buttons open, a fourth large lemon-coloured disk disappearing into it's button hole and out the other side, I was part way towards taking my clothes off in front of a person whom, until this afternoon, I had never set eyes on before.

My fingers were around the penultimate button of my jacket. His eyes were on my fingers and what they were doing. As I watched, they flickered lower, to my legs, then quickly higher, to the gap that was appearing at my chest, then back to the fingers themselves. The tip of his tongue came out and moistened his lips. His eyes were so focussed on me, it was almost weird. His shoulders were broad. He was bigger than Graham. Quite a bit bigger. And stronger too you had to think, the way he filled his shirt. I opened the last button of my jacket. His eyes lifted up and met mine. The disconcerting acuity within their depth had gone. But something else ... a hunger of a sort ... A want? A need? ... (was I staring at lust?) ... was there instead.

Did I do that?

Compelled, against my better judgement, by the change that the simple act of opening the buttons of my jacket had wrought in this man -- quite an important man, you had to think, otherwise I wouldn't be watching him like this, (or rather, he wouldn't be watching me like this!) -- I started to draw the jacket open. I wanted to see what it would do to these changeable eyes of his ... this older, bigger man than Graham. What would the sight of more of me do? To him. An important out-of-towner like this.

He was different from people in town, you see, a big city businessman like this. Quite a rich one too, obviously. Obviously, from the fact that he could afford this, one of the better rooms, in this, the best hotel in town. Obviously too, from the fact that he, or his company -- and I understood from Mr Balfour that it WAS his company -- could afford to buy 'The Mills'. This wasn't the sort of man we were used to in Felsham. So how might my showing him my bra, affect him?

Well I'll be blowed! His jaw dropped an inch and his mouth fell open!

I couldn't resist the smile. Perhaps he was teasing me? But then ... he didn't seem to be teasing. And no matter what I did with my eyes to encourage his back to my face, they stayed where they were. Locked on my flimsy red bra -- low cut -- and the parts of me they strove to contain. The smile drifted slowly from my face. My face had lost its allure, it seemed. Swamped perhaps by the attraction of breasts -- my breasts. Even partially covered, my breast appeared to have more attraction than a face most in town regarded as pretty okay.

Breasts were more private, I supposed ... wondering what came next.

"You are fucking gorgeous," he whispered, almost to himself, eyes glued to my breasts and the pillar box red of my bra.

Did they exaggerate in the city, I wondered, watching him. The way he sat forward in his seat. The rapt concentration on his face. The licking of lips. The size that his eyes had become. And to think I had thought they were a little bit scary! They were more like the eyes of a puppy, being offered a bone. A juicy one. To a starving dog.

If I am being honest with myself I am not that unusual. My curves, I concede, are sometimes remarked on -- 'mouth-watering' in the words of an old boyfriend; number two of the three I mentioned, but when HE said it, he had thought he was in love with me so his judgement hardly counts. And yes, I will also concede I have well-shaped boobs -- 'luscious' was my first boyfriend's adjective; but he too was biased, besotted as he was with me then. There are lots of girls out there who look as good as I do. Many much better. In the city there must be hundreds. Look at the magazines, they're all in there!

With his eyes still locked on my boobs, and bra, Zitsky's right hand rose in the air and his fingers circled, urgently. 'Get on with it,' they said. 'Get it off,' they implied.

It was like performing to an audience. Of one. Do well and they applaud. Do badly and they'll Boo. I shrugged the jacket off my shoulders, let it slide down my arms, caught it in my right hand, tossed it on the bed that was behind me, next to his. My hands went to the back of my skirt seeking the catch and zip, finding both, opening the first, running down the second.

Perhaps there is an entertainer in all of us, deep down. A part of us seeking approval. For when my skirt was open and ready to drop -- well, almost ready: it was firmly round my hips but my waist is small so the waistband is too, even opened, it needed a push to start it off -- I found myself posing, almost, bringing my knees together, easing the skirt off my hips with the flat of my hands, fingers aimed down at the floor. I felt it fall, caught it with an ankle, stepped out with the other, lifted the foot with it's lemon yellow prey to my hand, lifted it off, folded it once, dropped it behind me with the jacket on the bed. My eyes never left him as I did this. His applause was the expression of wonder-stuck awe on his face, or so it appeared at the time -- a mild form of stage-fright of my own, I have no doubt, turning his look into awe in my mind. But regardless of what I imagined, and what I did not, I had certainly got his attention!