In Chapter one our heroine, Kate, a successful businesswoman turning 60, has asked herself a troubling question. Is she a slut? Thus began a series of chapters in which she describes to her husband Henry (her fourth husband) her life beginning with her late teen years and her sexual activities at each stage. The portion in italics in each story is her recollection of some memorable sexual experience from her past. In this chapter Kate tells Henry of a night of debauchery she enjoyed with her third husband and his licentious friends at a very private club in Paris.
Henry and I awoke to a cold, gray Carmel dawn. Overnight the fog had rolled in off the Pacific. We were lying in bed comfortably warmed by each other and a lovely down comforter, when our bliss was interrupted by a soft knock at the cottage door.
"Oh, I'll bet it's Claude with breakfast," I said, as I stood and walked across the room to answer the door.
"My dear," Henry said, as I reached for the doorknob, "Aren't you forgetting something?"
"What?"
"You're naked."
"It's only Claude. He's seen me naked lots of times before."
"Oh, yes, of course," Henry responded in a dry tone implying that he still didn't totally approve.
I turned and looked back at Henry, my hand still on the knob. "Since when did you become such a Puritan?"
"Oh, never mind. You're right, of course. Just let him in. I'm starving."
He still sounded a little put off, but I put it down to early morning low blood sugar. I had been with Henry enough to learn the beast in him had to be fed first thing each morning or he wasn't worth a damn.
As I expected, it was Claude on the other side of the door, bearing a tray with just squeezed orange juice, freshly baked croissants from my favorite local bakery, unsalted butter, jelly, and a steaming pot of coffee. He brought the tray in and set it on a table.
"My my! Don't you look lovely today," he said with a devilish gleam in his eye as he took his time enjoying my naked form.
"Well, stay and join us for breakfast," I offered.
"There is nothing I would rather do," he said with his charming French accent, "But duty calls. I have another fifteen or twenty hungry guests to feed back in the main house. Try not to get too many croissant crumbs in the bed clothes." With that he departed, fondling my ass and brushing my tit with his shoulder as he stepped past me to the door.
"I was right. He is a lecherous bastard," Henry said as he poured coffee for us. "I think I like him."
"Well it's good that you
like him
because you are just
like him.
"
Henry groaned at my play on words.
I laughed. "Okay, I admit, that was pretty bad, especially for an English major. But what I meant is that you both have the most deliciously dirty minds."
"I knew what you meant, and Claude and I both should appreciate the compliment. No one can recognize a dirty mind like a publisher of erotica."
"Brrrrrr. It's chilly in here," he continued as he pulled a robe around himself.
I likewise pulled on a robe and we sat, silent for a few minutes, enjoying our coffee and croissants.
Finally Henry spoke up, totally changing the subject. "So, are you going to tell me more about your wild weekend in Paris with Yves?"
"Ummmm, I said, as I downed a sip of coffee. "Well, as I told you, thanks to Jim Worthington's reprehensible conduct, it turned out to be quite a bit more than a weekend. More like ten days before I flew back to San Francisco, again on Yves' G-5."
"So you flew off to Paris for a weekend with the Frenchman who picked you up in the bar in New York, stayed for ten days because Jim Worthington had pissed you off by selling the company, and then married the Frenchman after ten days of frenetic screwing? Does that about cover it?"
"Hardly," I said.
"What did I leave out, besides all of the juicy details about the sex, which, of course, I do want to hear?"
"First, I didn't marry him on the first trip to France. That came about six months later. It turned out that marrying a French millionaire who is in a war with his family is a complicated process.
"Furthermore, I didn't stay for ten days because I was pissed off at Jim Worthington. I got over that about twenty-four hours after I sent him the 'fuck you' cable. After all, it was his company, mostly, and as it turned out he sold pretty much at the peak of the market for traditional publishing companies. If we had hung around much longer, Jeff Bezos and his damnable Kindle would have eaten our lunch."
"So why did you stay? Was the sex with Yves that good?"
"Oh god, yes. Well, that was part of it. He was really good in bed. Great staying power and wildly creative. But the main reason I stayed and eventually fell in love and married him was that he was just so much fun. Dragging me off to Mass in the oldest church in Paris after barely finishing a morning fuck, the impromptu picnic in Luxembourg Gardens, a trip to Burgundy to visit one of his wineries, shopping in some of Paris' loveliest little boutique clothing stores, dinners in grand restaurants, and obscure little bistros, romantic walks along the Seine in the rain, wild rides in his Ferrari through the winding mountain roads of Provence. It went on and on."
"I see. Pretty hard to match." He sounded a little sullen.
"Now, now," I said. "Let's not be petulant. Remember that you're here with me, and he's gone, smashed up along with his Ferrari on that mountainside north of Nice."
"Yes . . . Yes, that's right. I am indeed here and considering myself damn lucky to be here with you. I've had my dust-ups with sports cars, too. It's just that they were before I knew you, and I was lucky and walked away. Ruined a couple of damned nice cars though.
"But enough of that," he continued. "How did you mend things up with Worthington after your, 'Fuck you. Strong letter to follow.' cable?"
"That really wasn't too hard. He and his new friends from Chicago needed me to wind down the San Francisco office. When I got back to San Francisco they were all there, more or less on bended knee, with a proposal they hoped would keep me around. But that really was the end of my personal relationship with Jim and Sandy. After that it was just pure business. Well, not totally with Sandy, but that's another story."
"Aha. A bribe. Money always talks, doesn't it my dear?"
"Well, it does with me. Actually though, after a bit of negotiation, I got more out of the deal than just the bag of cash they were offering me."
"Oh?" Henry said, raising an eyebrow. "What else did you extort out of them?"
"There was this one little publishing line I had been nurturing out of the San Francisco office that the boys from Chicago didn't want to keep. I had to admit it wasn't doing very well, but I tried to convince them they should keep it instead of just closing it down. I was sure it was going to break even any day now, but those blue-nosed bastards objected on moral grounds as near as I could tell. Anyhow, I agreed to take that piece of the business off their hands at a very attractive price."
"That's a very self-satisfied smile you are wearing Kate. Kind of a—how do you Yanks say—a 'cat that ate the canary' smile."
"Well, it was the erotic publishing business, and . . ." I broke out laughing. "I got them to pay me $100,000 to take it. They were sure it would cost them more than that to shut it down."
"And that, I take it, was the source of Dark Secrets Publishing?" he asked, naming my publishing business.
I laughed some more. "Yes, and it has made money from day one. It really took off once I convinced Amazon to market the electronic copies for me. I still think Bezos takes too big a slice, but there isn't a really good alternative to him, and it sure makes money, even with Amazon's unconscionable skim. Electronic publishing is especially important to erotica because a lot of people will buy it over the net, but they won't walk into a book store and pay a clerk behind the counter for it."
"But what about your relationship with Yves? How did that work while you were busy wheeling and dealing in San Francisco?"
"For the next six months, Yves was even busier than I was. He and I both did next to nothing during the ten days I spent with him in France aside from sex and touring all his favorite places in Paris and a few parts of France that he loved. But by the time I went back to San Francisco, he had decided that fucking me silly and squiring me around his favorite parts of Paris and France was a lot more fun than running Montagne Industries and fighting with all his relatives and other minority shareholders, so he went back to his lawyers and bankers and told them to sell the company as a whole for the best price they could get and to negotiate a split of the proceeds with the various minority holders as compensation for their interests.
"That let him deliver the company as a whole to the buyer, without the pesky minority interests his father had created. He told me that the increase in price he got by cleaning up the ownership structure more than paid for the cost of doing so. There were a couple of small pieces he kept for himself, like the plane and the winery and vineyards in Burgundy. It took him six months, but when it was done, he had $800 million in after-tax cash and no need to deal with pesky minority shareholders, customers, employees, and all those other troubling people who focus on you when you own and run a large business."
"And the two of you got married on top of all of that?"
"Yeah. It was crazy. It took six months to wind down the San Francisco office for Jim's buyers and it took Yves at least that long to complete his sale of Montagne Industries. About every other week, I would fly to New York, usually on the tail-end of a trip to Chicago to meet with my new masters. He would wind up his G-5 and fly over from Paris. Sometimes we stayed in New York, but lots of times we took the plane and went other places. We visited resorts all up and down the East Coast and in the Caribbean. Half the time we never got out of the hotel rooms we rented. We would spend time venting about our respective problems and then fall into bed and fuck our brains out. The sex wasn't always in the hotel rooms. We screwed on the 12
th
hole of some famous golf course in South Carolina once. It would have been better if the sprinklers hadn't come on," I said with a laugh. "Another time we spent a whole weekend naked on a yacht in the British Virgin Islands. After one of our weekends, we both felt like we could go back to work the following week. Didn't want to, but at least we felt we could face it."
"It all sounds very glamorous. Kind of like one of the stories the romance section of your publishing company puts out."
