An off-limits beauty.
A shocking proposal.
A million-to-one shot.
What would you do if your wife caught you leering at your impossibly sexy, devastatingly curvy next-door neighbor and, instead of chastising you, encouraged you to go 'have some fun'?
John Logan has spent the last decade working around the clock to climb the corporate ladder and prove his worth, both to his wife and to himself. No small feat considering she is an heiress to an unimaginable fortune thanks to her captain of industry father. But John's relentless schedule has left him a shell of his former self. So much so that he is stunned when his wife proposes some innocent swapping with their undeniably attractive neighbors. What follows is a journey neither John nor his wife could have ever imagined.
As his relationship with his wife deteriorates, things grow more complicated, and more heated, with his curvy neighbor. John tries to focus on his daughter, but things quickly spiral out of control as the beautiful women in his life make it clear he must make a choice. Only after giving in to the inevitable does he realize that the sultry vixen next door had an ulterior motive in mind all along in the guise of her best friend, an exquisite and mature woman who long ago stopped thinking of her own needs in favor of her now teenaged son.
The Phoenix Accord is contemporary erotic romance about a man forced to reevaluate many of the fundamental principles upon which he bases his life and, in so doing, discovering that true happiness can sometimes only be found after one is first reborn.
Author's note:
All sensuality (on page or otherwise) takes place between characters who are eighteen or older.
Copyright © 2023 Jake Lazarus
All rights reserved.
This book, or any portion thereof, may not be reproduced in any manner without the express written consent of the author (except for the use of brief quotations in a review).
This is a work of fiction.
Names, characters, business, places, events, locales, and incidents are either the products of the author's imagination or used in a fictitious manner.
Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, or actual events is purely coincidental.
Prologue
The most important day of John Logan's life went unnoticed by all those whose lives would be immeasurably altered by the series of seemingly random events which began with a single innocent question.
"Who's that walking around on the Pederson's front yard?" Katherine, John's wife of six years, asked as she sat from where she was sunbathing on the patio.
John glanced over to the property in question, a lavish six-bedroom house which was the jewel of their gated community. It was owned by an older couple whose children had all moved out to begin their own lives before the Logan's had moved to the neighborhood four years prior. They were cordial with the retired couple, but John would not say they were particularly friendly, due in large part to the age gap.
"I'm not sure," he answered at length. "Think I should go check it out?"
"Definitely, and I'd hope they'd do the same for us."
John shrugged and dropped the shovel he had been attached to for the preceding two hours in a not-quite-futile attempt to straighten the paving stones of the walkway from the main house to the combination shed and workshop at the back of their yard. He brushed his hands off as he walked up his driveway to the street (it being an article of faith in the neighborhood that only the worst sort of neighbor would trounce across the painstakingly crafted landscaping rather than using the sidewalk, thank you very much).
Upon reaching his neighbor's driveway, he got a closer look at the couple who were boldly wandering around his neighbor's property. He approached them cautiously, very much aware that he was trespassing as surely as they were.
"Help you folks?" he called out once he was in hailing distance.
Smiles quickly spread across their faces as they turned to him. The man was of indeterminate age thanks to the fact that he was inarguably in spectacular shape, but John guessed somewhere between his own thirty-five and mid-forties. He wore a suit, sans coat and tie, and stood perhaps a dozen centimeters shorter than John's one-hundred-eighty-two. He had piercing blue eyes, dark hair, and the most intense smile John had ever seen. His companion was somewhat taller, perhaps aided by the heels she wore, with long blonde hair. She was wearing a sundress which would have been demur on Katherine's slim frame, but which was almost scandalous on the undeniably curvy body of the interloper.
The man stuck out his hand and boomed, "Thomas Meade."
John shook and said, "John. Do you know the Pederson's?"
"Who?"
"The people in whose yard we're standing."
"Oh," he replied gregariously. "Sure don't. But I'm sure they won't mind us taking a look around."
At this point, Thomas' companion began to stroke his arm in a manner which would have produced a physiological reaction in John, but which only seemed to distract Thomas mildly. He eventually got the hint, although not before John began to consider rather extreme methods of creating a diversion, if only to bleed off some of the situation's awkwardness.
"This is my wife, Hazel," Thomas said belatedly.
John took her offered hand, somehow managing to maintain eye contact despite the canyon of cleavage she put on display as she leaned forward to greet him. He was momentarily struck dumb, shaking Hazel's hand repeatedly as the overworked engineering team in his brain tried everything, up to and including ejecting the warp core, to get his higher thought processes back online.
His trance was broken by Katherine's warm contralto voice calling out, "Everything ok, sweetie?"
John looked around guiltily to spy Katherine strutting up the driveway, the filmy wrap she had slipped on over her tantalizingly cut bikini doing little to hide her spectacular body. She reached John's side and slipped an arm through the crook of his elbow, pressing one of her shapely breasts against his tricep.
"This is...uh...Thomas and Hazel."
"Are they friends of the Pedersons?"
"I...um...don't think so."
Just as Katherine whirled on the newcomers, a spark of challenge in her eyes, Thomas took a long step to bridge the gap between them and scooped up her hand. He lifted it reverently to his lips and said, "It is a
pleasure
to meet you." He glanced at John and added, "Both of you. Isn't it honey?"
Hazel smiled dazzlingly at John and said, "Definitely."
"What...are you doing here?" Katherine stammered, clearly rattled by the fact that Thomas had yet to release her hand.
"House shopping," Thomas replied.
"I wasn't aware the Pederson's had put the house on the market," John interjected with a twinge of confusion.
"They didn't. But Hazel and I were driving around looking for her wedding present and she was just drawn to this place."
"It's so beautiful here," she added in a demure alto. She glanced over at the Logan homestead and said, "Your house is lovely as well, but I've always been attracted to the idea of a stone façade."
"Don't forget the pool," Thomas added.
"We're putting one in next spring," Katherine said quickly (and to John's great surprise, considering that that particular item was something he considered to be very much still on the 'under review' ledger). She then took a deep breath and continued, "But what makes you think the Pedersons will sell? They've been here since the neighborhood was built."
"Oh, don't you worry," Thomas said confidently. "I'm sure I can find a way to convince them to part with it."
One
The inky blackness of the moonless night, combined with the preternatural silence of the cove, seemed alien to John Logan's sleep-deprived senses. He sat quietly on an empty patio, just letting the stillness of his surroundings permeate his soul. A glance toward the heavens revealed the familiar swan shape of Cygnus, high in the sky and standing out easily now that the moon had set.
His reverie was broken by the sound of a notification coming from his laptop. He sighed and returned to the seat he had occupied since just after ten the previous evening when he had spoken the words which had been the bane of IT senior leadership since the invention of the microchip: 'I'm just going to hop online real quick and check in on the release'.
The brief check-in had turned into an all-night marathon of compounding errors, first attempting to save the release, and then trying to undo it. The message he had just received was from one of his architects informing him that everything had finally, hopefully, been put back the way it was before the whole doomed exercise had begun eight hours earlier.
John spent the next hour writing up instructions for his subordinates, who had not responded to repeated texts from their direct reports asking them to contribute. By the time he was finished, the cove outside his ad-hoc office was starting to come alive in time with the sunrise. He looked around, remarking inwardly on how truly awe inspiring Marigot Bay was up close.
He had arrived in St Lucia with his wife and daughter two days previously for what was supposed to be a week of reconnecting with the family. He had even managed to attend the sailing expedition the previous day, but he knew there was no possibility he could join them on the glass bottomed boat tour of a nearby reef later that morning. The amount of coffee he had consumed overnight made his stomach feel like a tire fire which had just been extinguished with week-old light beer, and he could already feel the drain his team's failure would place on his mood for the foreseeable future.
He decided to combat the frustrating mixture of fatigue and jitteriness coursing through his body by ordering breakfast in bed for his family. He did this in stages, first ordering waffles for his daughter and then placing another order for his wife once the first was delivered.
Entering his daughter's room, he spared a moment to cherish the look of innocence on the slumbering six-year-old's face. Seeming to sense his presence, she opened her eyes slowly but came fully awake with a speed only possible in children, or those who had suddenly been tossed into frigid waters, once she spotted what John held in his hands.
"Good morning, lovely Lena," he whispered happily.
"G' mornin' Daddy," she murmured. "Are those waffles?"
"They are!" he confirmed with a huge grin.
