Note: This is an original work of fiction. All of the characters are purely figments of my own imagination and any resemblance or similarity to any other persons, real or fictional, is entirely coincidental.
Note 2: This work contains graphic depictions of sexual acts between consenting women who, although entirely fictional, are over the age of 18.
Note 3: I intend for this to be a series of short stories with a light-hearted theme derived from the classic book, "A thousand and One Arabian Nights," in which a woman who faces a death sentence in the morning distracts her captor with a story that never ends and keeps him coming back for the conclusion, night after night, forever delaying her execution. Here, our heroine, Kelly, faces eviction from her home unless she can find a way to keep her landlady distracted.
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Catherine D'Boudec strode confidently up the little flagstone walkway to the little cottage that sat on the north edge of the estate. Before knocking, she straightened her blouse and tucked an errant wisp of hair behind her ear. "Ce soir! Je muste..." she said silently to herself. "This night I must tell this American girl that, if the rent isn't paid immediately, I am putting her out!"
Catherine was the grand-daughter of a wealthy industrialist and came from an aristocratic family that had roots in this part of Bretagne going back hundreds of years. The estate, a grand 18th century chateau and grounds perched high on a steep hilltop commanding views across the inlet to St. Malo in one direction and the pretty village of Dinard in the other, had been in her family since it was built. She had inherited it, along with a meaningless title that no one in France had cared about for more than 100 years, when her late father had passed away suddenly while covering the war in Syria for the French newspaper, Le Monde. Catherine had read law at Cambridge and was living in London when she got the news.
Being an only child, Catherine had dropped her cosmopolitan life out of a sense of obligation, and returned to a France she had not lived in since she was a child to run the family estate. The difference between the phrenetic and whirlwind world of London and this quiet little backwater tourist town could not have been more stark. What's more, although the family's fortunes were secure enough, managed as they were by bankers and accountants, running an historic estate was proving to be challenging. On the one hand, the economic crisis had left many in France openly hostile to the "old money" families, with many populist politicians calling for a redistribution of the nation's wealth and lands away from the hands of the privileged and into the public trust.
On the other hand, the crashing economy had severely impacted the tourism industry all over Europe, but especially in quiet, out of the way, seaside villages like Dinard. For many years, the estate had been run as a successful Chambre d'hote, or bed and breakfast, but that business was drying up. As a stop-gap to stem the money losses, Catherine had decided to rent out the little cottage across the garden from the main house on a long-term basis.
Her tenant was an American student who was supposedly attending a graduate program in Belfast, but was staying in Bretagne while researching a paper on local naval history or some such thing. The student was a beautiful and charming young woman who radiated health and energy and life. She had curly dark-brown hair and large doe-like eyes and a smile that seemed to shoot beams at whomever it was directed toward. She was fit, too, like an athlete, and she moved with a certain grace; not like a dancer, but more like a large, predatory cat. Catherine, with all of her pampered breeding, her Cambridge education, her doctorate in law, her big-city life, her family title and her gentrified estate simply wilted in the presence of this curious yankee girl.
Catherine had experimented in London, where being openly bisexual was all the rage in the trendy artistic circles she had moved in. But here in this small, heavily catholic town, she'd had to curb her wild social persona considerably. That she was in her mid-thirties and unmarried with no obvious male suitors earned her more than a few sideways glances during Sunday services from some of the older village women. She was careful, therefore, to look after her reputation in town and not to stir the pot. Business was hard enough as it was. When the American girl arrived, it awakened a hunger in Catherine that she had been denying for nearly three years. It was a treat too tempting to pass up.
The American girl, Kelly, had spotted easy prey and it was only a few weeks before she seduced the heiress, and only a few months before she had the heiress so wrapped around her finger that the payment of rent had been all but forgotten.
But Catherine was through being played with. She was going to march in there and tell this presumptuous little tart that it was time to pay up or get out. Catherine knocked sternly at the door. She was dressed in a crisp white blouse and blue pinstripe pants and her hair and makeup were both severe- she was the picture of cold, no-nonsense business. Kelly, however, was not. She opened the door wearing nothing but a housecoat tied loosely at the waist. It was opened almost to her navel and her pert breasts were nearly fully exposed. Catherine's resolve wrinkled... just a little.
"Kelly, we must talk."
