Carole Banning stared out the window of the Lear Jet at the banks of clouds below. She wrung her hands nervously and felt a gnawing in her guts. She had always hated to fly. This trip was only her fourth time to ride in a plane, her first in a private jet, and she was nervous to begin with. Add the fact that she was flying to New York, and she that was that much more afraid.
She had watched, along with everyone else, on that awful morning over a year and a half previously as the disasters in New York and Washington had unfolded, and all she could see in her mindās eye at that moment were jetliners smashing into tall buildings. Carole forced the images out of her mind, and fortunately, right then her attention was distracted by the steward, who was offering her some wine. She asked for a white zinfandel, and the steward produced a bottle, opened it, poured her a glass then left the bottle in a bucket of ice. As she took a big swallow of the tart liquid, Carole was grateful for the soothing effect of the liquor on her nervous stomach and jittery disposition.
It was a Thursday morning in late April, the culmination of a whirlwind 24 hours that had begun the previous morning, when she received an urgent message from Mary Jones to come see her bosses, the Bourne Brothers, in their big office immediately. Carole had worked for Bourne and Bourne since September of the previous year, and Mary was the Bourne Brothersā personal secretary. The company was a major stock brokerage firm headquartered in a mid-sized Southern city. Twin brothers Peter Bourne and Paul Bourne had been hugely successful on Wall Street in the early 1980s and had formed their own company around 1985, which had been equally successful.
But the company harbored a dark secret, as Carole had found out in February, about nine weeks ago. She had been called into the Bournesā office and accused of embezzling $150,000 from a major client of the firm. As an accountant, she had handled the account, and now the money was gone. She had vehemently denied the charge, but they claimed to have extensive evidence of her wrongdoing, and threatened to send her to jail and prosecute her if she didnāt have sex with them right then and there.
Naturally, she had balked, but when Ralph, the security chief, had slapped handcuffs on her and hauled her toward the door, she had consented, reluctantly. The Bournes then had fucked her like sheād never been fucked before, and once they got her going, she had responded like a wild woman. When they had finished, they had made her a devilās bargain. They would pay back the $150,000 to the client out of their own pocket, but in return she had to agree to take on a new job with new responsibilities for an indefinite period of time.
The position was euphemistically called the liaison officer, but in reality she was to serve as the company sex toy, their whore. She would be expected to service men and women in the companyās upper management as part of a rewards and incentive system, and top clients with whom the firm wanted to curry favor. Again, she had balked, but when she was shown newspaper clippings about a woman who had refused to take the offer, she had seen that there was no way out. The woman had been successfully prosecuted and sent to prison for a 6 to10 year term. Carole felt she couldnāt risk that, so with a heavy heart, she had agreed to take the position, even though it meant jeopardizing her marriage of nearly 22 years.
Of course, it was all a scam, the āevidenceā an elaborate fabrication. The Bourne Brothers had set up the liaison officerās position as a reaction to their loathing of women in general, and specifically a blind hatred of their fatherās widow, his sixth wife, who had conned them out of ownership of a successful plantation that had been in their family for eight generations. It also showed their contempt for the institution of marriage, which they believed had given this woman, and all of their fatherās other wives, the means to rip them off.
So as a measure of revenge, they had made sure they created a whoreās position for a married woman of their stepmotherās age. They filled it with women who looked similar to their nemesis: average size, nicely built, straight shoulder-length dark hair and pretty. Carole was the 14th woman to fill the position in the 18 years the company had existed. The Bournes had become very adept at finding vulnerable women like Carole, and had become experts at creating forged documents that gave the appearance of wrongdoing. They had been good enough at it to convince a prosecutor to press the case and good enough to convince a jury to convict Karla Jackson back in 1998.
Carole hated the idea of cheating so flagrantly on Mark, her husband, but she felt she had no choice. And once she decided to get into it, she had gotten into it in a big way. Carole had reasoned that if she was good, if she put everything she had into the job, the Bournes might keep her term of service short. So she had thrown herself into the job with gusto, and, she had to admit, she had been getting more good sex than she had had in her entire life. She was sort of reliving her youth, her wild late high school and early college days, when she had led a very active sex life. That had changed the second semester of her junior year in college, when she had met Mark. Until that fateful day that past February, she had never had another man after sheād met and married him. But by now, she had lost count of how many different men and women had used her body in the nine weeks sheād been doing this.
By the time she finished her second glass of wine, she was feeling a warm glow in her insides, and she could feel herself begin to get hot in anticipation of what would happen when they touched down in New York. The Bournes had told her brusquely that she was to take the day, and go with Mary to buy some nice, sexy clothes, that she was to accompany them to New York for a shareholderās meeting. They would leave bright and early in the morning and would return Sunday evening.
At first, she had tried to get out of going, but they had insisted, hinting of dire consequences if she refused. They told her to tell Mark she was going to personally deliver a report to the shareholders on the major project she had allegedly been working on. That had been the standing excuse for the increasing number of late nights sheād been working, when in fact, she was out on dates with company executives or top clients of the company. She had told Mark that sheād gotten a promotion, with a raise in pay, but also with added responsibilities. She hated lying to her husband, but she knew she couldnāt let on what she was really doing. If she had, she knew, her marriage, which had up to then been a good one, would be over.
So she had gone shopping with Mary, buying several new dresses, all of them short, to better show off her dancerās legs, plus some other items, and had come home early to pack. She had fixed a nice big meal for her family ā the Bannings had three kids: a son at college, and a daughter and another son in high school ā the first time sheād done that in several weeks, and had sprung the news at dinner. Mark had not been pleased. They had had plans for a weekend of spring cleaning, and he was leery of her going off to New York alone with the Bournes, no matter how honorable Carole said they were. There were a lot of things about Caroleās new job that he didnāt like, and this was just one more. They had argued about it, but before the night was over, they had made up, as they always did, and even had sex that night for the first time in several months.
As she lay awake listening to her husband snore, she thought to herself that maybe if she and Mark had done this more often maybe she wouldnāt have given off the signals of a woman whose body was hungry for sex. It wouldnāt have, because the Bournes had picked her out not long after she walked in the accounting office for her initial interview. Leon, the accounting manager, had immediately alerted the Brothers that he had the next liaison officer interviewing for the job that they always used as the lead-in to the whoreās position.
But Carole didnāt know that, and she let herself cry about her situation for the first time since sheād agreed to take the Bournesā offer. She loved Mark, and had almost from the first day they had met. She didnāt want to lose him, or her children, but she was trapped.