Disclaimer - Mature themes, adult language, sex, violence. This is a work of fiction. Unless otherwise indicated, all the names, characters, businesses, places, events and incidents in this story are either the product 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.
Other Lives, Other Lies
- By gstein.
Just a simple story about wives and lovers in a small southern town.
Dirk Muroski had a taste for women and his only preferences were they were at least a six on the female attractiveness scale and they were married and not looking for any kind of meaningful relationship.
Dirk liked women but he wasn't interested in being permanently attached to one.
And being a handsome, well educated and physically in great shape bachelor at thirty-two years of age, with an ancestral old world suave and debonaire manner. And having just a touch of southern fried good old boy character added in for flavor. Dirk had no problem attracting better than average looking lusty southern women of the married variety.
Now of course the rumors and gossip about Dirk went a long ways in helping him attract suitable women.
Because in private parlors and hidden gardens, and on verandas, porches and piazzas the best of friends talked about their assignation with Dirk. And the particulars of their tryst and the debauchery they experienced stirred the imagination and aroused the temptation of even the most prim, proper and prudent southern lady.
And the consensus opinion, among the women who knew, was that Dirk Muroski was an experience a woman should have at least once in her lifetime. So in the southern cities and towns and communities where Dirk was known, there were women desiring to indulge in some sexual pleasure with this trophy specimen of the southern male species.
And of those married women who took the plunge into promiscuity with Dirk, some were curious, some were adventurous, some were naive and some were daring. But all in all they were women who were fulfilling a secret human desire for a taste of forbidden sensuality.
Now Dirk's playboy lifestyle was made possible by his position as Vice President of Business Development for his family's decades old manufacturer representative business that sold equipment to electric utility companies across the deep south, that is to say South Carolina, Georgia, Alabama, Mississippi, Louisiana and Florida's panhandle.
And what Dirk did for the family business was to travel across those states and call on electric utilities to check on their needs and to keep them well-informed and up-to-date on new and upcoming equipment that would help them improve their operations and service to their customers.
And, of course, Dirk usually left those visits with lucrative orders for equipment and services.
Now some of the folks who knew him would say that Dirk Muroski was a smooth operator, just like his dad and just like his granddad. Some folks would say that he was a nice guy and a friend. And some folks would go so far to say that he was a scoundrel, just like his dad and granddad. But regardless of opinion Dirk got the job the done both with his customers and with the women.
Now years ago Dirk's granddad set the bar for schmoozing customers. In fact he set the bar so high that none of the Muroski's competitors could touch their style of entertaining and stroking customers. Now that didn't mean that the Muroski's got all of the business because that's not the way things work in the public utility sector. But most of the time the Muroskis got the 'cream' of their customer's spending.
So when Dirk Muroski would call and set up an appointment to come to a town to meet with the electric utility it usually kicked off a wave of excitement and intrigue. Because the leadership of the electric utility knew they would be wined and dined par excellence. And the single women, the few that there was, would get gussied up with high hopes of attracting Dirk's attention. And the married women, the ones who really knew the score, wondered which of their lot would end up in Dirk's motel room for a night of debauchery.
So, it was November and Dirk was coming to call on the Taliaferro County Electric Co-Op in Bonaire, a small town in southern Mississippi.
Now the Muroski family had been selling equipment to the Taliaferro County Electric Co-Op for decades and Dirk had been calling on them since he started working in his family's business six years ago. So this was just a routine sales call for Dirk and for the Co-Op.
And for this trip to Bonaire Dirk had three very specific goals to accomplish. The first was to wine and dine the Co-Op's leadership team. The second was to get a sizable order for equipment and services; and, his third goal was to bed the Co-Op's Director of Customer Service and Public Relations, Mrs. Angela McFarland-Ledbetter.
Now Angela McFarland-Ledbetter was a thirty-five year old beauty who came from a long lineage of beautiful and alluring women.
The old people who knew said her maternal great-grandmother had been the Belle of Mobile, Alabama during the city's booming war years in the 1940s. Further, people talked about how back in the sixties her maternal grandmother worked as a Bunny at the New Orleans Playboy Club. And then Angela's mother, after graduating from high school, went on to do fashion modeling in Atlanta and eventually worked in Miami and New York before coming back to Mississippi and marrying Buddy McFarland, one of the largest black Angus cattle ranchers in the state.
But unlike her great-grandmother or grandmother or mother, Angela wasn't the Belle of the South. And she wasn't a sexy hostess in a men's club in New Orleans. And she wasn't a New York fashion model.
But she could have been all of those things par excellence, but she chose not to.
Instead, Angela wanted to be a foreign missionary and spread the word of God to people around the world. So after graduating from high school, Angela left home to study at a small, independent Christian university in South Carolina where she majored in Biblical Studies and minored in foreign languages to prepare herself for a career in foreign missions.
And after graduating from college she did in fact get a job with one of the Christian denomination's foreign missions organization. And after a couple of years of orientation and training she was eventually assigned to a post in Eastern Europe to assist with church planting. In other words helping people establish Christian churches in their communities.
Now not much is known about Angela's missionary work in Eastern Europe but toward the end of her second year of service she abruptly left her post and returned home to Mississippi under a cloud of mystery.
Now of course the rumors and gossip about Angela swirled around Bonaire and Taliaferro County.
But the truth was that through her church planting work she had become involved with a Russian Oligarch who was helping fund her organization's work in Romania, Hungary and Slovakia.
And over time Angela and the Russian developed a relationship that evolved from ecclesiastical to personal to intimate and then to Angela becoming the Russian's mistress.
Now of course this relationship was an embarrassment and a problem for Angela's missionary organization and so they dismissed her and distanced themselves from her. Leaving her dependent on her Russian lover who, by that time, was becoming disenchanted with her and was considering either trafficking her on the sex market in Germany or gifting her to a senior government official in exchange for him looking the other way and waiving some government regulations which were hindering the Russian's business activities.
So suddenly Angela went from being the Russian's mistress to being his pawn, and she was in a perilous situation.
Luckily her family learned of her situation in time enough to work with a different missionary organization, and the United States Department of State, and arrange to get her snatched from of her situation and get her out of Eastern Europe before the Russian could cash in on her.
Angela was extremely lucky.
And soon she was safely back in Bonaire, but out of fear the Russian would try to find her, Angela lived in seclusion on her father's cattle ranch.
Now from time to time she would be seen around town but she was always with either one or both of her parents and always with a man who was thought to be her bodyguard.
She was never seen alone.
But then after a year or more her supposed bodyguard went away and Angela started coming off the ranch a bit more and sometimes she was even alone. But the McFarlands were still fearful for Angela and they were cautious and kept a tight rein on her comings and goings.
But eventually the family agreed that the threat, if ever there was one, had passed. And they recognized that it was time for Angela to breakout out of seclusion and reengage with life.
And one of her first steps to reengaging with life was regularly attending Church services and Sunday School and getting involved in activities at Mount Zion Baptist Church where she and her family had been members for decades.
Of course Mt. Zion was good for Angela because it helped to get her back into the social scene of Bonaire and Taliaferro County. And being back and part of the church congregation helped her get reacquainted with old friends and make new friends and develop relationships.
And one of Angela's new friends was Walter Harris who was president of Taliaferro County Electric Co-Op.
Now Walter had come to Bonaire and Taliaferro County from somewhere in Arkansas during the time when Angela was in college. So of course he didn't know Angela, but he knew Angela's father Buddy McFarland and her mother Marilyn quite well. So it really wasn't too odd that after Walter got a feel for Angela that he offered her an entry level job at the electric Co-Op working in administration. And, of course, Angela took the job and quickly began working her way up.
Then another friendship Angela made through Mt. Zion was with the church's youth minister Wayne Ledbetter. Like Walter Harris, Wayne came to Bonaire and Mt. Zion from a Baptist church in Central Florida. And, like Walter Harris, he came to Bonaire during the time that Angela was in college and Europe.
Now Wayne Ledbetter was about nine years older than Angela but he was certainly not as mature and experienced as Angela who had already explored and experienced the world geographically and ecclesiastically and hedonistically and promiscuously.
Angela was a worldly woman.
But regardless of the age and maturity and life experience gaps, Angela and Wayne seemed to hit it off and after a while they were an inseparable couple. And to make a very long story very short, over a period of about three years Angela's and Wayne's relationship slowly evolved from friendship to romance and eventually to a storybook wedding in which Angela McFarland became the loving wife of the Reverend Wayne Ledbetter who was by then the associate pastor of Mt. Zion.
Of course Wayne and Angela's wedding was the social event of the year for Bonaire and Taliaferro County.
And for wedding gifts, Angela's parents bought the newlyweds a home in downtown Bonaire and Walter Harris promoted Angela to Director of Customer Service and Public Relations.
So after a near disastrous experience in Eastern Europe Angela McFarland-Ledbetter was now a member of the electric Co-Op's leadership team, was earning decent money, owned her on home and was married to a respected member of the clergy.
Angela was Taliaferro County's woman in full.
Now Dirk Muroski and Angela McFarland-Ledbetter had known each other since she had started working at the Taliaferro County Electric Co-Op. And Dirk knew that Angela was a minister's wife. And he'd heard that she'd been a missionary at one time. So for a very long while he saw her as an untouchable because Dirk had a rule about not meddling in God's business or with God's people. But at last she was so damn bubbly, friendly, beautiful and sexy that last year at the Taliaferro County Electric Co-Op's Christmas party he broke his own rules of engagement and flirted with her.
And much to his surprise, Angela flirted back. And, from that point on their friendship took on a whole different flavor.
So ten months later, or by the time that October had come around, their flirting had progressed beyond just playful teasing to sensual expressions. And now both of them were sending verbal cues that they were ready for more. And they both knew what they wanted.
So it was November and two weeks before Thanksgiving and Angela's husband Wayne Ledbetter was out of town. In fact, he was about one-hundred miles away from Bonaire in New Orleans, Louisiana, attending a pastors conference at the Baptist Theological Seminary.
And Dirk Muroski was in Bonaire to bed Angela McFarland-Ledbetter.
Now since Wayne Ledbetter was conveniently out of town for a few days, Dirk's and Angela's plan was that they would do an all-nighter. And since they had the time, they agreed that their night wouldn't start until around 7:30 PM, giving Angela enough time to leave work and go home and primp and preen and pack a small overnight bag. And giving Dirk time to drop by Lewis Farmers Grocery Store and Deli and pick up some food and snacks and a couple of bottles of wine.
