August is a strange month at work; both staff and patients tend to be on holiday and are in relatively short supply so there is an eerie quietness about the place. For a research scientist like me it's a good time to catch up on the formalities of editing papers for publication and liaising with PhD students about their progress.
The reduction in pressure and the consequent ability to catch up in this way was one of the reasons Pete and I tended to take our holidays in July.
Since our return from France three weeks before, I had taken maximum advantage of the opportunity to get ahead of the game as far as work was concerned. Though sometimes it was still hard to believe, maternity leave was only a matter of months away and with research projects often lasting several years, I needed to be fully in control.
I looked at the clock in the corner of my computer screen; Friday evening, five forty-five. I leaned back in my chair with a sigh. The office was empty; it was time to go home.
If I was lucky, dinner for three would already be cooked. If I was unlucky, my daughter Izzy would have spent so long packing and re-packing her suitcase that she would have forgotten all about dinner and, with Pete working until seven, either I would have to start from scratch or we would have a take-away again.
I sighed and thought about my daughter for a moment.
Since our return from France, things between us had been difficult to say the least. Surprised, shocked and disgusted by her fifty-one-year-old mother's unexpected pregnancy, all her much-vaunted political correctness seemed to have gone out of the window.
Whereas it was perfectly acceptable for other women my age to have sex lives, my own was beyond discussion -- even if as far as Izzy knew, the only lover of my life had been her father.
Whereas it was laudable for other women approaching middle age to have the right to have IVF or even surrogate babies, in my case, a perfectly natural conception was something to be ashamed of.
And of course like all Generation X, Y or Z -- whatever the PC term was -- she had no problems passing judgement on me and my generation and voicing it loudly.
What she would say or think if she ever found out that within the last year, her mother had had four extramarital lovers, two of them little older than Izzy, and that the baby in my belly she considered so controversial had been sired not by her father, but by one of those young lovers, was the stuff of nightmares.
But my mind, far from being understanding, confirmed my position in that middle-age bracket by being full of resentment about the 'younger generation' and its outrageous hypocrisy -- thereby demonstrating clearly my own, equally outrageous double-standards.
Still, I would soon have a break from my daughter's disapproval soon, if only for a couple of weeks.
For me, it couldn't come soon enough!
Currently unencumbered by relationships, Izzy was going on holiday with her friends in the morning. I was unsettled. As a family we had visited Spain's Costa del Sol many times so I knew Torremolinos wasn't the sort of holiday destination nice girls went to on their own. I consoled myself with the knowledge that she was going with a group of female friends from University and would be staying in a villa some distance outside the town but even so, memories of things we had seen going on in and around the town's night-time streets in the past did not bode well.
I had seen for myself what heat, alcohol and a severe shortage of clothing could encourage girls to get up to. Still, Izzy was over twenty now and was no naïve virgin as her rather chequered history proved only too well.
Although her father still believed her to be his sweet, innocent, wronged Princess, she had in fact lost her most recent and longest-term boyfriend by cheating on him rather publicly after a student ball. The noisy, all-night session with her seducer that had followed had earned her the soubriquet 'Izzy-Oh-God', a nickname that appeared to have taken root among her University acquaintances.
If she did behave badly on holiday, it wouldn't be the first time. I believed her to be on the pill and had seen with my own eyes the intimidatingly large pack of condoms she thought she had concealed in her toilet bag so was under no illusions about the type of activity she had planned.
But she was officially a grown-up, and I had my own problems to worry about.
Now five months pregnant, there was no way of disguising my condition, so I had abandoned all attempts at doing so. Indeed, the rate at which my bump was now growing meant that the dreaded maternity clothes could only be a matter of weeks away.
In a strange, perverse way I was actually looking forward to breaching this final barrier. It would mark the end of deceit; the overt acceptance that against all probability, I was actually pregnant at my age. The world could think its worst and probably would; although I wasn't going to flaunt my condition, I wasn't going to try and hide it any longer.
The news had already spread round work and our group of friends like wildfire. In the hothouse of a hospital, any form of scandal is eagerly received so the idea of a fifty-one-year-old Senior Scientist being accidentally pregnant was too juicy a titbit to remain secret for long.
I knew there were rumours about how I had got myself in that condition too. Though considered scandalous, those that I had overheard were too tame to be anywhere near what had actually happened, but I tried to remain above all such scurrilous gossip for fear of letting the truth accidentally emerge.
Still, as I walked along the impersonal corridors towards the car park, I couldn't help noticing several of the white-coated colleagues I passed giving me rather closer attention than I was used to receiving.
I smiled inwardly; I was getting used to my tummy being stared at surreptitiously by disbelieving eyes, searching for signs of the rumoured bump. The open adoption of maternity clothes would soon remove any doubt. For a while, the staring would be blatant but it would soon become 'old news' and the pressure would relax.
Though none said so to my face, of those friends and colleagues who knew for certain I was pregnant, many were horrified but others were surprisingly impressed and supportive. All without exception were baffled both at the conception and the fact that at our ages, we were planning to keep the child.
I sat myself in the driver's seat of my SUV, dumped my over-large handbag on the seat alongside me then frowned; the wheel was definitely getting closer to my tummy. I fiddled beneath the steering column until it was a more comfortable distance away then started the engine and pulled into the rush-hour traffic.
My back ached as it habitually did these days. Despite the warmth of the day, I flicked on the heated seat to try and ease the pain as I worked my way through lines of slow-moving cars towards the open road that led home, wriggling on the warming leather beneath my bottom.
A wave of unexpected sensation rippled outwards from deep between my thighs followed by a shiver of pleasure, a warm glow in my belly and a slight burning in my cheeks.
A broad, guilty smile crossed my face as I thanked God I was alone in the car.
As my pregnancy progressed, my already-high libido had simply soared. Now, more than five months gone and with a tummy almost impossible to hide, it took almost nothing to bring me to massive arousal. Even as I sat putting on my seat belt, the soft pressure of the gusset of my knickers on my over-sensitive vulva was making me distinctly aroused.
Something similar had happened when I had been carrying Isobel over twenty years ago, but then I had been a girl barely in her thirties; younger and sexier. Now that the effect was even more pronounced, I was distinctly middle-aged and not in the best position to make best use of my increased desires.
Nonetheless, my dreams were haunted by images of the men I had fucked during the sexual madness of the last year. Sometimes my gorgeous husband Pete, sometimes my seducer and first lover Tony, less often Will, the young man who had tried to blackmail me but most often by far, the man above and inside me was Darren, the one all-night stand who had made me pregnant.
I wondered if all pregnant women fantasised about the man whose baby she was carrying.
Often as I lay in bed in the darkness, I remembered vividly his athletic, gym-fit body between my wide open thighs; his young, attractive face with the striking, olive-gold skin that made him irresistible to so many women of all ages; his well-wielded cock buried deep in my vagina as he filled me with his youthful, fertile seed.
I would remember the many orgasms he had induced in my middle-aged body for the rest of my life.
Living with a wife who needed raw, energetic sex on a daily basis, my ever-patient husband Pete had originally thought Christmas had come early and had stepped up to the mark with determination. But as the weeks went on and my demands became more exhausting than exhilarating, even he was beginning to see sex as a chore rather than a treat and had started complaining of soreness and back ache.
But that did not mean I was going to let him shirk his duties. With the baby due in a mere sixteen weeks and my belly growing larger every day, I wasn't going to let any opportunity pass. As I drove home that evening, both my mind and body needed to feel Pete's cock and semen inside me within a few hours at most.
It wasn't just lust. Okay, it was mostly lust but there was also the slight but growing and unsettling feeling of insecurity that most pregnant women feel at some stage; the worry, however unjustified, that the father of her unborn child might desert her when she was at her most vulnerable. In my case, that worry had led to a constant need for physical unity and emotional reassurance.
