It was my fourth offence in less than nine months, and as I arrived at the magistrate's court I knew I wasn't going to get away with anything less than a driving ban. The only question was how long would it be. Bloody speed cameras were threatening to take away my livelihood, and I was caught out bang to rights. Obviously, it wasn't the cameras that were at fault; it was me. I had been caught fair and square - this time doing 63 in a 40 mph zone, but the little devil on my left shoulder was telling me I'd had little choice. I had to make my delivery times, and driving myself had been the only option.
The first time I'd been caught, the police had offered me the option of attending a speed awareness course, but that hadn't meant I'd got away with my offence scot free. They had made it very clear that now my attendance at the course was on record any future offences would put me in line for a more serious consequence. The second time I'd been caught - just two months later, I'd had to pay a fine and had six points on my licence. The third time had been in France and I remembered thinking, when I caught the flash of the camera in my rear view mirror, that it wouldn't matter because surely police forces don't collaborate internationally on that level of offence. But then I saw the blue flashing lights and I was pulled over, fined on the spot and my license details taken. As it happened, no further points were accrued back in the UK, but it had been a nervous few months until I'd been able to assume the coast was clear. This time, all of my past speeding offences would be taken into consideration and my solicitor warned me I was probably in for a lengthy ban.
However long it ended up being it was coming at an awkward time for the business Annie and I had started just eighteen months ago. We'd spent the initial capital we'd raised - and taken out all the loans we could. Money was starting to come in from clients now at last, but our three biggest were all in the northeast of England, two hundred miles away, and we couldn't afford the exorbitant distribution charges the commercial sector was offering so we'd established a system where Annie would do the paperwork in the home office and I would pile the stock into the secondhand VW van we'd bought with some of our startup funds, and deliver it in person. It had worked pretty well up to now, but it meant I was having to cover large distances in challenging times, and speeding was pretty well inevitable. Annie didn't drive, so we were dangerously exposed. If anything happened to our system, we would be drastically short of alternative options.
The magistrates' decision came down in less than forty minutes. I got landed with a two-year ban. When I resumed driving at the end of that period I would face crippling insurance hikes. It was the worst sentence, short of a custodial one, that I could have expected. My solicitor shrugged her shoulders and murmured something about being more careful in future. I hadn't sensed any sympathy from her all along, and I could understand that. But Annie and I now had some serious rethinking to do if we wanted to keep our business afloat. It was showing signs of life, and we both believed in it. We just needed to solve the problem of a delivery driver.
It was Annie who suggested what now seems to be the obvious solution. She would learn to drive. I would take over the office work and she, once she got her licence, would deliver the stock. If we grew the business as our best-case predictions suggested might happen, we might be able to look at hiring drivers in about a year or two. But for this short-term period Annie and I would simply swap places.
I guess I should introduce myself - and my wife. I'm Tim. I'm 38, 6' 2" and just shy of 14 stone. I'm trim but I'm starting to realise you need to work at keeping your abs once you reach your late thirties. All the sitting down and fast food on the road doesn't help either. Fortunately my years in the navy and a love of sports have kept me fit. I've been married to the beautiful Annie for three and a half years. No kids yet, but we have plans to do that once we get our business on a sound footing. I didn't ever see myself as a family man. I never knew my own dad, and when I was sixteen I left school and home and the navy became my family. I served for ten years and made it up to Chief Petty Officer but I couldn't resist the severance they were offering during the round of cuts that coincided with Blair's second term of office, so I left and decided to formalise my skills in electrical engineering with a civilian qualification at my local tech college. That's where I met Annie and the rest, as they say, is history.
Annie is 35, three years younger than me. We met at a college Hallowe'en party six years ago and I've never changed my opinion of her since thinking in those first few seconds that I saw her that she was sex on legs. It was lust at first sight. When I first saw her she was wearing a Catwoman costume, and suffice to say she looked hotter than any actress I've seen playing that role. As I had gone as Batman, we were a natural pair and we hit it off from the word go. I invited her out for dinner the following week and we were having sex with each other by our fourth date. I found out months later that she still hadn't split up with her then boyfriend by then, and rather than be angry about that I found it really turned me on. I kept imagining her going home to him in that couple of weeks we overlapped - getting into bed with him, her cunt still swollen from my pounding, and drifting off to sleep in his arms with my cum silently leaking out of her freshly fucked pussy and staining their sheets.
Annie's best feature are her legs, but her ass is great too - tight and pert and more than compensation for her breasts, which she feels are too small, and which if we ever made it big she says she'd have enhanced. They're fine to my mind. She's a 34 A and her nipples are a huge erogenous zone for her. The slightest little nibble will have her breathing hard and moaning and getting wet between the legs. It's incredible. I've had the best sex of my life with Annie. Our favourite position is reverse cowgirl, but she'll try most things.
Anyway, on with my story...Annie is twice as smart as me. She was doing languages and accountancy at the college after deciding to do a career switch (she'd started in the wedding catering business but hadn't managed to make much progress). We hung around together quite a bit those first few days after the party, and I couldn't believe this gorgeous woman kept wanting to be with me. I figured I must have done something really good in a former life! I'd had my fair share of girls in my sailing days, but I'd never seen anyone as sexy as Annie. Her legs seemed to go on for miles. She's 5'4", slim and classically pretty but not self conscious or prissy about her looks. She has long golden brown hair which she wears in a dozen different ways. If we're going out she'll say "Up or down" to me and whatever I say I still won't know what it's going to look like until we're leaving.
In three and a half years of marriage I've never been tempted to stray. Annie's the world to me, and I couldn't ever see myself as happy with anyone else, but Annie also has a past, and there was a time - must have been about a year before we got married (about a week after she turned twenty-four anyway), when she had to go and deal with an aspect of that past down in Spain. It involved an ex, and she stayed away for four days. Although she said "dealing with it" didn't involve anything sexual, I've always known in my heart that she ended up sleeping with the guy (his named was Manuel) at least one of the nights she was away. I decided not to let it bother me, and it hasn't. But it taught me that I was capable of putting that sort of thing in a black box in my mind and not letting it do any damage. That's not something I've always been able to do - and in the man's world of the Royal Navy hot-headed reactions to hurt pride don't necessarily get you a bad reputation, so this new self-control I seemed to have acquired in civvy street was a surprise to me.
When Annie and I started dating one of the first things I told her about was my plan for making a living outside the navy that had been all I knew. In fact, talking to Annie about the plans was more than just chat. I was articulating what the plan was to myself as much as to Annie. I also realised she was genuinely interested in what I was saying - and was contributing some really neat ideas to it. Before very much time had passed we were discussing on a whole new level of seriousness viable plans for getting my ideas out of my head and into production. Briefly, it involved children's toys and some new developments in robotics. I don't want to say too much about that because this is a public forum and production is at a delicate stage, but suffice to say I was amazed to find no one had thought of this particular avenue before, and I was pretty damn sure there was money in it. I know nothing about kids, but I knew sure as hell that I would have wanted one of these things when I'd been nine or ten years old. Now, cheap parts from East Asia had made what I had in mind a viable option if I could pull together all the players I would need to collaborate with.
Enough about that. Some of you might have started a company yourselves, and you'll understand the breach of privacy you feel when you're forced to talk too long about your baby. I'll just say I found in Annie the perfect partner. It helped that she was hot but I can honestly say I fell for her mind as well. I never had sisters growing up, but I felt like I could open up and talk to Annie. I could also take critique from her (not my strong point, I'm ready to admit). When we finally got physical (fourth date - she made the move on me after a picnic on Hampstead Heath) I realised she was everything I wanted and, more than that, we were good for each other. We married on her 25th birthday in July, and started working in earnest on the toy project. At the time of my driving ban things were going OK - not great; not terrible. But we didn't have much margin for error. Most months we were paying the bills with little to spare. We needed all the luck we could get, and to steal some of someone else's if we could!
The first hitch in the job swap plan came when we googled local driving schools and realised they did not come cheap. I thought about trying to teach Annie to drive myself, but I know from experience I'm a lousy teacher. I have no patience, and my one attempt to teach her the guitar ended in a shouting match - although it did also lead to some pretty incredible make-up sex afterwards. In fact, if memory serves, that was the one and only night she let me fuck her ass. We sort of got carried away - and to this day "Want a guitar lesson?" has become our secret language for "Let's have a quickie".
It's important you understand that getting Annie through her driving test was absolutely essential to us. For the toys we make about half of each complete unit ourselves in my workshop, and we have suppliers for the parts that demand specialised equipment. Each unit costs us £28.41 to make and we sell them for £110. Last year for the first nine months we were almost at even, but we ended up making a just-about-manageable loss. This year we were sustained by three new clients in the northeast of England but we were still vulnerable. It was critical that we carried through on all our commitments to them, and that meant meeting very tight deadlines.
I found an affordable driving instructor in the local paper's classified ads. He was called Eddie Warren and his rates were two thirds what the local official schools were asking. I checked him out on social media. The face that appeared on my screen was that of a slightly chubby guy in his mid-to-late-fifties. He was standing in front of a small fleet of Fords. Your typical small-to-mid-sized town driving business by the look of it. I gave him a call.