Island Author's Note: Kudos to
jaF0
for putting together the
Amorous Goods Anthology Authors' Challenge
and doing an admirable job of herding us cats in the AG Forum.
We're looking forward to reading others' versions of
Amorous Goods Anthology Authors' Challenge
and hope that our own finds a place, perhaps in parallel universe no. 12.
Amorous Goods: Three Horny Monkeys
Prologue:
A lifelong collector of goods and objects from far and wide has passed and left the entire collection and the business built around them to his only remaining relative, a distant niece on a career path of her own as an archivist. Vikki has taken on the task of administering the estate and liquidating the business and collection. However, she has come to find out that many of the goods have been cursed or enchanted with amorous powers that affect those who encounter them. These are the stories of some of those encounters with objects found at Amorous Goods.
At Amorous Goods
CHAPTER ONE.
Vikki Friday pulled a box off one of the floor-to-ceiling shelves that ran in rows across the basement of the Amorous Goods mansion and carried it over to a large oak work table. She took off the lid and was hit with the comfortably familiar scents of decaying paper and fountain ink one always found in older archives. The long unopened box also had a dusty odour, which was another normal element she'd come to expect when wading into a neglected collection like this. Except, the dusty odour she'd found in the Amorous Goods archive was unlike any she'd ever encountered before. It was spicy or smoky or flowery -- she could never decide, because it always seemed to be shifting. Sometimes she wished she could bottle it as a perfume {
Or an aphrodisiac!
declared her Inner Voice
.
}, because it was so heady. Other times she immediately wanted to put the lid back on the box because the scent was more frightening than arousing {
Brimstone!
}.
Her newest partner in this bizarre venture, Morgana Delacroix, said the odours were a by-product of the spell or curse that lay over so many of the items that Vikki's far-distant and now-deceased uncle, Ludwig Freitag, had collected. Ludwig had assembled an incredible variety of items, ranging from rare manuscripts and Louis XVI furniture to first editions of
Playboy
magazine and furnishings from Fannie Porter's Texas brothel where Butch Cassidy was a favoured guest. But ancient or modern, classy or trashy, everything was united by a theme of love, romance, or sex. According to Morgana, one of Uncle Ludwig's specialty areas was erotic enchantments, and items imbued with one of these enchantments raised powerfully amorous feelings in the people who used them. Vikki had naturally scoffed at such ideas at first and jokingly called the older woman Morgan le Fay for her witchy beliefs. But ever since the time Vikki had found herself apparently overcome by that musky "amorous" odour and succumbing to its influence, she'd had to temper her usual academic's scepticism.
Vikki felt a warm feeling creep through her as she remembered that episode. She'd been here alone in this very room, like now. She'd opened one of the older specimen cases and found it held a collection of antique dildoes. The scent that had blossomed out when she removed the lid had hit her like walking into an Amsterdam coffee shop. An Amsterdam coffee and florist shop, she amended.
{A French whore's bedroom inside an Amsterdam coffee and flower shop!}
By the time the ventilation system had cleared enough of the odour away to allow Vikki to regain her senses, she'd found herself lying on this very table. Her skirt was up around her waist, her panties were hanging from one ankle, and she had two of the antique sex toys inside her, still moving slowly in and out as she came down from the most intense orgasm she'd ever experienced just from masturbation.
The ventilation fan in the ceiling kicked in just then, bringing Vikki out of her reverie.
{That weak, old ventilation fan? You know it didn't save you from the fumes.}
No, each time she'd thought about that episode, she'd become more certain that while the intoxicating odour had made her head swim and made her want to touch the dildoes,
{And their touch had led to the rest}
, it was only her orgasm itself that had finally broken the spell.
Vikki hadn't told Morgana or her business partner Dylan about the episode with the unusual artefacts.
{You mean the magic dildoes?!}
She'd simply cleaned them off (after putting on heavy rubber gloves over latex gloves), put them back in their box and moved them to the large walk-in vault that they'd found in the sub-basement. When she'd updated the collection inventory, Dylan had asked how she'd known the pieces were among the special items that required locking away. She'd simply said that the paperwork in the box with the antiques had been clear enough. Morgana had looked at her suspiciously, but thankfully hadn't pressed her on the subject.
Now Vikki literally shook her head and looked into the open box on the table. Just papers here, no ebony or ivory penises to entice an unattached archivist. Pulling on white cotton gloves, she brought out the pages of the first item and spread them across the table. She would appraise the item and enter it into the growing index of
Amorous Goods
holdings on her laptop. She needed this; a good old-fashioned session of appraising and cataloguing. Something mundane and pedestrian to help her re-center her mind after their most recent artefact recovery mission.
CHAPTER TWO.
Vikki had been sorting through the papers in the box for about half an hour when she heard the door from the upstairs open. That was followed by footsteps coming down the stairs and soon Dylan was standing by her side. "The shop's all locked up for the night, Cousin. Can I interest you in a glass?" He held up a bottle of red wine he'd carried down with him.
The two young people didn't share a bloodline, but family marriage ties had brought them together as kids, when they'd spent several summers together and "cousins" was what the grownups called them. When Vikki had needed someone's help managing the expansive business inheritance left to her out of the blue almost a year ago now, she'd naturally turned to her 'cousin' Dylan.
"Sure," she said, peeling off her cotton gloves. "How was business today?"
Since they could no longer hastily liquidate Amorous Goods or
the AG
as they'd taken to calling it, they had to keep the business going and this had become their division of labour. Vikki worked as quickly as she could to curate the terribly disorganized collection of items spread across the classic 19
th
-century robber-baron mansion, trying to determine what was safe to sell or display and what needed to be moved down here to the basement or locked in the sub-basement. Dylan kept the antique store on the ground floor of the converted mansion, as well as the boutique hotel known as
The Amorous Inn
on the upper floors, open, bringing in revenue they needed to stay on top of taxes, utilities and the expenses of recovering items they had sold in ignorance early on.
Dylan chuckled as he retrieved a corkscrew and glasses from a small galley installed in a corner of the basement. "Apparently, your Uncle Ludwig wasn't the only old pervert in these parts." He paused as he uncorked the bottle and poured out two generous balloons.
Even after several months, it was still hard for Vikki to reconcile that the young man she'd grown up with as a cousin, wasn't really a blood relative, while some old German 'Casanova-wannabe', as she thought of him, was. Second uncle, thrice-removed or some such nonsense, but Ludwig Freitag had known the link between the Friday and the Freitag branches of the family tree and had left his odd estate to his distant niece Vikki.
Dylan continued his story as he handed Vikki a glass. "We had an entire busload of senior citizens up from the city; I think they actually came from two or three different retirement homes."
Vikki's jaw dropped open as she accepted her wine. "You're kidding, right?"
Dylan lifted his glass up in a silent toast and said, "I kid you not," before taking a long sip. "Blue hair, liver spots, walkers and canes...and before you ask, no, they weren't here by accident. Naughty old Amorous Goods was one of the main stops on their itinerary." He took another sip, trying to wash away the memory of shrivelled old ladies cooing over the life-sized moulds of
Famous Cocks in History
.
"May we have that sort of energy in 50 years," Vikki said, raising her own glass in toast to libidos that were not willing to go gentle into that good night.
