In Chapter one our heroine, Kate, a successful businesswoman turning 60, has asked herself a troubling question. Is she a slut? Thus began a series of chapters in which she describes to her husband Henry (her fourth husband) her life beginning with her late teen years and her sexual activities at each stage. The portion in italics in each story is her recollection of some memorable sexual experience from her past. In this chapter Kate tells Henry of a night of debauchery she enjoyed with her third husband and his licentious friends at a very private club in Paris.
Henry and I awoke to a cold, gray Carmel dawn. Overnight the fog had rolled in off the Pacific. We were lying in bed comfortably warmed by each other and a lovely down comforter, when our bliss was interrupted by a soft knock at the cottage door.
“Oh, I’ll bet it’s Claude with breakfast,” I said, as I stood and walked across the room to answer the door.
“My dear,” Henry said, as I reached for the doorknob, “Aren’t you forgetting something?”
“What?”
“You’re naked.”
“It’s only Claude. He’s seen me naked lots of times before.”
“Oh, yes, of course,” Henry responded in a dry tone implying that he still didn’t totally approve.
I turned and looked back at Henry, my hand still on the knob. “Since when did you become such a Puritan?”
“Oh, never mind. You’re right, of course. Just let him in. I’m starving.”
He still sounded a little put off, but I put it down to early morning low blood sugar. I had been with Henry enough to learn the beast in him had to be fed first thing each morning or he wasn’t worth a damn.
As I expected, it was Claude on the other side of the door, bearing a tray with just squeezed orange juice, freshly baked croissants from my favorite local bakery, unsalted butter, jelly, and a steaming pot of coffee. He brought the tray in and set it on a table.
“My my! Don’t you look lovely today,” he said with a devilish gleam in his eye as he took his time enjoying my naked form.
“Well, stay and join us for breakfast,” I offered.
“There is nothing I would rather do,” he said with his charming French accent, “But duty calls. I have another fifteen or twenty hungry guests to feed back in the main house. Try not to get too many croissant crumbs in the bed clothes.” With that he departed, fondling my ass and brushing my tit with his shoulder as he stepped past me to the door.
“I was right. He is a lecherous bastard,” Henry said as he poured coffee for us. “I think I like him.”
“Well it’s good that you like him because you are just like him.”
Henry groaned at my play on words.
I laughed. “Okay, I admit, that was pretty bad, especially for an English major. But what I meant is that you both have the most deliciously dirty minds.”
“I knew what you meant, and Claude and I both should appreciate the compliment. No one can recognize a dirty mind like a publisher of erotica.”
“Brrrrrr. It’s chilly in here,” he continued as he pulled a robe around himself.
I likewise pulled on a robe and we sat, silent for a few minutes, enjoying our coffee and croissants.
Finally Henry spoke up, totally changing the subject. “So, are you going to tell me more about your wild weekend in Paris with Yves?”
“Ummmm, I said, as I downed a sip of coffee. “Well, as I told you, thanks to Jim Worthington’s reprehensible conduct, it turned out to be quite a bit more than a weekend. More like ten days before I flew back to San Francisco, again on Yves’ G-5.”
“So you flew off to Paris for a weekend with the Frenchman who picked you up in the bar in New York, stayed for ten days because Jim Worthington had pissed you off by selling the company, and then married the Frenchman after ten days of frenetic screwing? Does that about cover it?”
“Hardly,” I said.
“What did I leave out, besides all of the juicy details about the sex, which, of course, I do want to hear?”
“First, I didn’t marry him on the first trip to France. That came about six months later. It turned out that marrying a French millionaire who is in a war with his family is a complicated process.
“Furthermore, I didn’t stay for ten days because I was pissed off at Jim Worthington. I got over that about twenty-four hours after I sent him the ‘fuck you’ cable. After all, it was his company, mostly, and as it turned out he sold pretty much at the peak of the market for traditional publishing companies. If we had hung around much longer, Jeff Bezos and his damnable Kindle would have eaten our lunch.”
“So why did you stay? Was the sex with Yves that good?”
“Oh god, yes. Well, that was part of it. He was really good in bed. Great staying power and wildly creative. But the main reason I stayed and eventually fell in love and married him was that he was just so much fun. Dragging me off to Mass in the oldest church in Paris after barely finishing a morning fuck, the Escort Bayan impromptu picnic in Luxembourg Gardens, a trip to Burgundy to visit one of his wineries, shopping in some of Paris’ loveliest little boutique clothing stores, dinners in grand restaurants, and obscure little bistros, romantic walks along the Seine in the rain, wild rides in his Ferrari through the winding mountain roads of Provence. It went on and on.”
“I see. Pretty hard to match.” He sounded a little sullen.
“Now, now,” I said. “Let’s not be petulant. Remember that you’re here with me, and he’s gone, smashed up along with his Ferrari on that mountainside north of Nice.”
“Yes . . . Yes, that’s right. I am indeed here and considering myself damn lucky to be here with you. I’ve had my dust-ups with sports cars, too. It’s just that they were before I knew you, and I was lucky and walked away. Ruined a couple of damned nice cars though.
“But enough of that,” he continued. “How did you mend things up with Worthington after your, ‘Fuck you. Strong letter to follow.’ cable?”
“That really wasn’t too hard. He and his new friends from Chicago needed me to wind down the San Francisco office. When I got back to San Francisco they were all there, more or less on bended knee, with a proposal they hoped would keep me around. But that really was the end of my personal relationship with Jim and Sandy. After that it was just pure business. Well, not totally with Sandy, but that’s another story.”
“Aha. A bribe. Money always talks, doesn’t it my dear?”
“Well, it does with me. Actually though, after a bit of negotiation, I got more out of the deal than just the bag of cash they were offering me.”
“Oh?” Henry said, raising an eyebrow. “What else did you extort out of them?”
“There was this one little publishing line I had been nurturing out of the San Francisco office that the boys from Chicago didn’t want to keep. I had to admit it wasn’t doing very well, but I tried to convince them they should keep it instead of just closing it down. I was sure it was going to break even any day now, but those blue-nosed bastards objected on moral grounds as near as I could tell. Anyhow, I agreed to take that piece of the business off their hands at a very attractive price.”
“That’s a very self-satisfied smile you are wearing Kate. Kind of a—how do you Yanks say—a ‘cat that ate the canary’ smile.”
“Well, it was the erotic publishing business, and . . .” I broke out laughing. “I got them to pay me $100,000 to take it. They were sure it would cost them more than that to shut it down.”
“And that, I take it, was the source of Dark Secrets Publishing?” he asked, naming my publishing business.
I laughed some more. “Yes, and it has made money from day one. It really took off once I convinced Amazon to market the electronic copies for me. I still think Bezos takes too big a slice, but there isn’t a really good alternative to him, and it sure makes money, even with Amazon’s unconscionable skim. Electronic publishing is especially important to erotica because a lot of people will buy it over the net, but they won’t walk into a book store and pay a clerk behind the counter for it.”
“But what about your relationship with Yves? How did that work while you were busy wheeling and dealing in San Francisco?”
“For the next six months, Yves was even busier than I was. He and I both did next to nothing during the ten days I spent with him in France aside from sex and touring all his favorite places in Paris and a few parts of France that he loved. But by the time I went back to San Francisco, he had decided that fucking me silly and squiring me around his favorite parts of Paris and France was a lot more fun than running Montagne Industries and fighting with all his relatives and other minority shareholders, so he went back to his lawyers and bankers and told them to sell the company as a whole for the best price they could get and to negotiate a split of the proceeds with the various minority holders as compensation for their interests.
“That let him deliver the company as a whole to the buyer, without the pesky minority interests his father had created. He told me that the increase in price he got by cleaning up the ownership structure more than paid for the cost of doing so. There were a couple of small pieces he kept for himself, like the plane and the winery and vineyards in Burgundy. It took him six months, but when it was done, he had $800 million in after-tax cash and no need to deal with pesky minority shareholders, customers, employees, and all those other troubling people who focus on you when you own and run a large business.”
“And the two of you got married on top of all of that?”
“Yeah. It was crazy. It took six months to wind down the San Francisco office for Jim’s buyers and it took Yves at least that long to complete his sale of Montagne Industries. About every other week, I would fly Etlik Escort to New York, usually on the tail-end of a trip to Chicago to meet with my new masters. He would wind up his G-5 and fly over from Paris. Sometimes we stayed in New York, but lots of times we took the plane and went other places. We visited resorts all up and down the East Coast and in the Caribbean. Half the time we never got out of the hotel rooms we rented. We would spend time venting about our respective problems and then fall into bed and fuck our brains out. The sex wasn’t always in the hotel rooms. We screwed on the 12th hole of some famous golf course in South Carolina once. It would have been better if the sprinklers hadn’t come on,” I said with a laugh. “Another time we spent a whole weekend naked on a yacht in the British Virgin Islands. After one of our weekends, we both felt like we could go back to work the following week. Didn’t want to, but at least we felt we could face it.”
“It all sounds very glamorous. Kind of like one of the stories the romance section of your publishing company puts out.”
“Like a lot of things that sound glamorous, it really wasn’t. It was mostly work and not near enough sex for my tastes. Once every two weeks doesn’t cut it for me.”
“Are you trying to tell me that you were monogamous?” Henry asked with a look of mild astonishment.
“Yes, but not so much by choice as it was simply that there wasn’t time for much of anything but work.”
“Really? You? No time for sex? Not even a lunch hour quickie? Not even once?”
“Oh, okay. There were a couple of times. One time Halili came up from San Jose where she was teaching, and we spent an evening together. It was nice, but I was woefully unprepared for the next day, and Halili had a steady thing going with another woman teacher at San Jose State at that time, so it was a one off.”
“And there was another time when I fucked a bicycle messenger in the woman’s bathroom of an empty floor just below our offices in the Bank of America building.”
“What?”
“Well, I hadn’t seen Yves in three weeks, and I was really horny. I had been sitting in a really boring meeting and all I could think about was how much I would rather be fucking Yves—someone, anyone—instead of sitting in this meeting. I met the messenger in the elevator just after the meeting ended, and I just hit the 28th floor button, which I knew was unoccupied, and dragged him off. I think he was just as horny as me. As soon as he put his cock in me, we both just exploded. Then we buttoned up (we were in such a hurry we never really took our clothes off, just the parts that were in the way) and went back to our respective pieces of the world. I have no idea who he was, and I’m sure he doesn’t know who I was. Neither of us even bothered to ask the other’s name. Never seen him since. He was a pretty good quick fuck though.”
Henry was laughing hard now. “Really Kate? Are you sure you weren’t raised by a bunch of guys in a fraternity house?”
“Hey, hey! Be nice!” I said in my best pouty voice. “I can be very girly.”
“Yes, you can my dear, except when it comes to money or sex. On those issues you would fit right in on a trading floor on Wall Street.”
“Hmm,” I said. “You’re so not nice.” What was really irritating was that I knew that he was essentially correct.
“Okay, okay. I’m sorry. But tell me,” he said. “How did Yves propose? Was it on one knee with roses and violins?”
Ouch. I didn’t want to answer that question after the little exchange we had just had. Oh well, Henry is my husband. He’s entitled to know, I decided.
“Actually I proposed to him.”
Now he was in hysterics. It took him a good two minutes or so to regain enough composure so he could sort of speak. “Let me guess,” . . . more laughing, . . . “Roses and violins? Were you down on one knee?”
“Fuck you!” I said as I threw a half eaten croissant at him. Then I began to laugh as I realized how my response had confirmed everything he was saying. Finally I just looked at him and smiled. “You know,” I said, “I learned years ago to accept myself for what I am. You can’t spend your life wishing you were someone else. So yeah, you’re right—I’m quite aggressive about money and sex. Now let’s get in bed and fuck.”
“Okay, on one condition. You have to tell me one of your dirty stories from your past.
“Absolutely,” I said as I let my robe drop from my shoulders, “and I know just the one. Oh, but one thing Henry, . . . seriously. I didn’t marry Yves for his money. I really was in love with him. He was just so damn much fun to be around. I was crushed when he was killed a year and a half after we were married.”
“I never thought you did my dear. Between what you inherited from your aunt and the money you made working for Worthington, you had all the money you needed by the time you met Yves. Now get in bed and tell me a sexy tale from your past.”
After Ankara Escort Yves and I married we had two main homes—his flat on the Boulevard Saint Germain des Prés in Paris and my house in Pacific Heights in San Francisco, and we tried to spend roughly equal amounts of time in each, plus some time at his place in Provence and at a second home I owned at Lake Tahoe. Needless to say, wrapping up the loose ends of our respective business ventures tended to interfere with that schedule, but we tried.
Late one Friday night I flew out of San Francisco to Paris on our jet, tired but anxious to see Yves after a tough week of dealing with the last issues remaining in winding up Robards’ West Coast office. That project seemed to drag on forever. It was done now and I was through with them. There was still Dark Secrets Publishing that I owned, but my staff was more than capable of running things while I took a couple of weeks off in France. Yves met me at the private air terminal, Le Bourget, when our plane arrived shortly after noon, Paris time.
I had slept on the plane until about an hour before landing. I spent much of that last hour of the flight fantasizing about the nasty things I was going to do to and with Yves over the next couple of weeks. I particularly wanted to fuck him out in the vineyard in Burgundy again, but that’s another story.
By the time we landed, I was anxious to see him and horny as hell. He picked me up in his Ferrari and as soon as we were out of the airport, I reached over and began to caress his dick through his trousers.
“Darling,” he said. “That feels marvelous, but we will want to pace ourselves this afternoon. We have a dinner party to go to tonight.”
“A dinner party?” I said, thinking of any number of dull family and business dinners he had dragged me to since I had met him.
“Oh, not another family dinner,” I complained using my best pouty voice.
“Yves looked over at me and laughed. “You know dear, that tone of voice is so phony. Listening to you trying to be a pouty little girl is like watching a Russian oligarch trying to be diplomatic.”
I laughed. “All right you got me on that. But really, do we have to go to another family affair, where I have to dress in the most conservative clothes imaginable and make polite chit-chat with people I know you can’t stand for good reasons?” A long pause, “Really, do we have to do that the first night we’ve been together in two weeks?” Another long pause, “Really dear, isn’t there something else you would rather do?” As I spoke I was softly raking my nails up and down the inside of his right thigh, stopping just short of his now partially inflated cock.
Putting my hand aside, he responded, “There’s good news and bad news about this party. First, yes, we have to go. But, it’s not family or business. This is the semi-annual gathering of the members of an organization I have participated in for many years now. My absence would be noted and not favorably. Furthermore, they all know I am recently married, and curiosity about the woman who finally managed to trap me is running high. The only thing worse than not showing up would be showing up without you.”
“Sounds like a country club?”
“I guess you could call it a club. But it’s not anything like the country clubs you have in America. It’s very secretive. There is no status in being a member, because no one, other than the members, knows it even exists, much less who the members are. Everyone who comes to any of our dinners is sworn to never disclose anything they see or hear there. There are some very important members—heads of companies, cabinet ministers, diplomats, financiers, entertainment personalities, famous artists.
“Does this club have a name?”
He chuckled. “Well it’s formal name is Amis de l’érotisme, but . . .”
“Oh, it’s that kind of club,” I interrupted. “I think you neglected tell me about this club before we married.”
“Hmm. Perhaps I did. Of course, we never use its formal name. Even its billings come to me as bills from a plumber, an electrician, a doctor, a lawyer, and so on, but never anything that reflects the true name. Normally it is simply referred to among the members as ‘Le Club.’ I think I may have mentioned it to you under that name, but I confess, I didn’t provide you with the details.”
“And?” I said.
Yves briefly looked at me in confusion.
“The details?”
“Eh oui. You want the details about Le Club.”
Men can be so dense, I thought. He married me, at least partly, because of my wild obsession with sex, and it doesn’t occur to him to tell me about a club he belongs to called “Friends of Erotica.”
“Oui. I want the details.”
“Okay. We own an old mansion in the Trocadero. That’s a neighborhood across the river from the Eiffel Tower in the 16th arrondissement. It’s a very posh, conservative, neighborhood. Le Club is on a quiet side street a few blocks back from the Seine. Some say it once belonged to the Marquee de Sade, but I don’t think it’s old enough for that. Most of the Trocadero was razed in the 19th century during Baron Haussmann’s renovation of Paris. In any case, Le Club has owned it since shortly after World War I.”