I left University at the age of twenty-one with a good degree in Media and Business Studies, and set about the task of finding myself gainful employment. By this time I was sharing a flat with two other girls, Katie and Jade, both of whom I had been introduced to by Jessica, and whilst we had a lot of fun and some pretty wild times together, after three years of communal student living I was beginning to feel the need for my own space. Jess herself had kind of drifted off the scene a bit after falling heavily for some guy who directed her in an independent film she was involved in over the summer holidays, but Katie Shaw had more than filled the gap in my life left by her departure. I had been introduced to Katie by Jess, and first became intimate with her when she invited me to join her and her boyfriend in a threesome he had been pestering her for. In fact I nearly turned her down as I’ve never been very keen on mixing the two sides of my sexuality, but I accepted because I was always up for new experiences, and I fancied her like crazy.
Katie had a petite frame with gorgeous boobs, pale blue eyes, long hair so dark it was nearly black, and a big generous wide, generous mouth. She had a way of wearing her clothes that gave the impression they were in imminent danger of falling off at any moment, which was rendered even sexier by her innocent girlie manner, which implied she was completely innocent of the effect she was having on the male population. She wasn’t, of course, and she and I would take great delight in winding up blokes in pubs and clubs by kissing, cuddling and touching each other.
As it turned out, my concerns were completely justified, and the threesome was a bit of a disaster. Katie and I were just too into each other to give the poor bloke much of a look in, and in the end he was pretty much forced to sit and watch while we devoured each other hungrily. In the end Katie felt sorry for him and suggested that he came over her tits while I ate her pussy, and I remember the strange feeling of power I got realising he was jerking himself off over what we were doing. In fact the whole moment was so intense that I was forced to push my hand between my own legs and finger my clit as I watched his cock jerk in his hand and his cum splatter onto Katie’s beautiful boobs. When we discussed it later, Katie and I agreed that the feeling of being watched with such uncontrollable desire was a definite turn on, and probably the best bit of the whole experience. Laughingly, we fantasised about making love in front of a group of men in a “Look but don’t touch” scenario, and what a fantastic experience that would be, and if anything we became even bigger teases in the pubs and clubs from then on.
Katie and I fell into a happy pattern of being regular fuck-buddies. We both had a number of boyfriends at different times, but always reserved a little girlie time for each other. It was a very satisfactory arrangement for us, and one of the most settled and peaceful periods of my life.
After leaving Uni I kept the wolf from the door by continuing to undertake small modelling assignments on a casual basis while I searched for a suitable job. I had set my sights on the world of advertising, but decent vacancies were proving hard to find, and I was starting to think that I might have to accept one of the many invitations to do “glamour” work (getting my kit off, basically) that I received from modelling agencies on what seemed like a daily basis. Almost at the point when I was resigned to getting my tits out, I landed a job at Merrill Silverstein.
Merrill Silverstein was on of the top London ad agencies, with a host of real big name clients, and I was under no illusions as to the pressure I would be under to perform and get results, but this was my dream job, and I threw myself wholeheartedly into my work. Of course, I would be lying if I said I got the job purely on merit – there were a lot of other young graduates equally well qualified in the London job market - and I was aware that the company had an active aesthetic employee policy, “babes, not biffers” as one junior executive charmingly described it to me. Advertising is even more image conscious than most big business, and my aristocratic lineage did me no harm either, and my business cards were proudly emblazoned with “The Hon. Georgina Harrington”.
Irrespective of the basis on which I was given the job, I was determined to prove I was good at it, and within a few months I was already one of the more successful of the company’s young executives, proving adept at securing and retain new accounts. I can’t remember who it was who was quoted as saying “we are all prostitutes”, but whoever it was they obviously worked in advertising. I shamelessly used my appearance and femininity in at every opportunity to secure business, and I soon learned to tailor my dress and make-up to a specific client – short skirt, high heels and lots of cleavage for the randy old goat who ran the mail-order wine business that was one of my first successes; sober suits and minimal make-up for the very serious family-run catering chain; and soft summer floral prints, loose hair and a heavy leaning on my Italian side for the slightly scary Sicilian boss of a small but highly successful pharmaceutical company who was rumoured to have Mafia connections.
Advertising is also extremely competitive and bitchy, and I made a conscious effort to maintain nothing more than a polite professional relationship with the other female employees. I also made sure that the more exotic aspects of my sexuality remained a secret. Whilst it seemed fine and acceptable for several of the male designers to openly gay, I wasn’t going to give anybody any ammunition to use against me, and although Katie and I still saw each other regularly, at my request we toned down our behaviour when we were in clubs in town, particularly the West End, where there was a higher chance of my bumping into work colleagues. We compensated for this by going on regular clubbing and shagging weekends in Brighton – my salary was now sufficient to enable me to afford to pay for us to stay in the Grand or the Metropole – which seemed a more than acceptable compromise.
Time passed, and I began to settle into a comfortable routine. I was doing well at my job, I’d bought my own place (a small flat in Highbury), I’d bought a suitably flashy second-hand convertible sports car, and I had several reasonably long-term boyfriends, as well as a number of more fleeting relationships with girls – some chance encounters, like the time I met Sarah Cullen at the Health Club, and others more long-term although Katie remained a constant and undemanding friend and lover. Then, just as everything was going brilliantly, I met Marcus.
Marcus Barnard was the MD of a Property Development company whose account Merrill Silverstein had been pitching for over a considerable time. The decision to put me in charge of the negotiations, I sure, was a completely cynical one. Marcus was a renowned ladies man in his late thirties, six foot five inches tall, bronzed and built to match, with a reputation for not suffering fools gladly. I have no doubt that the senior management made a conscious business decision to send the posh totty along to see if she could charm him. I gave it my very best shot, opting for an expensive navy business suit that suggested efficient and sexy – low cut enough for a hint of cleavage, but not too much – coupled with heels and stockings, and a skirt, again, not quite short enough to give too much away.
There followed a week of complex and exhausting negotiations, demands, compromises and quibbles. For a while I thought I’d failed dismally, and then suddenly, almost out of the blue it seemed, we arrived at a concord and he signed. I was over the moon, so much so that I hardly heard Marcus Barnard’s final demand as the contact was being carried from the office, ink still barely dry.
“Of course, I do have one final demand.”
My heart sank. Oh God, what now?
“You have to have dinner with me tonight.”
Well, I could hardly refuse could I? In fact, as I soon discovered, it was quite hard to refuse Marcus anything. He was a larger than life dominant personality, a successful man used to getting his own way, and frequently getting cross when he didn’t. What I also discovered was a hitherto unknown submissive side to my nature, which in a perverse way actually enjoyed being controlled by this forceful and undeniably masculine man. The third time he took me out we ended up back at his plush flat in Kensington, and we had barely got through the door before he commanded me to strip for him. I can’t think of anyone else, male or female, that I would have taken that from without a fight, but such was the force of his personality that I didn’t bat an eyelid, merely waited for him to be seated comfortably on the large leather sofa with a glass of whiskey in his hand, and then began to peel off my dress slowly. I definitely have an exhibitionist streak in me, because as I watched the bulge growing firmer in his trousers with every discarded item of clothing I also felt my own arousal growing, the warm dampness between my legs. I took a good long time over getting naked for him, spending a while teasing my nipples which obediently jumped to their usual prominent erection and writhing my hips slowly, before I finally dropped gently to my knees, unfastened his trousers, and took out his massive cock. And it was massive – I don’t think I’ve ever encountered anyone before or since as well-endowed as Marcus Barnard; the guy was hung like a donkey. As if it wasn’t enough him being rich and gorgeous, I thought, and not without a bit of a struggle, I took him into my mouth. I’ve never been able to get my head (no pun intended) around that whole deep-throat thing – I’ve watched girls do it and had them tell me it’s easy, but frankly it just makes me gag, and that really isn’t in my list of top ten sexy reactions. But please don’t for a minute think I give a bad blow-job, because I can suck dick for England, and there is very little in life to rival the sense of power you get with a guy’s cock in your mouth!
I gave Marcus my full attention for as long as I felt I reasonably could, licking, sucking, and stroking him to the point of cumming, then just backing off just enough to stop it happening. It felt incredibly good to have this powerful man, who had so recently had me jumping through hoops for him, completely in my control, and I was determined to make it last as long as possible, but it was becoming obvious that the point of no-return would soon be reached. Which presented another dilemma for me. As a general rule, when I’m in a relationship I prefer to swallow at moments like this – after all the taste of a mans cum, whilst it doesn’t quite have the allure of the taste of pussy (for me at least) isn’t that unpleasant, and it’s infinitely more convenient and less messy than getting it in your hair, which is just a nightmare. However, it occurred to me that swallowing the cum of a man who I hardly knew and who was almost certainly promiscuous and slept with a lot of women, might not be the cleverest move I’d ever made. Common sense prevailed, and I opted for Plan B. Drenching his cock in saliva, I allowed him to build in my mouth until I felt the first straining contraction of his cumming, and then I jerked my head back and thrust my tits forward, working his shaft furiously with my hand as his bum rose off the sofa and his cock bucked in my hand, spitting bright globs of cum onto my boobs.
Afterwards, when he had got his breath back, Marcus pushed me slowly down onto the sheepskin rug on the floor and spread my legs slowly as he positioned himself between them. He must have read my mind, because he paused long enough to roll a condom onto his rapidly hardening member, and then he lifted my legs up onto his shoulders and forced himself inside me. He fucked me like a machine, that great powerful body just kept pounding into me, the magnificent cock stretching me and sending all the nerve endings in my pussy wild with sensation, while his balls slapped rhythmically against my ass. I came wildly, uncontrollably, raking my fingernails down his back, screaming and yelling, which only seemed to encourage him to even more athletic feats, and he carried on without a pause until we both came again, noisily and violently, finally collapsing together in a breathless, sweaty heap.
Six months later, Marcus asked me to marry him.
My parents reacted differently to the news of my engagement. My father seemed to rather like Marcus (who was beside himself with delight when he found out he was marrying into the aristocracy) and between them they did considerable damage to the family wine cellar in celebration. My mother on the other hand, although she was never openly unpleasant to him, treated my fiancé in a rather off-hand manner.
“I’m sorry my darling, I’m just not sure that he is right for you,” she said defensively when I challenged her about it. “He is charming, yes, and big and strong and masculine, and he has money…but…” she raised her had to forestall my question as to the exact problem with this. “…I fear that one woman alone will never be enough for him, and I don’t see you as the type to be the little wife at home, ignoring what is going on in front of her face.“ She paused and looked me directly in the eye. “And will one man alone be enough for you? Will man alone be enough for you?” She smiled softly at me to let me know she understood the significance of the missing numeral. “It is not my place to interfere – you are a woman now, and must make a woman’s choices”.
But I was young and in love, seduced by power and wealth and romance. I convinced myself my attraction to other women had just been a phase, the foolishness of youth. I was grown up now, a woman about to marry an amazing man, and I cast aside girlish things. We planned the wedding and the honeymoon and the post honeymoon. Marcus wanted to start a family as soon as possible, and I wanted nothing more than to please him, to take his seed and let his children grow in my womb, big strong boys in his image. We agreed I should give up work; after all, I’d be too busy with the house and the family to worry about anything else. I found someone to rent my flat and transferred ownership of it into the name of one of Marcus’ many property companies. One Sunday, a few weeks before the wedding, Marcus drove me down to Sussex and showed me the house he had bought for us, a rambling Georgian pile set in acres of parkland, with stables and barns – straight out of the pages of Country Life. I fell head over heels in love with Petham House the moment I set eyes in it. I envisaged myself in years to come teaching my daughters to ride in the paddock, while Marcus taught our sons to fish on the river that bordered the estate. I was completely and utterly in love, and I didn’t care who knew it. I even stopped taking the pill, anticipating the excitement of telling Marcus the news that I was pregnant.
Our wedding day came and went in a flurry of white confetti and ivory silk. The honeymoon lasted three weeks in the Seychelles, a blur of sun, golden sand, azure sea and physically exhausting sex. We returned home in the late summer to a frenzy of moving and redecorating, and I was slightly disappointed to discover my period arrived on schedule, having got it firmly into my head that I would get pregnant almost immediately to complete my happiness. But this was a small set-back, and I threw myself happily into the task of making a home for my husband and my incipient family. Autumn turned to winter, Christmas came and went, and I remained cosseted in the warm glow of my good fortune, the only dark cloud in my sunny sky my steadfast inability to fall pregnant. Spring was looming on the horizon, with the daffodils in the paddock by the lane already fading and dying, when my world fell apart.
I didn’t deliberately read the texts on Marcus’s phone, it was just one day he left his handset at home by mistake, and I was alerted to it bleeping in the alcove in the hall by where he normally kept his car keys. I saw the name Josie on the display and reasoned that this might be an important message from his PA. It was, but not in the way I imagined. “Can’t w8 2 c u tonite so horny” I read. The house swam around me as I sat on the bottom of the stairs with my head in my hands, trying desperately to find rational explanations for the evidence I was seeing with my own eyes but didn’t want to believe. For over an hour I sat there, willing myself to move, but seized by an uncontrollable inertia. Eventually I managed to force myself to take action, and took myself for a long walk around the grounds as I weighed up the situation. Marcus often stayed up in town during the week (he had retained his old apartment as a pied a terre) and I had never thought anything of it – in fact it seemed a perfectly sensible arrangement, saving driving and enabling him to spend longer at home on the weekends. Now I had to face the fact that there was a strong possibility he was using this time to carry on an extra-marital affair. It wasn’t a particularly palatable thought, but I knew that whatever the outcome, I couldn’t live in ignorance.
It took me inside twenty-four hours to find and engage a reputable private investigator, and then a week of agony while I waited for him to get back to me. I survived the weekend, and Marcus’ presence in the house, only by pleading terrible stomach ache and retiring to my bed like the tragic heroine of a gothic novel. In truth the ache was less in my belly and more in my soul, but the end result was the same. I barely emerged from my room all weekend, and pretended to be asleep when Marcus came to bed. For the first time since the first time, we slept together without making love. On the Tuesday morning following that fateful weekend, I had a call from the investigators office, could Mr. Rogers call to see me that afternoon? The moment of reckoning had arrived.
I don’t think I was really surprised. The rational half of my brain had been telling me this since I first saw the initial text, and Mr. Rogers, a pleasant, softly spoken man in his middle forties whose mild and unremarkable demeanour completely belied the somewhat sinister nature of his profession, confirmed it. Marcus was seeing not one, but two of his female employees on a regular basis. He had the pictures to prove it, provided names and addresses, even the fact that one (the Josie of the text) had recently had a breast augmentation, paid for by money that he intimated had come from my husband.
After that it all became a bit of a blur. I remember the tearful journey to London that evening, and the agonising wait outside the flat that belonged to Josie of the plastic tits until they both arrived in a taxi, laughing and joking. I vaguely remember screaming at Marcus in the street, him trying to drag me indoors, my refusal to set foot inside her flat, and Josie’s appalled face when I went for her. After that I have cognisance of very little except the interminable wait at a south London police station before my parents arrived, looking shaken and distraught, and doing their best to pour oil on troubled waters.
The divorce was bitter and protracted. Marcus hired top-notch lawyers to argue his case and they did their level best to paint me as a hysterical obsessive with lesbian tendencies (Marcus had obviously hired his own team of PI’s). With a wonderful twist of irony it was the weekend after I confronted Marcus and Josie at her flat that I discovered I was pregnant. I told no one, not even my mother. I’ll never know if it was the fact that I was barely eating at the time, or the fact that I was drinking heavily, or just the natural course of events, but I lost the baby less than three weeks later.
So there it was. I couldn’t hold my man or my child. In my mind I was a failure as a wife and a failure as a mother – overall a failure as a women. The world became a pretty dark place for a time, and I let it suck me in, drowning the darkness in a tide of red wine and gin and tonic.
The divorce case dragged on, and with every passing day I became less and less interested in the outcome.