Chapter 1

 

I love my wife. I always have. We were childhood sweethearts together and neither ever seriously considered another partner for life. We were married at eighteen and for the last fifteen years have had eyes only for the other. Which is why the events of last year were so tragic.

I am a self-made man. I have a photographic memory and study always came easy to me. I breezed through an economics degree at London University and then discovered I had a flair for investment. Amelia came to me with a dowry of a twenty thousand pounds and I quickly turned that into a million plus over the next few years. By the time we were twenty-eight, I had turned her twenty thousand into fifty million and I am still at it.

Our sex life was good. Very good. Both of us enjoyed sex and we both made a bit of a study of it to improve it even more.

As we acquired more wealth, so we moved up into better real estate, eventually culminating in a very pleasant manor house down in Sussex. The house was quite large and required servants: cook, housekeeper, maid and gardener.

And therein lay the tragedy. Amelia was, and is, a most beautiful woman. She is slim, with a model's figure (which she still has), has a perfect complexion and masses of wavy chestnut hair. Andy, the gardener doted on her, so much so that one day, while she was strolling in the garden, he attacked her, fucked her and then fled.

Of course he was caught, charged and sent to jail but that was little consolation for the attack utterly destroyed Amelia's psyche. Assaults of this kind damage most women psychologically. It did far more than that to my beautiful Amelia. Despite the best efforts of the most eminent shrinks around, she simply couldn't bear to have anyone touch her, even me. She never ceased to love me. I could see that in her gaze as she watched me around the room and we talked all the time about the same things we always had; it was just she could no longer bear to have me make love to her, kiss her, or even touch her endearingly.

In every other way, she recovered - except that she wanted us to give up the big house and go back to London. "I want to look after us, James. No servants... Oh, I might have a daily woman, but no-one else living with us ..."

And so that's what happened. We moved back into the city, into a fashionable area with a nice but quite small terrace house. And so things continued for a while. I went on making money - heaps of it, and Amelia took up her housewifely duties - and seemed to enjoy it.

But then, after a year or so, she suddenly dropped this bombshell onto me. "James, I think you must take a mistress, or at least a lover ..."

I stared at her, my pen raised in mid-sentence. I must have looked a picture: eyes staring, mouth open, every muscle frozen... "A lover?" I stuttered eventually. "But I love you. I don't want a lover ..."

"No and I love you too, but you are a very virile man and I don't think I am ever going to recover enough to make love to you again ..."

"Oh my darling!" I cried, rising from my seat at the table and moving over to kneel at her feet. "It isn't necessary. I am fine, really!"

"No you're not. You have a virile male's needs and I would far rather you satisfied them with someone I knew about than that eventually you might go off and find one on your own ... But anyway, there's another reason."

I looked at her inquiringly. Amelia was not only possessed of a beautiful body. She also had a fine, discerning mind and I knew whatever was coming would have been well thought out.

"Even though I can't, at the moment at least, see any end to my horror of people touching me - even you, I now have very strange urges. Weird, you might say, actually... I want to watch you make love to another woman, preferably a very beautiful one."

She stopped and looked straight at me. I didn't know what to do, or say for that matter. There was my wife. My beautiful, lovely, gracious wife now asking me to make love to a mistress whom she would help me choose, while she somehow looked on. It was unbelievable - or was it?

I thought about it and later discussed it with her psychiatrist. He was strangely encouraging: "It's possible, James, that it might just be the trigger she needs to snap her out of the mental block that is preventing any physical contact with you or anyone else. You will have to handle it very carefully, but yes, I think it might work ..."

There's one thing about me. If I do something, I do it properly. Amelia wanted to watch me make love to this as yet unknown lover of mine. I would need to provide a means by which she could do so comfortably and without detection. Accordingly, I made inquiries about the property immediately behind our house. I had to pay more than I would have liked for it but it was ours within the month.

And then I had the alterations made. The new house was not as big as ours but at one point it abutted on to our back wall and it was easy to make a concealed entry on the first floor from the box room at the back of our house into the room right next to what would become my bedroom in the new one. The room was quite small, having been a third bedroom originally. The door into it was kept locked so that my lover might not accidentally stumble into it.

I had the house decorated in lavish style with silk wall hangings in reds and gold, satin drapes and heavy furniture. It wasn't our style but it suited that house and its purpose.

On the wall between the secret room and my bedroom was a very large mirror - a one way mirror and here Amelia could sit on the other side, within two yards of the huge ornate bed in that room, and watch me make love to my new lover, whoever it might be.

She watched all these preparations with a sparkle in her eye and I even began to wonder if perhaps it would not be necessary to actually go the whole hog. Alas, it was. I was very careful when touching her to watch her reactions. I never gave her more than a peck on the cheek or touched her hand... Anything more and I would feel her stiffen in horror and so, although I had hoped her obvious delight in our preparations with the 'house at the back', as we called it, might have been enough, it wasn't and we had to proceed to the next stage.

We were a rather social couple and mixed with others in the investment area quite a lot. It was there I met Jane. Jane Wylie, even at the age of nineteen, was a social climber and a snob but she was very beautiful. She was as slender as Amelia with a figure that would have been a sculptor's dream. Her skin was peaches and cream and her blue eyes looked ingenuous, but weren't. Her hair was golden blonde and fine and silky, wafting along behind her in shining tresses.

Without Amelia's prodding I wouldn't have given her a second glance - well, perhaps not a third, for although she was very, very beautiful, there was a metallic hardness about her I didn't like all that much. Still, this was Amelia's exercise and as long as I was comfortable with the girl, I didn't care much who she was.

I was well known as a multi-millionaire, approaching my first billion by this time and as such would be considered a catch for any girl looking for a sugar-daddy.

Amelia's condition was also known in our inner circle and our friends had all been most supportive. Of course Jane found out about it too and then set her eyes on me, no doubt prompted by Amelia thrusting me in her way as often as she could.

"She's got a beautiful figure, James. You will enjoy bedding her ..."

"Maybe," I said doubtfully. "I still don't feel comfortable with this, my darling. It's only because ..."

"I know, I know. You're only doing it for me... Well go on. We've come this far, now get on with it!" She was smiling though, teasing me and I sighed and went about seducing the lovely Jane Wylie. Not that it was difficult. She wanted to be seduced and to get her hands on some of my wealth, I was sure. Just how far she wanted to go I hadn't realised and neither had Amelia.