Amanda's Young Men (3 page)

‘God, yes, for a while, anyway,’ Amanda said. She was utterly sated. Amanda thanked her lucky stars that she’d married a man who, although he might be older than she, was still as strong as the proverbial bull.

Ten days later, Amanda got a call from the police. Roger had been found, naked, alone and dead, in a motel that rented by the hour. It looked like a heart attack.

2

THEY ALL ARRIVED
on the same day: the insurance cheque, the brass urn with Roger’s ashes, his watch, his bunch of keys, his wallet and his prized hi-tech paper-thin multi-function cell phone. Amanda laid them in a row on the dining-room table. This was it, the sum total of a man’s life. They’d had no children so this was all that was left of him. Amanda wished she could cry like an ordinary widow, but she couldn’t. Roger had died cheating on her and that complicated everything, especially her grief.

So. She had a life to live. It had been a month. She couldn’t grieve but she’d gone through the other stages: denial, anger, guilt and so on. The guilt had been the hardest to deal with. She’d read that it was quite common for newly bereaved people to experience extreme lust, and that it was perfectly natural – a genetic response. In her case she had every right to bring herself off, as she had on those many, many nights when she’d been left alone while Roger ‘worked’ late. Even so, she’d denied herself any form of release because she knew, if she gave in and masturbated, she wouldn’t make it halfway through before she’d be sideswiped by hate, first for Roger and then for herself. Even her guilt was complicated.

Now she had his remains in front of her, in her power. Now it was time to move on. Since the day of their wedding, Amanda had devoted herself to Roger. Her world had shrunk to him, home, shopping, a special event here or there and a few friends who, she now realised, had been more his friends
than
theirs. At this point she had two choices: she could take shelter in a cocoon, just ‘live’ and do what amounted to nothing – or she could go out there, face the world, be dynamic and adventurous.

It wasn’t a hard decision to make. Out there, in the real world, there were men, energetic young men practically vibrating with lust. All these years, it seemed, Roger had been tomcatting around while she’d stayed true to him, except in her vivid imagination. But now she took off her wedding and engagement rings and, with them, all the restraints that marriage had imposed.

Amanda had a lot of catching up to do, just to even the score, so she’d better get started.

First, she dug a hole under Roger’s favourite apple tree and poured his ashes into it. That was the end of him. Next, she changed into a businesslike black suit and took her million-dollar cheque to the bank.

Mr Sorensen, the bank manager, offered his condolences even as he drooled over the size of her deposit. ‘Nice to get rid of that overdraft, right, Mrs Garland, even though …’ He spluttered to a halt.

‘Overdraft? What overdraft?’

‘Your husband’s account – his line of credit.’

‘Why on earth did Roger need an overdraft?’ she asked. Amanda wondered just how generous her husband had been to his various bimbos.

‘I’m not sure why,’ Sorensen continued, ‘but Mr Garland hadn’t deposited a company cheque in over eighteen months. The line of credit is what he – you – were living on.’

Damn it, how many secrets had Roger had? Amanda cut the interview short and stormed off to Forsythe Footwear’s offices on the tenth floor of the Rackstaff Building. She had Roger’s keys. She’d inherited his shares, his controlling shares. Those,
both
the keys and the shares, added up to
power
. She’d never had power before, except the power of love that she’d thought she’d had over Roger.

Amanda marched up to the pretty little pink-haired receptionist and looked straight into her pale-green eyes. ‘I want to see the chief accountant, now,’ Amanda said, feeling as if sparks were crackling between her fingertips.

‘The Chief Financial Officer? Mr Eggerdon? Who shall I say is calling?’

‘Your boss, Ms Amanda Garland, widow of the late lamented Roger Garland, that’s who!’

It was immensely satisfying to watch the girl’s face flush to match her outrageous hair. The call was placed with trembling fingers.

An hour later, Amanda was feeling somewhat mollified but still worried. Eggerdon, a pleasant but owlish little man, had seemed delighted to have Amanda take over the frayed reins of Forsythe Footwear. It seemed that the company had been bleeding money for years. Not only hadn’t Roger drawn a salary for the past eighteen months, but he’d been pumping money in. No, Eggerdon had no idea where the funds had come from. Now, with the five-million-dollar insurance that the company had had on Roger, it could stay afloat for two or even three more years but eventual ruin was inevitable, unless some miracle turned its fortunes around.

Eggerdon offered to calculate the back salary owed to Roger and draw a cheque for Amanda. She declined. There was no way she was going to let the company her husband had slaved for all his life go under! Poor Roger – the bastard! It was disconcerting how one minute Amanda mourned the man, the next she hated him. There was only one cure that she could think of – get another man, or two, or three, and have steamy sex with them as many times as it took to get her back to her senses.

3

APART FROM THE
one tailored black suit and the two pairs of old jeans that she wore for gardening, Amanda’s wardrobe could be divided into two categories. She had stay-at-home things, ranging from pretty and cute to downright erotic, and she had ‘formal’ – gowns and dresses for entertaining or being entertained, for cocktail parties or for dancing or the theatre. There was no way she could launch her new career as a dynamic businesswoman in any of the clothes she already owned. Fortunately, after paying off that overdraft, she still had nine hundred thousand dollars and change.

Amanda went shopping.

Chez Chic was showing a new collection, Dernier Cri, which Amanda fell in love with. Both the skirts and the pants were high waisted, coming up to just below her bust. The skirts came in two lengths: to just above the knee and down to the ankle. The jackets were in a narrow-sleeved boxy style, almost Chanel, but abbreviated, just meeting the skirts. Alternatively, there were bolero tops, minimalised to the point that they were almost shrugs. Everything was very fitted. The fabrics were either stretchy and bias cut or clinging silk knit jersey. The pants’ cuffs flared slightly. The hems of the skirts were very narrow – so restricting it would have been impossible to walk in them if it hadn’t been for the side slits that were adjustable, fastening with Velcro, press-studs or invisible zippers.

Amanda liked the idea of being able to decide exactly how
much
leg she’d show, and of having the option to increase or decrease her exposure at whim. Since her spending was an investment, not an extravagance, she bought a dozen outfits, mainly in plain black but with a couple in pin-stripe charcoal and one in dove grey, with a pale-pink chalk-stripe.

Her next stop was Coquette, for tops and hose. The stockings she had at home were almost all black, Roger’s preference. Black hose would be too much with most of those severe suits, so she bought three pairs of Dim stay-ups in flesh tones and six in gunmetal grey. Amanda found some turtleneck sweaters in silk and in knitted jersey, and purchased a half-dozen of each in a variety of colours. Her new suits called for blouses as well, so she added a couple of white ones in waffle poplin and three more in plain crisp linen before breaking down and splurging on one in each of black and white chiffon and another black turtleneck, but in see-through stretchy net. None of those tops could very well be worn to the office but she just couldn’t resist them. Nor would any man she allowed to see her in them.

Roger would have loved those last items. He’d doted on anything that her skin showed through and the black net turtleneck exposed more than it concealed while the chiffon blouses were as transparent as the smoke from an autumn bonfire.

Fuck him! Some other man was about to get the benefit, just as soon as she found a suitable candidate. ‘Some other men’ and ‘candidates’ she amended.

High on retail therapy, she also bought three dresses that she had no possible excuses for, except that they looked sexy. Her final purchases were a Gucci briefcase, a Mont Blanc fountain pen and a pristine pad of linen-finish paper.

On the following Monday, Amanda dressed as an executive
for
the first time. She chose a long black skirt, slit adjusted to knee height, a white linen blouse and a black jacket. At nine in the morning, she hip-swayed her way into the reception area of Forsythe Footwear, showing boldness but feeling a total fraud. Perhaps she’d fooled old Eggerdon into thinking she could just sail in and turn the company around but she couldn’t fool herself. She could, however, reinvent herself. Perhaps she could reinvent Forsythe Footwear at the same time. Which was right now.

‘Good morning,’ she told the doll-faced candyfloss-haired receptionist. ‘Where’s my office?’

‘Your office?’

‘The one my husband, Mr Garland, used when he was alive. I’m taking over.’

‘Oh! This way, Ms Garland I’m – um – Nola.’ Unaccountably, the girl’s voice dropped to a whisper when she spoke her own name. She fluttered out from behind her desk. Her flared skirt couldn’t have been as much as a foot long from its low-ride waistband to its flirty hem. Her legs were very attractive. Apparently, Amanda was going to have stiff competition in the leg-show department.

That was a ridiculous thought! She wasn’t in any sort of competition, especially not with a girl who couldn’t be a day over 25, if that.

Amanda followed Nola into an office that had a plate-glass wall that looked out into the reception area. Thank goodness, the wall had vertical blinds. Amanda certainly didn’t want to be on display as she worked, doing … Well, she’d find out what she’d be doing, in due course. Her dead husband’s office held a black leather couch, a credenza that ran the length of one wall and that was inlaid with black leather, and three matching chairs. All three were large but the one behind his desk was by far the biggest.

Roger’s desk was long and wide and also inlaid with black leather. It was equipped with a phone, a pen-holder and the sleek screen, mouse and keyboard of a computer, and three silver framed photographs. When Nola left her alone, Amanda hung up her jacket and turned on the computer. The screen asked for a password. She tried her own name. It was accepted. This was no time to wonder for the thousandth time how a man who used his wife’s name as a password and kept not one or two but
three
framed photos of her on his desk ended up dead in a sleazy motel, but she did anyway. Who had he been with when he died?

It took her about an hour to find her way around the various programmes. Most of what she discovered were reports and summaries. It seemed that all of the shops were overstocked despite steadily falling sales. Most of them were spending far too much on their payrolls, according to the targets someone, likely Eggerdon, had set.

The company’s problems were obvious – low sales, high inventory, high payrolls. The solutions?

Amanda sat back and tapped her new pen on her teeth. Roger had likely been looking for answers for months, or years. What were the chances she’d find one instantly? Perhaps Roger had left notes? She tugged open the narrow middle drawer of the desk and found some small change, a clear plastic ruler and a couple of twisted paperclips. The big bottom right drawer had alphabetised hanging files, which she flipped through fairly quickly. As far as she could tell, there was nothing of particular interest to be found there. Top right? It was locked. Amanda fished Roger’s keys from her briefcase and found one that worked.

The first thing that caught her eye was a little bulging velvet bag. When she pulled the drawstring loose and dumped the contents on to the desk, a dozen gold charms, many with
precious
stones set in them, gleamed up at her. She poked them with her fingertip. There was a little Christmas tree and – her eyes welled at the sight of it – the number 25, with what had to be a diamond flashing above it. A couple of tears trickled down her cheeks as she scooped up the rest of the charms and dumped them back into the bag. He might have been cheating on her but he’d obviously had no intention of ever leaving her. That had to mean something! She held the anniversary charm up to her bracelet; she’d been wearing it for so long it had become a part of her and she’d practically ceased to notice it years ago. Roger. Maybe she should just forgive his indiscretions and focus on the love they’d shared as husband and wife.

Amanda added the anniversary charm to the bag and placed it back into the drawer, back on top of some glossy pages that looked as if they’d been torn from magazines. Curious, fully expecting to find illustrations of footwear, Amanda scooped them up and put them on the desk.

Oh! Oh no! Oh, Roger!

The girl in the first picture that Amanda saw was certainly wearing shoes – shoes with heels that had to be five or maybe six inches high – but those, and hose, were
all
she was wearing. She was posed bent over the padded arm of a sofa, with her bare bottom high, and blotched crimson.

Damn him! Not only had Roger cheated on her, but he’d also been reading kinky magazines. Amanda wouldn’t have minded if he’d brought them home and been honest about his predilection – perhaps shared it with her – but to hide it, to keep it in a locked drawer, that was too much! She’d never suspected he had a taste for spanking. If he’d asked her, she’d have let him. He should have known that. She’d never refused him any submissive act or sexual pleasure; in fact, she’d given him the clear green light to bugger her bottom and he’d been the one to balk.

The next picture was a cartoon of a girl dressed as a secretary, over the knee of a man in a three-piece suit. Amanda guessed he was supposed to be her boss. Her skirt was up around her waist; her panties dangled from one ankle. The man was spanking her.