The Step-Mother
Unknown
Chapter 1
The big German shepherd sat back on his haunches with ears erect and eyes aglow, watching the shapely blonde girl move busily about the kitchen. Her visible, soft white flesh, even that hidden beneath her skimpy bikini, like the tossing of her shoulder-length golden hair, pleased him with its quivering apples to her every graceful motion. Her aromatic feminine scent filled his keen nostrils, stirring his interest more than the smell of the foods she prepared, and occasionally lie would wander close to her, brushing against the silken warmth of her long naked legs.
Shirley Douglas hardly noticed the lovable dog's ingenuous display of affection, except when she nearly stumbled over him and reprimanded her animal house-guest to lie down in the corner. His flattened ears and tail-between-legs reaction as he obeyed also went unseen by the curvaceous, twenty-five year old bride of six months – her flustered young mind was that preoccupied with unhappiness.
How long could she go on this way? God, she could hardly call it a marriage, nor had it been anything faintly resembling one from their wedding night on… unless security and material wealth could replace conjugal bed relations. Long since, Shirley had distressfully concluded that they could not, though they had been prime reasons in her marrying a man twice her age. Not that Frank Douglas had been any stranger to her. She had served as his private secretary for over two years, but aside from business, their close association had never gone beyond the platonic stage, even when she accompanied him on week-long business trips of the small electronics firm he owned and operated with an efficient hand.
He had always treated her with the utmost respect – a gentleman of the first order, as her dead mom would have said – and perhaps that was why Shirley's feeling toward him slipped into the category of extreme admiration without ever touching at love. A widower of five years himself, Frank Douglas had astounded her that evening at dinner when he had very quietly proposed that they marry.
He knew she could never love him, that is, not in the same manner she would undoubtedly feel toward a younger, more desirable man, he had calmly admitted, but he vowed security and abundant kindness, plus the very limit of his ardent capabilities, should she want them. Sex was of relative unimportance to him, he'd shyly assured her, promising that he would always leave that department up to her. In short, he very much needed and wanted her, no longer as a secretary, but as his wife!
Remembering it all vividly, the dazzling, blue-eyed young blonde recalled how thrilled and honored she had felt, and how stupid she must have looked in her wordless astonishment as she sat there in dazed silence listening to his quiet and almost humble proposal. Lisa, his daughter, was seventeen, he had gone on, graduating from high school in June. She would either be going off to college or, if she had her way, marrying young Paul Fulton. In any event, shortly she'd be flying from the nest to leave him rattling alone around that big house.
Above all, he abhorred the thought of that aloneness, but not anyone could eliminate it. Some might lessen it… but she, as his wife, could make it an impossibility!
Shirley had been too dumbfounded, overawed by his offer to answer him that night, and gently smiling he'd said that he understood and was willing to wait for a few days for her to consider. Of course, what he could not have known, for she had never discussed her personal life with him, was that the only man she had ever loved would be his age had Viet Nam not claimed him!
Shirley had lived the life of an Army brat. Her father had been an army career officer and most of her life was spent on U.S. posts throughout the world. By the time she'd reached eighteen, she had attended so many different schools she couldn't remember them all, hated the military existence with a passion, and especially the young shave-tail Lieutenants a girl had to date if she wanted any social life.