‘Hoi! You did it again!’ I didn’t know whether to laugh or be annoyed by his overweening confidence.
‘You’ll like it. They just liquidise a whole lemon with icing sugar and water – very refreshing. And I asked him to make sure it was bottled water.’
‘That’s not the point, Marcus,’ I hissed. ‘You should have asked. Female choice, remember?’
He crooked an eyebrow. ‘You’re right; choice is powerful. But surrendering the power to choose … that’s powerful too.’
‘What?’
‘It’s another order of power altogether.’
‘What are you talking about?’
‘I’ll show you.’ His teeth gleamed in the dimness. When he spoke again his voice was lowered. ‘Lift your skirt up.’
I stared at him, my heart beginning to thump.
‘Lift your skirt,’ he repeated, leaning in ever so slightly. ‘I want to see your thighs.’
I looked down at my legs. Sunlight shining through the little hexagonal holes in the blind lay in bright specks all over my white skirt.
‘Show me.’
Plot:
Non-supernatural. Astrid and her husband Rhys are
holidaying in a coastal resort in the Middle East, but Rhys is obsessed
with scuba-diving and Astrid can't join in. When they meet a handsome
older American tourist called Marcus, Rhys is quite happy for him to
take his wife out for an afternoon of sightseeing inland.
Marcus, who has an almost uncanny affinity with her, is
clearly determined to seduce Astrid, and in fact
succeeds - only for it to be revealed that Rhys and he have been
colluding for months to set this up. Rhys wants to watch
while his wife is fucked by another man. How will Astrid react to the
shock...?Sexual Themes: Straight. Cuckolding.
Notes:
In late 2008 Black Lace switched back from its run of paranormal erotic
novellas to put out a call for anthologies of straightforward
contemporary short stories.
This was the first in the new series, and themed on the title Seduction. So Honey Trap
was my first non-paranormal piece for Black Lace (I'd already done a
few for Cleis and others) . The word length was set at 6000,
which a lot of people found really quite difficult to write to: it's
quite long for an erotic short story - most other publishers'
anthologies expect short stories of between 2.5K and say 4.5K.
By the time I'd done a few of these for Black Lace I'd worked
out that 6K means a teaser sex-scene plus a full-on one. And you've got
to have some plot!This was the second story I wrote upon discovering the online Hotwife/Cuckolding scene - the other being Scratch in my collection Dark Enchantment. Specifically, the inspiration for this story was a reported Cragslist advert in which a man addresses the husband and describes in steamy terms how he will go about seducing that man's wife ... with a little help from the husband, who will provide details of the woman's likes and dislikes, favourite music and books, etc - all designed to break down her resistance. It's pretty underhand, and I'm not sure too many marriages would survive the wife finding out how she'd been set up like that. Or maybe it would be balanced out by her guilt at falling into adultery and they'd call it evens - who knows? That's what Honey Trap is all about...
The country this story is set in isn't named, but it's Jordan, and the town is Aqaba. (They're staying in the Royal Aqaba hotel - which I did my best to make sure is not a real place.) That makes it, by the way, the first occasion I've set a story in a foreign location I hadn't actually been to at the time - I only visited Jordan a few months later. Aqaba, I found, is like Bournemouth but with better weather.
I actually overshot on the wordcount in the end, and - this being the first anthology - I was pretty worried it would count against the story. In fact the Black Lace editor e-mailed me to say he wanted an extra paragraph of "the money-shot" in the final sex scene. Blimey, I've never been told off before this for not being rude enough!
