“If I send you the photos, would you be able to tell me who took them?”
“Of course. It’s going to kill me, but I’ll know who betrayed me the second I see them,” she said as she began to cry harder. “I think I need to get out of here and go home. I’m a fucking wreck.”
“I think that’s a good idea. We don’t need anyone in the office to know what is going on. Give me your personal email address because I don’t want these pictures to go through our server at the office.”
Within five minutes, I had added her personal email address to my Outlook file and forwarded the photographs to her. Now, all we had to do was wait for her to call us back.
Shannen was quiet, and I was wondering what she was thinking. “Well, what do you think?”
She shook her head and frowned. “I feel sorry for her. She is crushed and horribly embarrassed. She trusted some bastard, and he betrayed her. Guys like that should be castrated.”
“I think they should have their dicks cut off,” I said angrily.
“I can tell you one thing for sure. She is going to need your support to get through this. I think that she has had a thing for you for a long time, and now, this has destroyed her. You’re probably the last person in the world she wanted to see her naked unless you were to ask, which you had better not do,” she said giving me a rather stern look.
Forty-five minutes later, I received Catherine’s call. I placed the phone on the desk and tapped the speaker icon. “Hi, Catherine, I was starting to worry about you. Are you okay?”
“No, I’m not okay,” she said between labored sobs and sniffles. “I’m going to resign, Alex. I just can’t be around you now. Not after you’ve seen me like that.”
“I won’t hear of you resigning. I won’t accept it. Listen, no one needs to know about this but us. We’ll fix this some way.”
“I could never look you in the eyes again. It would be too painful.”
“Listen, you have nothing to be ashamed of. You haven’t done anything wrong. I have seen a lot of women in my life, and believe me, you are gorgeous from one end to the other,” I said as Shannen gave me a sour look. I winced and shrugged my shoulders.
She was quiet, not saying anything for a long time. She finally cleared her throat. “It is someone that I broke up with two weeks ago. I’ve been going out with him secretly for about a year, and he was beginning to get too possessive and demanding of my time. When I told him that I didn’t want to see him any longer, he went a little nuts and began to beg me not to break up with him. The whole thing scared me, so I told him to leave. I guess this was his way of getting back at me, and I have no idea how he got access to the pictures.”
“Okay, can you tell me who it is? He has broken both state and federal laws, and if I were to press charges, he could go to prison for a long time.”
“This is so embarrassing, Alex, but it was Paul Angelo from our marketing firm.”
“What!” I exclaimed, causing her to begin crying again. I winced in pain as Shannen slugged me hard in the ribs. I gave her a dirty look, and she gave me a worse one.
“I’m sorry, Catherine. I was just surprised, that’s all. Hell, half of the married people at the plant met there, and the other half just played around for a while. I don’t care about stuff like that as long as everyone gets their work done.”
“I know, but part of my embarrassment is because he is so young, young and unstable,” she whimpered.
“Believe me; I’m going to fix his ass so that he will wish he had never heard of your name.”
“I just want him to leave me alone.”
“Oh, he will leave you alone alright. At this point, it doesn’t matter, and it’s really none of my business, but I’m curious why you started seeing him in the first place.”
“I felt sorry for him. He seemed so sad and so lonely. He had never been with a woman before. He was scared to death of having sex because he didn’t know anything about it. So, like a fool, I took pity on him and taught him about sex. He’s been coming over to my apartment once or twice a week for about a year until two weeks ago when I terminated our relationship.”
I had been watching Shannen grow more and more angry by the second. Her face was red and contorted, and I thought she would explode.
“I’m sorry, Catherine. I know this has been very painful for you. Please know that I will get the photographs that he has of you. I will destroy them, and when we are finished with him, I will destroy the ones that I have as well. You don’t have to be ashamed around me because I care about you a lot. You are one of my favorite people, and I won’t let you go, not because of something like this.”
“Thank you, Alex. I’m exhausted, and I think that I need a good, long cry,” her voice cracking.
“I want you to call in tomorrow and take a week off. You need it. You never take all of your vacation days, and I’ve never known you to be sick, so take the rest of the week off, okay?”
“Okay, I don’t think I could stand it if he were to come to the office for some reason right now.”
I chuckled menacingly. “Don’t worry; he will never be back at our offices.”
She sighed with a soft whine. “Oh, good, that’s a relief.”
“I have to go now, Catherine. You get some rest, and remember, you are one of my favorite people. I will see to it that you are taken care of and are safe, okay?”
“Yes, Alex. Thanks. Bye, bye.”
Chapter Twelve
The second I tapped the off button, Shannen screamed, “I want that lying bastard’s balls. Not only should he not return to your offices, he should be fired.” She was seething, she was so mad. “The prick was telling both women the same lie and then punished them when they tried to break up with him.”
“Okay, calm down. We have to figure out what we need to do and then do it quickly.”
“The first thing you need to do is call that lecherous old bastard Tony and tell him that his nephew is no longer welcome at your offices so that you can protect Catherine.”
I called him immediately.
“Well, hello, Alex. This is a pleasant surprise.”
“No, it’s probably not going to be so pleasant, Tony. I want you to listen and listen carefully. Your nephew, Paul, is no longer welcome at any of our offices, and I don’t want him involved in any of our ad campaigns.”
“But what …”
“Just listen, Tony. He is not to contact any of my people on or off the job. Is that clear?”
“B … but, Alex, what in the world happened? What did he do?”
“You will have to ask him. Just remember, if he violates any of my instructions, your firm will be terminated immediately. Do you understand?”
“Yes, but …”
I hung up on him before he could respond. We sat there for a few minutes trying to calm down.
About twenty minutes later, I received a call from Nancy, and I knew that it couldn’t be good. I looked quickly at Shannen. “I should have called Nancy before I talked to Tony to give her a heads up.”
She nodded. “Yeah, probably. Let’s see what she wants. Besides, we need to fill her in on what an asshole she has been sleeping with.”
I shook my head and tapped her number. “Hi, Nancy. What’s up?”
The first thing we heard was a sniffle, so we knew immediately that she was upset about something. “Alex, Tony just fired me. He told me that you forbid Paul to come to your offices any longer. Why would you do such a thing? I told you that he was a good kid and that he wasn’t the one who sent the photographs.
“Paul told Tony the only reason he could think of as to why you would be so mad at him was because he had been having sex with me. He said that you were jealous of him because you and I had been having sex as well. So, basically, Tony fired me for having sex with you and with his nephew.”
“I’m sorry, Nancy. I really screwed up by not calling you before I called Tony. Paul has been lying to you. He has been lying to everyone. You need to g
et out of there and go home. We will call you later and give you all of the details. But the short version is that he lied to you about being a virgin when you first met him. He used that line just to get into your panties. He did the same thing to Catherine, in our office, and he has been having sex with her for a little over a year now. He told her the same story that he told you. He told her that he was a virgin and talked her into teaching him about sex.”
“What? This all sounds so impossible. I can’t believe it. I just can’t believe it.”
“She cut him off two weeks ago, so he took out his anger on her by sending me ten photographs of her naked. He sent them anonymously, thinking that I wouldn’t find out who it was. Naturally, I called her to see if she knew anything about it. She needed to see the pictures, so I sent them to her. When she saw them, she knew immediately that Paul had sent them because he is the one who took them. At that point, she told me everything.”
She sighed loudly. “I can’t believe that he would lie to me. Not after all …” She said, stopping in midsentence, her voice trailing off.
I thought for a moment that she must be devastated and hoped that she wouldn’t be too terribly hurt.
“Listen, I’m going to call Catherine and have her call you so the two of you can compare notes. The problem is that she doesn’t know about you having sex with Paul yet because I wanted to speak with you first to make sure you didn’t mind if I told her. Well, it’s too late for that now because she needs to know what he has done, and the two of you need to talk. I’m going to give her a quick call now, so I think that you should expect a call from her in a few minutes.”
“Alex, this is so fucking incredible that if anyone else had told me this, I wouldn’t have believed them. But coming from you, I know that it has to be the truth.”
“Okay, you need to get out of there now because I think that Paul is unstable. If he is capable of sending me photographs of Catherine nude, he might be capable of almost anything.
“Okay, okay, I’ll leave right away, but I’m in shock. How could I have been so wrong about him?”
“I don’t know, but he is a narcissistic con man and an asshole. Oh, yes, there’s one more thing. Right after I talk to Catherine, I’m going to call Tony again and fire his fucking firm for firing you, so you probably don’t want to be there twenty minutes from now.”
When we hung up, I called Catherine. I told her about Nancy and explained what she had been going through with Paul. I explained that I was going to dismiss their marketing firm for letting Nancy go, and that I wanted her to call Nancy as soon as she could so they could compare notes. She was dumbfounded by all of the sudden developments, but she couldn’t wait to talk to Nancy.
Next, I called Tony and told him that his firm was finished. I explained what Paul had done to Catherine and told him that he had better keep his mouth shut about it. I also told him that he had better control that fucking nephew of his because if he didn’t, I would see to it that he was prosecuted for what he had done.
He tried to plead with me, but his pleas fell short. He actually begged me, saying that we were his largest account and that it would seriously hurt the firm. I told him that I couldn’t be more pleased and that I would fire him and Paul, if I could.
After I had hung up on him, I had to call Michael and explain the reasons why we no longer had a marketing firm. I asked him to keep those reasons confidential because I didn’t want to cause Catherine any further embarrassment. Actually, I was afraid she would quit if the information somehow leaked out to her fellow employees.
It took us about a half an hour and a couple glasses of wine to finally calm down.
Shannen’s mood slowly improved, but I could tell that she was still upset. She finally grinned and clinked her glass against mine. “You have had one hell of an afternoon. Somewhere along the line, we forgot to have lunch,” she chuckled. “I guess you were just having too much fun. At the end of the day, there is just one thing that bothers me, though.”
“What’s that, honey?”
“That lecherous old bastard and his perverted, fucking nephew do not deserve to keep their jobs. You told him that you would fire both of them, if you could. Would you really like to?”
“I would love nothing more.”
She smiled widely at me. “Then let’s fire those two assholes.”
She picked up the phone and called her accountant. She gave him the marketing firm’s name and told him that she wanted him to evaluate it and buy it even if they had to pay more than it was worth. She also told him that they just lost their largest client, which is why they might be interested in selling.”
She laughed. “Business pretty much bores me because it just isn’t that much fun, but that felt good. Tell me, do you think that Nancy would be capable of running the firm?”
“For the last three or four years, she’s the only one that has been involved with their clients. Tony and Paul spend most of their time on the golf course and having two martini lunches. There is no doubt in my mind that she can run it. Besides,” I chuckled, “with her at the helm, they will get their largest client back,” I said as we both laughed.
“Good. I can’t wait to see the look on his face when she goes in and fires him for sex discrimination in the workplace.”
“You would actually do that for Nancy?”
“Yes, she didn’t deserve what happened to her, and those guys need to go. Besides, it looks like it’s going to be a good investment because it will be undervalued since they lost their best client,” she giggled.
“I don’t think that you will ever be disappointed in her performance. She is a hard worker, and I can’t wait until you can tell her.”
“I don’t know about you, but I’m hungry and I’m horny. I’ve been horny since this morning when I was rolling your balls around in my hand,” she grinned.
“I know what. Let’s go downtown near your office and eat at that new Italian restaurant you were talking about that was supposed to be so romantic. After dinner, maybe we can take a few minutes, and you can show me your office. You’ve described it, but I’ve never seen it, and I would like to get a better feel for where you work.”
“That’s perfect. We can park at the office and walk to the restaurant. On the way home, I’ll show you where I spend three or four days a month,” she laughed.
******
The restaurant was absolutely gorgeous. It was richly decorated with an old-world, Italian ambiance. The walls were covered with dark, raised-paneled oak from floor to ceiling. The ceiling was covered with embossed tin that had been distressed to look as though it were over a hundred years old. The gas sconces on the walls were giving their small, private dining areas a look of pure, Italian romance. Each room had three booths that were positioned so that none of the diners could see the other tables. It was as if you had your own private room.
The booths were elegant and cozy, capable of sitting six people. The table was made of solid, dark-brown oak that matched the walls. They were covered with white, lightly-starched, linen tablecloths that hung down to your lap and had a two-candle candelabrum at its center. The seats were covered with a reddish-maroon leather that had been distressed so that it looked as though it would need to be replaced in a couple of years.
The chargers and plates were made of bone china. The goblets were crystal and the flatware, sterling. The walls were covered with late, eighteenth-century photographs of small towns and rural farming communities throughout Italy, giving the rooms a warm, romantic feeling.
I requested a booth at the back of our dining area, so no one, other than our waiter, would be walking by to disturb us. She slid in the booth with me right behind her.
We had no more than sat down when our server introduced himself. “Hi,” he said affectionately, “my name is Stanley, and I will be your server this evening. Can I get you something to drink?”
We said hello to Stanley, and I ordered a bottle of Sauvignon Blanc. When he left to fetch our wine,
she gave me a sweet, sultry look and scooted up close, our thighs firmly touching.
She was stunning that evening with her long, gently-curled, auburn hair hanging loosely over her golden-brown shoulders. She was wearing a white blouse with a black skirt and a matching jacket. The first two buttons of her blouse were undone letting the top swell of her cleavage glimmer in the reflected light of the gas sconces and the candles.
“This is very romantic,” she whispered looking up at me, her lips slightly parted and moist, begging to be kissed.
“I can’t resist your lips,” I moaned as I slowly leaned into her. Just before our lips touched, I noticed a thin band of saliva stretching between her lips. “Oh, God, baby, you are scary sexy,” I moaned as I gently placed my lips to hers.
Her lips were luscious and full; her mouth wet and warm; her tongue eager and supple. Our embrace lasted longer than we had intended because when we finally parted, Stanley was standing there, waiting to pour our wine. “I’m sorry for just standing here, but that was so beautiful that I couldn’t bear to interrupt you.”
She giggled. “That’s okay. We shouldn’t be making out in the restaurant anyway, but this place is so romantic and his lips taste so good,” she said as she gently kissed me again.
He poured our wine and placed the menus on the table next to our chargers. After telling us about their specials, he turned to walk away but hesitated for a moment. “Excuse me, but if you like, I will tell our staff not to disturb you, and I will be the only one that will come back to cater to your needs. That way, you won’t have an endless throng of busboys and servers coming by to see if you need anything. It’s just a suggestion to make your dining experience with us more pleasurable,” he smiled warmly.
“That would be very nice. Thank you, Stanley,” I replied with the same generous smile.
She took a sip of wine and leaned her supple lips up toward mine. I bent down and took the wine from her mouth savoring it for a moment before swallowing. That sexy little gesture gave me an immediate erection. I took a sip and placed my lips to hers, and she sucked it into her mouth. She slowly swallowed, leaned into me, and licked a tiny drop off my lower lip with a lustful groan.
Mistaken Identity Page 25
