A Well-Laid Trap: The Story Of A Professional Hotwife Read online

  A WELL-LAID TRAP

  The Story Of A Professional Hotwife

  By Arnica Butler

  *********

  Copyright 2016 by Arnica Butler

  All rights reserved. No duplicating and no resale, but

  feel free to share with friends or family.

  Published by Thirteenth Line Publications

  This book is a work of fiction. All characters, companies, organizations, products and events in this book, other than those that are clearly in the public domain, are fictitious, and any resemblance to real persons, living or dead, companies, organizations, events, or products, is purely coincidental.

  All characters depicted in this story are 18 years or older.

  Cover characters are models. Image(s) is/are licensed from:

  cokacoka / DepositPhotos

  Published by Thirteenth Line Publications

  Other Novels by Arnica Butler:

  The Hobby Job

  Ela's Performance: A Romantic Wife-Watching Novel

  Not Black And White: A Hotwife Novel

  A Gamble: The Making Of A Hotwife

  The Tenant: A Very Naughty Hotwife Novel

  The Hotwife Summer

  A Dark Place: Cuckolded in Lagos

  The Hotwife Tattoo

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  TABLE OF CONTENTS

  1: A Woman In A Bar

  2: Circumstantial

  3: Smooth

  4: Talk With Your Wife

  5: Doubt

  6: Paranoia

  7: Red-Handed

  8: Evidence

  9: Lie Lie Lie

  10: No Further Questions

  11: Conviction

  12: Photos

  13: CU Later

  14: Truth

  15: First Time

  16: Something Naughty

  17: Another First

  18: A Winner

  19: Inside The Honey Hole

  20: Afterward

  21: We All Know…

  More From Arnica Butler

  A WOMAN IN A BAR

  When I looked back over my shoulder at the woman who Douglas had been captivated by for the past five minutes, I noticed her left ankle first. It was bobbing and twisting in the air. A flirtatious ankle. Her shapely foot was encased in an expensive gray suede. Sultry cuts in the suede offered windows on her fresh, young skin and the delicious curve of her foot, but only a peek. The heel was long, just a tiny-bit higher than practical, ending in a spike that narrowed to an enticing point. The shoe was professional enough for an executive job. But sexy enough to belong, just as easily, to a high-class hooker.

  The suede shoe ended at her ankle, and I started moving my eyes up her calf. A shapely leg, long and athletic. It was all I could really see of her, besides a sliver of her back and the pleasant bubble of her ass on the bar stool.

  She had passed our booth from the back entrance. The smell of her had made me lift my eyes from the lengthy article Doug wanted me to look at. (The article impugned the whole county court system, and therefore me, in a money-grabbing crackdown on illegal immigrant DUIs.) By the time I looked up, I saw only a glimpse of shapely legs and a pricey skirt ending the view just above the knee. Again, the clothing was just past the point of absolute propriety. She had an efficient gait, but with a little swing to it, conveying confidence. When she had passed and I looked at Douglas, I could see from the expression on his face that the confidence was merited. He raised his eyebrows and let out a puff of air. “Jesus,” he said. “What I wouldn't do to get my hands on that...”

  I had decided I had to suffer through the article for another five minutes before it would not be ape-like to turn around and check her out. I tried to look as though I was looking for a waiter.

  I turned back to Douglas and expelled a puff of air much the same way he had. I hadn't seen much, but I liked what I saw.

  “Why don't women dress like that at our bar?” We had strayed from our usual watering hole, Riker's, precisely because women did not look like this, though neither of us had admitted it to the other.

  Douglas laughed. “Because those women are lawyers. They'll either eat your face to sit on the supreme court, or they're unshaven bleeding liberals saving gangsters and terrorists from DUIs.”

  I folded up the newspaper and smiled for him. He was most likely talking about Catherine Gates, who probably would eat anyone's face to sit on the Supreme Court, which we should all pray never happened. Doug's wife, curiously, was an “unshaven bleeding liberal.”

  It was hard to get a finger on the pulse of Doug's real political views.

  “It isn't like John Grisham novels,” he mused, truly working himself into a state of self-pity over the real-life ugliness of female attorneys.

  “How bad do you think this is?” I asked him, waving the newspaper around and trying to get back to the potentially career-ruining journalism in my hand.

  But Douglas was staring at the woman. Really, deeply, staring.

  I turned around again. Now she had rotated on her bar stool, and was tossing her hair. She had a lovely, auburn mane that reminded me of Jordan's hair from long ago. Her ass was turned toward us. Shapely, firm, not spreading at all beneath her weight on the stool, hard from some kind of constant exercise. She had a narrow waist. Every now and again, the momentum of her animated hands turned the stool outward, and we could see the contour of her very full breasts, pressing out on the expensive-looking worsted gray dress.

  She had taken up conversation with an absolutely thrilled fat gentleman next to her.

  “Hooker,” Douglas said.

  I turned back to him.

  “What?”

  “Ten to one, she's a hooker.”

  I rolled my eyes. Douglas saw hookers everywhere, probably because he sincerely hoped they were everywhere and eventually one would proposition him.

  “Look how fast she started talking to that guy.”

  “She's an attractive woman, Doug. Men talk to attractive women at bars.”

  “Yeah but, this guy, he is like a...a gnome, for fuck's sake. He's even uglier than me.”

  Our waitress, a twenty-something girl with a plain, Slavic face and an accent that made her seem perpetually bored, appeared in front of us. Rather than saying anything, she swept her eyes over the two of us, following Doug's eyes to the woman at the bar.

  She gave a small harrumph, and took out her booklet.

  “Another drink?” she asked. Her impenetrable face registered nothing.

  Doug, who never missed a chance to be an asshole, reached up and touched her elbow. “Anna, Anna, right?”

  Anna, whose name was stitched on her shirt, like everyone else who worked at this bar, looked down at him without changing her expression. She moved her elbow inward and out of his grasp in an almost unnoticeable, and clearly well-practiced movement.

  “You think that woman is a hooker?” Doug asked her, moving his head in the direction of the auburn beauty.

  Anna tossed her bangs from her eyes as she snapped her head in the woman's direction.

  “Redhairs?” she said. She turned back to us. “She's maybe hooker. Hooker is prostitute, right?” Her voice bore no sign of interest.

  Doug smiled. “Exactly.”

  Anna shrugged, the kind of Eastern shrug that had to be Russian, because there were no other people on earth who could give less of a fuck. “Maybe. You are finishe
d, yes?”

  Anna didn't wait for the answer. She took our glasses and slid away to the bar to get our tab.

  “Why is she talking to this fat bastard, if she isn't a hooker?” Douglas said.

  I pinched the bridge of my nose. My mind was returning to the article, and how much of it I knew to be true. I had no idea how Doug could keep his mind on anything else.

  “She's like, really laughing at him,” he continued.

  I started to shake my head.

  And that's when I heard it.

  The lilting, sweet clatter that is – unmistakably – the somewhat embarrassing, but very endearing, cackle of none other than one Jordan Isabella Goodall.

  My wife.

  A cold fist clamped down on my heart, and my breath caught in my chest. My limbs turned to stone.

  The images I had just seen slammed against the walls of my mind. The auburn hair, the pretty ankle, the nice ass.

  Impossible.

  The expensive shoes, the expensive suit.

  The hand inside my chest relaxed.

  And then there it was again.

  Chirp-chirp-cackle-chirp.

  Anna the waitress set a slip of paper on our table and looked off to the side, with her hand in her pockets.

  I was still frozen. Douglas frowned at me, and I watched him fish out his wallet with great, exaggerated moves. My mind was a million miles away, trying to sift through the voices in the bar and single out the voice of the auburn-haired woman.

  The one who looked so much like my wife.

  But most importantly, sounded exactly like her.

  “You okay buddy?” Douglas said. “Bad oysters? You look pale. Fuck. You can't trust this place. You gonna puke?”

  I was silent.

  My heart was taking over my body and my thoughts. Thunk, thunk, thunk. Rapid, heavy. Blood was filling my ears, drowning out the sounds around me.

  Douglas was peering at me.

  My attorney brain, a little shocked, sputtered to life.

  You have to talk to yourself sometimes. When something terrible happens right there in the courtroom. Right there in front of the jury, and you can't act like everyone else would, and say “Fuck!” and kick a trash can. This situation was trash-can kicking fucked, so I let my inner voice speak to me.

  Get it under control, Paddy.

  Analyze.

  Analyze.

  FACT:

  There is a woman at the bar who looks like Jordan. This woman appears to be flirting with a man.

  FACT:

  You do not know this woman is Jordan.

  FACT:

  If it is Jordan, you do not want Douglas to know she is here.

  Cheating on you.

  My heart plummeted at the thought.

  God, with a fat man.

  STOP.

  FACT:

  You do not know that if the woman is Jordan, she is cheating on you.

  FACT:

  The last thing you need is scandal, either way.

  Act.

  In a courtroom, when things go horribly awry, the best bet is to find a way out. Throw out something crazy, flummox the judge, get a recess.

  You can think about your problem later.

  The key is to get out.

  The immediate problem, then, was not the woman at the bar, but how to get out of this bar without Doug seeing the woman at the bar.

  In the event the woman was Jordan.

  Stop.

  Whether it is Jordan or not is not your problem right now.

  Act.

  Use your opponent's assumptions against him.

  Doug thinks you're sick.

  That was it.

  That was the ticket.

  Act.

  My heart slowed. The actor in me, the courtroom actor, took over my body.

  I pounded on my chest. “I think...I think I need to get back to the office,” I said. “I feel...not so good.”

  We had to pass the woman at the bar to get out the front door. I going to keep Douglas from looking back at her, and seeing that it was Jordan. Or wasn't Jordan. But either way.

  Anna the waitress was still waiting for her money, hands in the pockets of her apron. Her face revealed not a trace of sympathy or interest for my illness.

  Douglas paid her, with two fifties, and she took them without asking if we needed change, securing a twenty-five dollar tip for herself.

  “Let's go,” I said. I stood up. I wanted Douglas in front of me, but it was going to take some doing.

  I started to squeeze through the packed bar and the booths that jutted into the walkway behind them, and then I stopped abruptly. I squeezed back past Doug and leaned into our booth, pretending to have forgotten something. This put Doug ahead of me as we started forward again.

  Keep your goal in mind, don't get distracted by your curiosity.

  Was it Jordan?

  Get out.

  Think later.

  Later you can think on why your wife is dressed like a high-class hooker in a downtown bar when she should be at home.

  We walked past the woman. Jordan. Whatever.

  Act.

  I looked down and behind me as I passed her, and I pushed Doug forward at the same time. I glimpsed her knees, one crossed over the other, the small hips on the leather seat, the large, very shapely tits, hanging in the expensive fabric like a rounded shelf. My eyes got as far as the hair at her shoulders, when I felt the great momentum of Douglas' large body turning on me.

  He wanted to see her face. Who wouldn't?

  Act.

  I lurched forward, pressing him toward the door. “Oh god,” I said. “I'm going to be sick,” I said. I faked a little gurgle in the back of my throat. “Go!”

  Douglas, it could be counted on, was terrified of vomit, ever since a guy had barfed on him back when he first started working at the DAs and spent the whole day bargaining D&Ds and DUIs in the basement of the courthouse. It had been a fiasco. The puke, full of blood, got in his eyes. He had to get tested for HIV.

  So, as I had known he would, he moved of his own volition and didn't look back.

  He even kicked the front door open. I could feel him gathering speed, trying to get as far away from me as possible. The Mile, where we were, was a firetrap hovel with only one door in front and no windows onto the street. I could get out of here without Doug seeing my wife.

  If she was my wife.

  And think on this another time.

  But at the last moment, I threw caution to the wind, and let curiosity get the better of me.

  Because how could I not?

  I turned to face the closing door.

  I caught only a second of the image, before the door swung closed. The pretty woman, her face turned to the bar as she spoke, her hand on her jaw. Glittering, beautiful, sexy as hell.

  But was it Jordan?

  I checked off the things that looked exactly like Jordan:

  Long, auburn hair.

  Nose, dainty.

  Beautifully wrought features, small except for the pouty lower lip.

  Large breasts, as improbable as they were on her thin frame.

  Was it Jordan?

  There was room for error.

  There were things that were Not-Jordan:

  Bright make-up.

  Long, straight hair. Not in a bun.

  A fragrance, decidedly un-her.

  And finally, time and place: wrong, wrong, wrong.

  I stared at the closed door, and I remembered to clutch my stomach for Doug's benefit.

  I pretended to retch.

  This was not happening.

  “Okay. No, the fresh air has me feeling better,” I said.

  Douglas was frowning at the door. “Let's get out of here,” he said. His voice had ceased to be disappointed by the end of his sentence. Doug's life, after all, consisted of disappointment after disappointment.

  We walked back to the office. I was glad to have the lie of feeling sick to cover up my need to be inside my
own thoughts.

  The woman in the bar certainly looked like Jordan. And Jordan, with her huge tits, her small frame, and her very particular shade of red hair, was not an easy woman to look like. How many women looked like her? Almost none.

  I looked at Douglas.

  He would have said something, if it had occurred to him that the woman was Jordan. Douglas was blatherer. He was embarrassingly indiscreet.

  So:

  I thought this woman looked like Jordan. But Doug, who had the view of her all that time, and had not hidden the fact that he was staring, had not said: “Hey, that looks like your wife.”

  I almost stepped in front of a light rail train. Doug pressed his big hand against my chest. “Jesus,” he said. “Paddy, man. You look sick as fuck.”

  I shook my head.

  Yet...Doug had only ever met Jordan a few times. Usually she had her hair in a bun. Usually she had no makeup on.

  But...Jordan didn't have anything in her wardrobe that expensive. There was that.

  (Unless she was keeping it from me. There was that.)

  It was a wash.

  A wash of circumstantial shit.

  I shook my head and tisked aloud.

  But why would she go, if she were having an affair, to a bar so close to my office, where her chances of getting caught were so much higher?

  I rubbed my forehead with the back of my thumb.

  It couldn't be her.

  CIRCUMSTANTIAL

  When we got to the office, I went to the private bathroom two floors down, where some kind of accounting was done, and called her on my cell.

  As the phone rang I stared upward at the pipes that ran like arteries through the whole building, and carried conversations with them. Stupid.

  Oh well. She would answer, I would talk, Doug would ask me why I wanted to talk to my wife while I was puking, and that would be that.

  This whole thing was silly. Jordan would answer, and I feel like an ass.

  The phone purred in my ear, over and over. Click.

  Hi -

  and for a nanosecond my heart leaped with relief -

  - you've reached Jordan Goodall with Arest Greene. I'm unavailable to take your call, please leave me a message with your callback number and the best time to reach you.

  “Okay,” I said to myself. I pressed “End.”