Betrayal of the Virgin Bride

Chapter One-1

Chapter One

The Set-up

My fate began at twenty-two, when I stumbled upon George Gettys—a flashy older man of thirty-three with a wide grin, impeccable suits and an affectionate hands-on approach to wooing women. I was walking thoughtlessly, head down, along a busy city sidewalk, paying no attention to the throngs of smelly, worried, grimacing folk around me, when I ran smack into George’s left shoulder. I believe he might have been staring up at the sky at a flock of geese that were winging their way north. It was early spring. George abruptly turned around, indifferent to the rude jostling and smiled.

“I’m terribly sorry,” I immediately announced. “I guess I wasn’t looking where I was going.”

“Just as I was foolish enough to stand stock still in the middle of this crowd,” he replied with a whimsical smirk and a slight, gracious bow. As if in a time warp, we stood immobile, gazing for a moment at the people who hurried by, tucking their heads against the cold wind and scowling because they had to move around us.

Then we giggled. That was just the effect George had on me that so endeared him to me. Otherwise, there was little reason for me to give him a second thought. We were miles apart in temperament—he was lackadaisical while I was a serious workaholic. He was a man of the world and women while I was the straight-laced goody-two-shoes, a virgin and proud of it. He was the dreamer; I the pragmatist.

By the time I bumped into him, I’d been to several church-sponsored seminars telling me how to ward off his kind of smarmy, indolent charm, and fend off the lusty, yet inappropriate, innuendo that was certain to follow.

I had learned well. Being an attractive woman, I had to. Sometimes I cursed my looks—the big hazel eyes, chestnut-colored hair and trim build. I liked to smile because it seemed natural and gracious, kind and Christian. However, it was constantly misconstrued as taking an interest in the recipient, or worse, as a “come on.” I told myself this was my cross to bear; I would not capitulate on my ethics, which required that I put on a sunny disposition and friendly attitude toward everyone. I’m afraid that I also learned a cold shoulder technique—in one of those seminars—which was sometimes necessary for those men who jumped right on my friendliness as an invitation, who refused to accept my kind but firm regrets and move on.

At twenty-two, my life was a terrible struggle between what I believed myself to be and the quiet inner rumblings I had come to ignore. I thought I’d conquered the baser instincts of my sexually driven generation. But with George Gettys, I completely failed in my game plan to thwart obvious, scoundrel men. I knew from the moment I gazed into his heavy-lidded brown eyes that I was in for serious trouble. When he asked to me to coffee, following that first inadvertent exchange, I found that I was far too weak to make my usual excuses. How easily he wooed me from my intent. All it took for my carefully constructed world to crumble was one pair of sexy eyes adoring me and a hand lay tenderly on my shoulder as if it belonged there. In reply, my heart raced like some schoolgirl following her first crush. Ten minutes later, there I was, Sally Kettering, the relentless virgin, drinking coffee in a retro diner, seduced by the enemy of our kind, and too head-over-heels infatuated to realize it.

I suppose it was because George was so much older that he succeeded where other men failed. Perhaps I trusted his age. Where I’d never have given in to a younger man, for some reason I was willing to let my guard down with a more mature one. In any case, George succeeded in capturing my interest. I was smitten. With every disclosure he made about himself, and every explanation I gave him about who I was, with every bit of amusing banter and every shared smile, I found myself more deeply engrossed in him. At the same time, I felt a growing awareness of how he made every nerve in my body flush with excitement.

“I’m sure I’m not like you, Mr. Gettys,” I told him directly.

“And what is it you think I am?”

“A charming, very good-looking—”

“Thank you.”

“—somewhat insincere ladies’ man,” I said quite decisively.

He smiled, almost as if he would blush, he was so self-effacing. That really warmed me. “I’m afraid I’m all that. But I do try to be sincere, especially with women whom I don’t want to take advantage of—for example, a lady like you.”

“And what makes me different?”

“You have breeding,” he replied without thinking.

I very much liked that appraisal and blushed a bit myself.

The rest of the afternoon was a whir of hormonal activity, heart palpitations and prompt rationalizations for every red flag that waved before my glazed and delirious eyes. My staunch ethics lay in shambles and my defenses crumbled, invalidated by every heartfelt rejoinder George Gettys gave to the careful description I gave him of myself. I told him all the pertinent things, including my virgin status and why I thought it was so important to wait for the right relationship—and marriage—before a woman gave away her treasure.

He found my attitudes refreshing, amazing, remarkable, bracing… all adjectives he used throughout our conversation. He was particularly intrigued that I was not simply an uptight church girl, spouting what she’d heard in Sunday school, but that I’d carefully thought through my moral standard and held on fast because it was such a true reflection of my heart.

Had I so touched this man that he might change his ways? I had the audacity to wonder.

“So what could I possibly do with a man like you?” I pondered aloud. We’d already covered the fact that he was well experienced with women, which I took to mean he’d bedded at least a hundred by the time he was thirty.

“You can give me a chance,” he offered. “Spend some time with me. Let me prove to you that I’m more of a man than you expect me to be.”

Oh, I was so easily won. Fate had knocked at my door and I answered with a pleasant welcome.

George Gettys and I were engaged to be married six months later, after what I thought was a cautious, carefully controlled courtship. I was proud of myself, for as close, as intimate, as affectionate as we became, we did little more than hold hands, embrace and kiss.

Oh, don’t underestimate those kisses. They were distinct kisses, passionate kisses, filled with all the ardor of two people deeply in love. Of course, it was physical too. My body was on fire with just the thought of him. His physical presence engendered that unexplored untamed need in me until some days I thought I would self-immolate and my body turned to ash.

As driven as I had been for chastity and holiness, I struggled to recall pure thoughts, but more often spent those twilight moments prior to sleep lost in the fantasy of our first night in bed. It pained me how my mind could crudely twist what I anticipated to be an untainted expression of love. My imagination created pictures too raw, too steamy; too lust-filled to square with the innocent virginal precepts that previously inhabited my mind.

Would I ever confess this to George? Of course not! Even though I gave him my heart, I was always one step away from believing that he’d press me for s*x if I gave him even half a chance, that one small opening where he might pick apart my calculated Christian logic and sully me with a shameful seduction to betray everything I stood for.

Did I have so little faith in him, or was it faith in myself that was lacking?

I refused to entertain that question.

Toward the end of our engagement, I wore blinders—I suppose because I had to. A wedding to plan, even the smallest of affairs, takes time and emotion, which come in limited quantities. I knew that. If there were something wrong with the decisions I’d made up to that point—like the one to marry George Gettys—it was not the time dwell on doubt!

Even when Rikki Bowles came to see me, I blew her off with a lighthearted laugh.

“I really think you should know this,” the blowsy redhead said as she strolled to my table at the retro diner. George and I always met there for coffee on Thursday afternoons—a romantic gesture in honor of the day I bumped into him on the street. I was waiting, he was late, and Rikki had spotted me from her seat at the lunch counter. The slut was wearing a bright floral dress two sizes too small. The colors made me wince. Who’s to say that redheads shouldn’t wear orange and pink? She looked like a Christmas tree ornament. Any moment I expected her gaudy jewelry to blink like neon. Regardless of my instantaneous repulsion, I accepted her as graciously as I would my choir director and offered her the vacant seat in front of me.

I knew that George knew her—he’d explained the situation to me… a lonely night, sad news about his sister’s cancer, he’d needed her ‘massage therapy’. I knew they had s*x, and this was just his way of couching the truth. The fact that he didn’t lie about her was all that I required. And George absolutely never lied about his s****l past. He didn’t explain it all, but he never lied to me, and he always offered whatever information I asked for. This I believe to this day. His better self wanted me, and being the simple man he was, he knew that a difficult confession would score more points than a feeble attempt to mask the truth. Even more importantly, he knew I was intuitive enough to know if he fibbed.

“What is it I really should know?” I asked Rikki Bowles. She was fishing through her purse, which was the size of her generous hips, not finding what she was looking for, saying, “Oh, drat!”

“Something the matter?” I asked.

“No cigs,” she moaned.

“Well, it’s a no smoking table anyway,” I pointed out the sign right over our booth.

“Yeah, you’re right.” This seemed to perk her up, and her undulant body parts settled in comfortably, the way Jell-O settles in a dish.

“So you were saying…” I really did want to move this conversation along.

“I saw your boyfriend last night.”

“My fiancé, George?”

“Yeah, your boyfriend.”

“And…”

“The Pines Hotel,” that’s were George was living, “and there was a woman in his room.”

“You’re saying he was having s*x?” I went right to the point without appearing rattled.“No,” she shook her head, “didn’t say nothing about s*x. I mean they might have, might well have,” her made-up eyes got bigger for a moment before they dimmed, “but they didn’t have their clothes off or nuthin’.”

“So what are you implying?”

“You wouldn’t think that a guy about to be married would be carrying on with a woman in his hotel room, now would you?” she bit off rather sarcastically, her eyebrows now suspiciously raised.

I didn’t like the sound of it either, but I was a master of keeping my emotions in check.

“What were they doing?” I asked.

“Don’t really know. I only saw them together, ‘cause these two guys, really scary guys, knocked on his door as I was passing by. He answered and I could look right in.

“What do you mean by scary?”

“One was this big black guy—I mean really big… bald head, gold pinky ring, leather jacket, straight out of the movies…the other was Chinese, or Japanese, or something like that…I can’t never tell for sure. George called him Mr. Sun.”

“And why were they so scary? They may well have been George’s business associates.”

“Ya think so?” She was not at all convinced.

“That’s the likely explanation.” George worked with importers, brokering deals between foreign and American markets.

“And why would they come to his room at nine at night?” She was asking me as if I had an answer.

“I haven’t a clue, but then I’m sure there’s a reason.”

“You trust him, doncha, honey?”

“Of course. I’m marrying him.”

“You think a leopard can change his spots?”

“I know his reputation, Rikki. But you have nothing if you don’t trust a man.”

“All I’m saying is that it didn’t look good from where I was standing.” She was all out of tales to tell; and, I’m sure, wishing there were much more of a story. “Don’t say I didn’t warn you.”

“What, exactly, didn’t look good?” I tried to press her.

She shrugged, which made her great big body jiggle again. “Just a feelin, Miss Kettering. Just a feeling.”

She finally ambled to her feet. I could hear the bare skin of her thighs peeling away from the vinyl bench.

Then he was there, taking her place. George had seen us together so I had no way of extracting the untainted truth from him. But staying in character, he didn’t lie about anything.

“What did she want?”

“To tell me she’d seen you last night with a woman in your room…”

“And Mr. Sun knocking on my door?” he quickly added.

“Who’s Mr. Sun?”

“Ultimately, he’s my boss.”

“And he comes to your room at nine o’clock?” I sounded almost as skeptical as Rikki had been.

“It’s the nature of the business. I think you’d know that by now. My world doesn’t sleep.” He’d said that before and was saying it again a bit wearily. “Mary was there to take notes of the meeting, and Mr. Sun and Dac were filling me in on a shipment.”

“I’m not questioning you,” I chimed in. “Rikki was. I’m sure she thinks the worst.”

“And didn’t I call you at midnight for your kiss goodnight?” he reminded me, with his voice making almost imperceptible alterations toward the languid and sultry tone that so tickled my very anxious crotch.

“Oh, yes you did,” I answered with a gleaming smirk—wished I had the guts right then to suggest we forget formalities and get my virgin deflowering over with that afternoon. This was no way for me to be thinking, but I was getting used to the torrid pictures in my mind, and the squishy feeling in my panties and the way my untouched breasts ached for his caress. With our date pleasantly descending into the bantering of lovers, the incident with Rikki, the girl, Mary, and the two scary men was forgotten. I only mention it now because it was the only foreshadowing I would have of what would happen on our honeymoon.