"Thanks to my husband," she said with a touch of girlish sarcasm. "He left me flat, with no money and no warning. All I had after he skipped was what you see here." A complete fabrication – she'd never married any of the men she'd lived with.

"You were married?" he asked inanely.

"Too long," she replied. "And never again. Couples lie to each other more than strangers do, I think."

Her comment raised the intangible devil of Lonnie again, sweetly cooing her affection for her husband, while Roger was kept blissfully unaware of her adulterous relations while he was gone. He shook his head and drank heavily. Well, one thing was clear; Kim was no virgin, not having been married, and Roger bet mentally that this sweet young secretary-divorcee was one holy terror in bed. Just watching how she walked and smiled and smelled was irrefutable testimony to that…

"Excuse me, will you, Roger?" Kim asked, jumping up. "I want to get cleaned up and out of this old stuffy work dress. Do you mind!"

"No… no, of course not…" Roger blinked, for her "old work dress" was anything but stuffy – not with that second skin look it had as it clung to her voluptuous young body, and the way it stretched around her firm pointed breasts and ripe thighs. But he knew how women love to get rid of the reminders that they have to work; when Lonnie had been a salesgirl in a local department store during their first, poverty-stricken years of marriage, she'd been the same way.

Kim kept the door of her bedroom open so that she could continue to talk to Roger as she changed. He could hear the zip as she took her dress off, and he quickly drowned his imagination of her standing naked in there, a few feet away, by swallowing his gin and tonic. He looked down at his glass again, embarrassed. How stupid he'd feel if the lovely girl in the next room knew he was thinking such things? He drained his glass, and as the gin swirled in his stomach and fused through his blood, a strange confidence that he'd never possessed before seeped through him. He was a man, wasn't he? Why shouldn't he be excited by the lascivious thoughts of a pretty young girl naked?