The Wives of Beverly Row 2: Lust Has a New Address by Abby Weeks

I
    V ERONICA WAS SURPRISED AT HOW excited she felt. She thought there was nothing Hank could do in the bedroom that would excite her. She’d written him off as a complete failure as far as sexual gratification was concerned. But kneeling there on her bed with her back to the man she’d been married to for six years, waiting for him to take her, she felt suddenly aroused.
    “You ready?” Hank said.
    She swayed her butt left and right in answer. Hank was holding a bottle of lotion and he poured some onto his hand. Veronica held her breath as she waited for what was coming. It had been a very long time since she’d had any kind of thrilling sexual encounter and now it was coming from the one place she’d least expected it, her husband.
    Twelve years ago, Veronica had married the sexiest man she’d ever met in her life. She’d been in Barcelona at the time, working at one of the best restaurants in the city. Cooking had always been Veronica’s passion and after her first marriage failed, she’d taken her life by the reins and made her way to Europe. Kyle was living with his father at the time and she had no other children so she was as free as she was ever likely to get. Veronica had always dreamed of opening a restaurant so she decided to work in as many kitchens as possible while she travelled through Spain and learned the culture. In Andalusia she learned the secret of making perfect gazpacho . In the Sierra d’as Zucas she learned how to prepare lamb for the region’s famous asado de ternasco . And in Barcelona she got a job at a small and highly regarded three-hundred year old restaurant close to the harbor. The place was like something out of a storybook. Over six months she learned everything there was to know about Catalan cuisine, from grilling vegetables for escalivada to salting cod for esqueixada . She also learned that she was a lot more adventurous than she’d ever imagined. Within a month of getting to the city she’d fallen in love with her head chef, a man a little older than her called Alejandro de Gràcia. They were married soon after and spent their honeymoon on the French Riviera. It was during that time Veronica learned just how much fun sex could be. Alejandro did everything to her. On a beach at Cap d’Agde she let him fuck her in front of a crowd of Dutch nudists. At a nightclub in Saint Tropez he had anal sex with her while she sucked off a young Frenchman she’d never seen before in her life and had never seen since. During the year she was married to Alejandro she tried everything, his appetite for her knew no bounds, and she realized that she loved being dominated and possessed by a strong man who knew exactly what he wanted. She also realized that anal sex could give a woman a kind of orgasm that she’d never even known was possible. It wasn’t something she spoke about often, but Veronica was convinced she’d discovered in anal sex a secret to attaining the perfect orgasm that other women didn’t know about.
    All of that seemed to her like a different life, a life that had happened to a different person. She’d married Alejandro when she was thirty-five and they were divorced the following year. It was one of those relationships that was never destined to last very long. She came back to Los Angeles and Kyle moved back in with her. A year and a half with his father had been more than enough. For the next five years she tried to gather up the nerve to open her own restaurant. She’d wanted to use all the skills and techniques she’d learned in Spain, but it never materialized. Financially things had been tight. She couldn’t get the funds together. She also found that there was no way she could continue the flamboyant sex life she’d grown accustomed to in Europe, not as a single mother living in Topanga. When she met Hank Roycroft at the restaurant she waitressed for she was ready to settle down. And that’s what she did. She settled.
    Hank was good to her, he was good to