He Loved Lucy

"Are you going to visit with her parents?"

"Hell, no! There's no chance of me doing that. After all, they knew about the fake wedding conspiracy and they never really warmed to me, so fuck 'em. No. I'll not go see them."

Rhiannon was smiling as she scooted closer to David and rested her head against his shoulder. "Rhiannon, there's something about the wedding reception that I remember. You spoke very firmly to Lucy. What did you say to her?"

"I told her that if she ever did anything to hurt you that she'd have to answer for it."

"Why did you think she'd maybe do something to hurt me? I mean, yeah, she did do something to hurt me, but how'd you figure she might or would?"

"David, I'm a Witch, from my mother's side of my family. The females in my family are all Wise Women, or Gwraig ddoeth, I think is the Welsh term. One of the powers I have is that I can see auras of people, animals and some plants. Lucy's aura proved to me that she wasn't at all what she appeared to be. She looked like an angel, but she was anything but.

"The only other person who I'd ever seen with an aura like Lucy's was someone I knew years ago who had a clinical diagnosis of narcissism. Of course, there wasn't anything I could do but warn Lucy off from hurting you. It's a sad thing, but she obviously didn't heed my warning."

"What'll happen to her now?" David asked, a note of concern in his voice.

"Nothing she doesn't deserve. Oh, I haven't put a curse on her, if that's what's worrying you, or anything like that. If there is a curse on her, it's one she has put on herself. You can't go around fucking people over like she has fucked you over without any consequences befalling you. That's not how things work in the universe. God doesn't like it.."

He nodded."Yeah, I guess that makes sense to me."

Rhiannon giggled. "This has certainly turned into an interesting Christmas Day for me. I'm not one for doing much celebrating on Christmas Day, but a voice prompted me to buy in some special foods to put together a traditional Welsh Christmas feast, even though I wasn't planning on having guests. So, would you like to eat?"

He laughed and said, "And somehow my feet were directed here, so I think forces were working on us!"

They ate their fill of a number of Christmas foods that Rhiannon told David her Welsh born Grandfather insisted must always be a part of the Christmas feasting, washed down with mulled cider and imported bottled Welsh ale.

Rhiannon looked at David, gave him a coquettish smile, and said,, "And there's something else I bought, too. Some mistletoe!"

She presented the mistletoe with a flourish and held it up. Grinning, David reached for her and they kissed.

Then they kissed again and Rhiannon sat back on the sofa, opened her legs, she was wearing a mini skirt, and giggling, she held the sprig of mistletoe over her crotch.

David quickly maneuvered his mouth toward her white panties and kissed her crotch. Suddenly her panties were soaking wet and she gasped. "I was only teasing you. I never expected..."

David interrupted her, whilst smiling. "You don't want me to do that again?"

"Yes! Please! Yes!"

He shifted her panties to one side and began licking and kissing her vagina. After a minute she quipped, "Can we have a brief pause whilst I remove my panties?"

David went down on Rhianon again, firmly but gently taking her clitoris between his teeth, rapidly licking it with his tongue.

After several minutes of his ministrations, she orgasmed, gasping. "Whew!" This is most definitely not how I expected to be spending my Christmas afternoon!"

She sat up, rubbed David's crotch, and said, "Your turn, now, David. But why don't we take this to my bedroom?" Which they did.

Quickly they were both naked and she tenderly but with meaning sucked on his penis, swirling her tongue round and round his glans.

After a couple of minutes, he spoke to her. "Please, can we make love now?"

She nodded, and said, "I'd love that."

He frowned. "The thing is... I don't have any condoms. So I'll have to withdraw before I come?"

She shook her head, grinned and said, "By pure coincidence, I don't have any condoms, either! But when I make love with my man he doesn't waste his seed, he comes off inside me, okay?"

He nodded and hugged her, saying, "I'll be your man, so you are my woman?" She nodded.

They made love and climaxed together. They made love twice more before they dozed, waking up several hours later.

After they bathed together in the apartment's whirlpool bath, they dried off, put on their clothing and loafed around in the living room cuddling, eating holiday food, or Christmas food as Rhiannon called it, and drinking more wine and chatting.

"Are you glad you didn't visit with Lucy's parents today?"

David grinned and said: "And miss what's turned out to be the best Christmas day in my life? No way! Besides, I don't think I'd have been able to face them, in all honesty. They knew I was only a stand-in husband for Lucy so I don't know who would have been more embarrassed, them or me?"

Rhiannon shrugged and said "You weren't a stand-in husband. You were a stunt husband!" They both laughed and after finishing off the wine, retired to bed both stunned by how different their Christmases had turned out to be.

The next morning over breakfast they were chatting.

"You told me that Lucy said you could continue living in her house? How fucking generous of her!"

David smiled and said: "Yeah, how generous of her! But as you'd expect, I don't intend to take up her offer. It's a pity I sold my apartment. If the bitch hadn't let me sell it, I could possibly have moved back there. But now I'll have to go through the hassle of calling real estate agents and letting agents."

Rhiannon nodded, saying, "But then she'd have had to come up with a plausible reason for you not selling your apartment without giving the game away. Anyway, there's no need to call real estate agents or letting agents, I have masses of room here in my apartment. It covers the entire upstairs of the building the bar is in. So, why not move in here? I'm not being pushy but to my way of thinking, the quicker you distance yourself from those evil bastards, the better!"

"Thanks, I really appreciate that. When can we get my stuff? I'll hire a van and get it moved whenever."

She shook her head. "I can help with that. You remember my friend Jill? No? Oh, no matter! Jill has set up a moving business called Jill and Son. They do house and apartment moves, deliveries and such. I'll give her a call, see when she'll be available. Anyway, she's a friend and will do a pretty good 'buddy price' for us."

And so it was that Jill and her son Brian came that evening and moved David's clothing, his college degree, his personal effects, important papers, his computer and that was that. His life of the past three years all boxed up (Jill and Son were pros, they bought collapsable boxes with them on such jobs) and deposited them in a storage room at Riannon's apartment.

They all had a drink back at the bar and whilst they chatted David realized that had met Jill before. It was the way she laughed that had clued him in.

The next day was a work day for the Y Bar. Rhiannon had set the hours of the bar midweek from 4PM until midnight. She employed a couple of cooks, a pair of duty managers and some bar staff.

After having run the Y Bar for 10 years, she was now able to leave the day-to-day operation of it to her staff. She left David upstairs sorting out the stuff he'd bought from Lucy's townhouse as she went through the bar's food and drink orders for the coming week and agreed to the proposed staff rota making several amendments as she saw fit.

Mid afternoon, David and Lucy stopped for a snack, which quickly became a making out session and then more glorious lovemaking.

They bathed in the apartment's whirlpool bath and afterwards as they finished their snacks, David said, "Rhiannon, I don't know about how you feel about things, but to me it seems crazy. It's almost as if the last three years of my life either never happened or were just a bad dream. And I feel like I have just woken up and this" his hands swept round the room in an expansive gesture "is my real reality, for want of a better term, where I should really be. Does that seem crazy to you? Or not?"

Rhiannon shook her head. "Weirdly, no. It all seems right to me, too. Like this is what should be happening. It's as if the Universe has done a reset and turned everything right side up again."

Over the next several weeks things rapidly changed between them. It was never really a traditional landlady and tenant relationship in the first place, but to them and the people who knew them, it was obvious that this was no mere fling, that what they were witnessing was real, true love.

Although under normal circumstances getting married only two months into a relationship would have been considered strange or crazy, they both knew that for them, the whole situation was perfectly normal.

As Rhiannon put it: "When the universe or God gives you the opportunity of a reset or a do over, we'd be idiots to fail to grasp that opportunity, wouldn't we?"

David proposed to Rhiannon in a very traditional way, on one knee, and she accepted. The rings were bought from a local jewelry store in a tiny strip mall a block down from the Y Bar, and most certainly not from the snobbish high end jewelry store Solarise Helve.

The wedding was held at St David's Church in the city, which was the church Riannon attended. It had been founded in the late 19th century when Welsh slate miners had been brought to the state to work in a largely failed attempt to mine slate locally.

Even though the slate mine hadn't worked out, the Welsh-speaking miners and their families had remained in the area, and even at present, Welsh was still spoken by a sizable minority of their descendants and several times a year Welsh language services were celebrated in the church.

Two months after the wedding, Riannon became pregnant and David and she could not have been happier.

Elsewhere, however, Lucy was finding the life of the wife of an International billionaire not as fulfilling as she had thought it would be.

Yes, there was the private island which was part of the 180 or so islands of Bermuda, and the 20 houses in the USA, Europe and several other places, plus the use of one of his corporate jets to fly to and from them. But she was beginning to feel hemmed in, somehow.

Each of the properties had chefs (not cooks. Properly qualified chefs!) and she wasn't allowed to prepare any food for herself. Not even a simple sandwich for herself.

When she'd lived with David they would go to the minimarket at the corner of the street, buy a bottle of inexpensive Californian Zin and drink it while eating snacks, cuddling together, watching a streamed movie on their 50 inch TV.

But on the very rare occasions that she and Alex were in the same country, let alone the same home, the sandwiches would be gourmet creations with artisan chips that were so greasy she found herself longing for a packet of Lays, Ruffles or Pringles chips.

And the wine? Oh, lord, the wine! Romanée-Conti Grand Cru, something called Screaming Eagle, Moët & Chandon Imperial Vintage Champagne, which she felt tasted like over-priced battery acid.

And why bother watching a streaming movie on a gigantic 325 inch LG "Extreme Home Cinema" television when you are most likely to be by yourself?

Unbidden, she began having thoughts about David. What he would think of something, how he would have liked to see the dolphins and so on. She realized with a shock that she was starting to miss the ordinary life she used to live, and was even missing being married to David. And she'd somehow not seen much of her own parents. She decided to remedy that and took one of Alex's fleet of private jets (she didn't actually know how many he owned) to fly to stay with her parents.

"Mom, Dad, I'm beginning to think that perhaps life with an incredibly wealthy man isn't all you might expect."

They listened to her moans and complaints about the chefs, the wine, the foods, having to spend time in Bali, Rome or wherever and although they expressed sympathy they were both thinking "Hell! Talk about first-world problems!"

And then she dropped the bomb that her parents hadn't seen coming. "Have either of you heard from David? Seen him, maybe?"

Her parents looked at each other, the secret communication system that most married couples develop came into play and her mother was delegated to make the reply on the behalf of them both: "We haven't heard from him. But we did see him a couple of weeks back. He was out walking with a woman. His wife, I thought?

"They were walking out of a maternity shop. She's hardly showing, but she was clearly pregnant, even so. You know how you can tell with some women? Your Dad recognised her. She's that woman with the funny name who runs that bar with the crazy name, the Zee bar, I think? Where you and David had your reception?"

Lucy looked and felt devastated. "Yeah, Mom. Rhiannon is her name and it's the Y Bar."

Lucy thought that things couldn't get worse for her. But then Karma said "Really, dear? Hold my beer! Or should I say hold my Chardonnay!?"

Not long after the encounter between Lucy and her parents, David and Rhiannon were sat in the living room of the apartment reading the news on the iPads when they both gasped at the same exact moment.

This was what they read:

"BREAKING: Death of local billionaire businessman. Alex White was killed in a firefight with Bermuda Police Service officers."

Shocked, they turned on the television.

The presenters were trying to look professional, whilst trying not to look as if they were excited by a breaking story.

"Good morning, viewers.We bring you breaking news that is just coming in. Favorite son of the city of Canoga Falls, billionaire Alex White, has been killed in a firefight with members of the Bermuda Police Service after a raid on his property on his private island which is part of the islands that make up Bermuda. We go over now to Tim Westing with the Bermuda Broadcasting Company, who has more details."

"Hi, this is Tim Westing. An American businessman tentatively identified as a Mr. Alex White and several members of his security team died during a police raid on his home on his private Bermudan island.

"Members of the Bermuda Police Service Drugs Unit, assisted by the Serious Crime Department, Financial Crime Unit and Tactical Division attempted to execute a warrant to search the property and to arrest Mr. White. However, an armed guard in the employ of Mr. White reportedly shot at the police officers, injuring one of them who was taken by a Bermuda Air Ambulance for treatment at Hamilton's King Edward VII Memorial Hospital after the incident unfolded and was contained.

"Members of the Tactical Division of the Police immediately returned fire and after a short firefight Mr. White's six armed guards had been shot. Mr. White and four of the guards were shot dead, the other two guards were treated by ambulance personnel and later transferred to the Westgate Correctional Facility where they were placed in the hospital medical centre.

"Other staff at the home of Mr. White, including a chef and the butler were taken in for questioning as was Mrs White, the wife, or should I now say, widow, of Mr White. More information will be released as the situation develops. And now over to you in the studio."

Back in the studio, the co-anchors were trying to contain their glee.

"Max Daniels here, with Misti Lebrayer. This is stunning news, one of Canoga Fall's local heroes, multibillionaire Alex White dead as the result of an armed police raid on one of his many properties, this one in Bermuda. What do you make of this story, Misti?"

"Max, for years there have been speculations about how Alex White earned his billions of Dollars in income, how he was able to fund the lavish lifestyle of his 20 or more fully staffed houses both here in the States and abroad and his fleet of private jets. Now, it appears that Mr White was nothing but a common, or not-so-common drug dealer. One thing's for certain. We haven't heard the end of this matter."

Rhiannon turned off the TV. "What the actual fucking fuck? Alex White, our local hero, was a drug dealer?"

David shrugged his shoulders. "I only met him a couple of times. He liked to come over as an Andrew Carnegie, but it looks like he was more of a Henry Starling."

"Henry who?" said Rhiannon.

"Oh, sorry. I forgot you aren't a nerd. Henry Starling was a character in Star Trek Voyager, who posed as a philanthropist but was really a baddy. Shit! I just remembered! Poor Lucy."

Rhiannon said: "I'm just remembering a quote from a book I read: ''Life's a bitch and her stripper name is Karma,' and I think Lucy's karmic vibrations are just about to start shaking her up. Her problems are all of her own making. As my old granddad would have put it: I really cannot be arsed to feel any sympathy for her."

Meanwhile Lucy had been taken into police custody and was allowed a phone call to instruct a local attorney to represent her, and eventually a member of the U.S. Consulate General's staff met with her to discuss her options.

"Hello, Mrs. White. My name is Gregory Jones, I'm with the U.S. Consulate General's office in Bermuda. Are they treating you well?"

"Yes, thank you Mr. Jones. What will happen to me?"

"Extradition warrants have been issued for both you and your husband on charges relating to your husband's role in a major drug smuggling ring. Obviously it might seem unfair for you to be in custardy as the only person left, but justice must prevail. I hope you can understand that?"

She nodded and then said: "But I never knew that Alex was involved in drug smuggling."

"Really?" Jones sounded dubious. "What did you think he did to earn his vast amount of wealth?"

"Yes, really. I had no idea. As to what he did... I didn't have a clue! As far as I knew he was an international businessman."

Eventually, Lucy was extradited back to America and languished in an FBI detention facility whilst the pregnancy of Rhiannon and David progressed nicely. Hardly any morning sickness and only some fairly limited aches and pains.

Mr. and Mrs. Gordon, Lucy's parents, reached out to David and pleaded with him to visit Lucy whilst she was in custody. He politely, but firmly, rebuffed their appeal.

With plea bargaining, Lucy and her lawyers were able to arrange a reduced sentence of 15 years in a Federal Women's prison. The prosecutor privately acknowledged that the situation wasn't fair to Lucy White, but that the Federal government had spent so much time and effort investigating Alex White that they felt cheated that one of his guards had accidentally fired his gun and hit a Bermudan Police Service officer and accidentally set off the firefight that caused four of his colleagues and his employer to end up dead, had resulted in Alex White being beyond the reach of justice. Lucy was a sacrificial lamb.

Ironically, the guard who fired the accidental shot was only slightly wounded, and along with his surviving colleagues were spending life terms in the Westgate Correctional Facility on Bermuda.

The vast majority of Alex White's vast property empire, his fleet of aircrafts and vehicles were confiscated by the FBI, so when Lucy was going to be released from prison she'd be virtually penniless, relying on her by then aged parents for her needs.

Meanwhile, the twins that Rhiannon had been expecting had been born and Rhys and Anwen were both sturdy toddlers and keeping their parents active, loved up and exhausted, often at the same time.

One day David and Rhiannon were pushing their double baby stroller showing Rhys and Anwen the park in the center of Canoga Falls when they met Lucy's parents who had nothing better to do now that their once beloved son-in-law was dead and outed as a drug smuggler and their only child was in prison for the next 15 years.