Threesome Next Door Ch. 22-28 - End

"The curse is that we've been conditioned by society to hold a somewhat puritanical view of sex. For many, it's naughty or bad or a sin. For some, it's a sin only under certain conditions such as out of a marriage or when not used for procreation. For a very few, like us, it is just fun, but we have those other philosophies right at our doorstep and sometimes they influence how we think and give us guilt trips."

Stacy said, "So, the gap in our ages doesn't bother you either?"

I shrugged, "Not for me. I have two hot women I'm married to -- one about my age, and you." I had a sudden thought, "STACY, is your biological clock ticking?"

She protested, "I can turn it off."

Ginger and I both laughed. Ginger affirmed, "I doubt it. What can happen instead is that we can give Jillian and Ethan a little brother or sister."

I said, "I still have it in me to be a dad to a child if you're up for being a mom."

Stacy sat up and looked at the two of us. "Really? You'd do that for me?"

I said, "I'd do it for all of us and for whomever we bring into the world. This wouldn't be just for you."

"But the impact on all of us ... on the sex?"

"We'll work around it if we need to. Doug mentioned to me a weekend or two ago that Jo and Beth are thinking about starting a family, too. Brad told me he's already bought an engagement ring for Megan, and he wants children sometime. Sure part of it is social conditioning to want them, but part of it is more deeply ingrained than even that."

"So, if I went off birth control?" Stacy asked tentatively.

"Please do. Let's see what happens."

Ginger said with a chuckle, "Better you, than me. I've done mine, but I'll sure be a second mom to whatever you produce."

I suggested, "Talk to your mother when we're in Texas. See whether she has any sage advice or considerations we haven't thought of."

Another long silence ensued as we all thought about the discussion we'd just had. Soon, I heard small sighs that indicated that Ginger had fallen asleep. Stacy's heavy breathing came next, and then I blacked out.

The next month went by at Mach One. The jobs all seemed to be peaking at once, and we were working what felt like twenty-four hours a day seven days a week. Oh, we slipped in some breaks for sex with each other and with our neighbors here and there, but devoting a whole weekend to the activity seemed too decadent given the demands on our time.

In the consulting profession, like lawyers, a measure of how busy you are is your 'Billable Hours' -- the number of hours you can actually invoice to a client. If you were to bill forty hours in a week, you'd be one hundred percent billable. For that month, I carried about eighty billable hours a week, and so did Ginger and Stacy. Dave was running a little over sixty, and our part time Emma was doing forty -- a full week's worth.

While all that was going on, we had several more telephone calls from companies that were new to us and that asked for our help. Each of them called based on the strong recommendations of our current clients through the big network of business professionals. I felt bad about pushing them off, but each of those leads told me they would wait for us to be available. Wow!

Even with that pressure on us, we were also managing to sustain the romantic and sexual relationships we'd developed at our clients. The demands on my evening time when at a client site were helped because Dave was traveling with me and he even had more stamina and skills with females than I did. I think his sexpot girlfriend Kat had strongly contributed to his development.

Dave was as busy as I was in Houston and Dallas. Ginger had Emma with her to help with the male components in New York and Tennessee. Stacy split her time between the four locations as she built up a nice specialty considering corporate values that we used on each job.

Dave and Emma eventually came up on their six-month anniversaries with Carson Consulting LLC. Ginger and I gave them large bonuses -- twenty grand for Dave and more than half that pro rated for 'part time' Emma. Emma cried when we handed her the check; she tried to give it back and tell us she loved us, but we insisted and confirmed our love for her. Even Dale called us to thank us for how we were treating his wife, including the gratuitous sex we occasionally enjoyed with her when we were taking a break or on the road.

We made things slow down over the summer by limiting ourselves to a normal workweek without evening hours. Stacy helped us come up with some new approaches so we could take on some of the new client work, and short cut a few of the more laborious tasks.

One day when we were all having a meeting in our living room, I floated the idea of hiring two more staff with Ginger, Stacy, Dave, and Emma. They all nodded and agreed it was time.

Emma said, "Will that mean that you'll need to set up a real office somewhere?"

That part of the idea hadn't occurred to me yet. She was right. Unless we gave up the rest of the house, we didn't have room to run the business out of our home if we brought on more people.

Ginger had the spark of an idea, "Why do they have to live here? Why couldn't they live anyplace that had a big airport near it? Our work isn't here outside Tampa; it's in Houston, Dallas, Atlanta, New York, or wherever our clients are. They could come here for meetings, planning, and getting them indoctrinated into our methodologies, but other than that we want them on the road."

We all grinned at her. She'd come up with the obvious solution.

A month later, we had started to sift through three hundred resumes submitted for a position in or near St. Louis, and another batch for a position in or near Silicon Valley. Because the job in St. Louis was waiting for staff, we put our emphasis on that one first. We telephone interviewed twenty people, FaceTime interviewed six of those, and face-to-face interviewed three. Dean Ryder got the position.

We got Dean down to Tampa and into a motel on Anna Maria Island, and took turns pouring methodology and our ethics into him for ten hours a day. I did Monday and Tuesday, Stacy overlapped me on Tuesday, did Wednesday, and got him going on Thursday until Ginger took over to finish Thursday and do Friday. Our living room looked more like a conference room than a living room with a projection screen, projector, and flip charts all over the place. Dean did get to meet Dave and Emma as they were in the 'office' on Monday and Friday.

I kicked off the job at Arch Extrusions in St. Louis with Dean on Monday of the following week, and after two days there I left him and headed for Dallas and to see Marsha and in the evening Ashley as her mother joined us. Stacy and Dave had gone to Houston to keep things moving along at Mantra Electronics there.

The following week we did telephone interviews with sixteen people for the Silicon Valley job. We quickly narrowed the field to two outstanding candidates and, taking a big risk, we decided to hire both of them after we flew them to Florida on a weekend and completed the face-to-face interviews. Carol Hodgkiss and Todd Whitehall joined the team.

I flew to the west coast a week later. Carol, Todd, and I spent three days together going over the fundamentals of our methodology and company history, and then on Thursday we paid a visit to Kronics Matrix Company or KMC. They were an Internet security service company and the founders had done very well. They'd decided to grow the business, but weren't sure whether to grow organically or whether to do some targeted acquisitions. They had some targets in mind, but were open minded about the whole situation, including just leaving things the way they were.

KMC signed up with us by mid-afternoon. I promised a letter of agreement by Monday, but we'd start immediately on Friday. Carol, Todd, and I spent the afternoon in one of their conference rooms detailing the job and their tasks for the next three weeks. I also planned daily FaceTime calls with them about the job and to continue their education. I figured we could also link in Dean Ryder for the education stuff.

For the next two months -- August and September -- I felt we were building a house of cards that would blow over in the least little breeze. I was too wrapped up in administrivia. Stacy went out to California and stayed out there with Carol and Todd for two weeks working on the KMC job and teaching them more about our methodologies. I spent more time in St. Louis with Dean, and then did our Texas clients. Ginger was keeping Emma busy in White Plains and Nashville and shuttling in between, and then touching base with her client in Raleigh who'd been doing some homework she recommended.

We had a bit of a coup in early October. The Wall Street Journal wrote an article about mergers and acquisitions. Somehow, they had decided to talk to Mantra Electronics and Gene-Biotics as part of the article. Both clients mentioned us prominently in the article as the global experts not only in M&A, but also in strategic and executable operations planning. We were stars!

We got a dozen calls based on the article and what they discovered about us from our website. We did another strategic hire -- a secretary / administrative assistant. We'd put the word out through all our friends and neighbors about what we were looking for, and hit pay dirt.

Holly Truit, our neighbor Megan's mother, called me one day and said she'd like to interview for the position. She joked and added, "And any other positions you have including the ones you use in your bedroom." Holly and I had met over the previous Thanksgiving holiday months earlier. We'd also made love several times. I instantly remembered how smart she was about the business world and how hot she was to make love with. I got some background from her, and asked for a resume or CV. It arrived by email ten minutes after we ended our call. She was serious.

I called Holly back and asked a key question, "Holly, you live in Missouri. How will this work?" I recalled why we hadn't seen her for these many months; she lived five states away.

She laughed, "Dumb me. I forgot to mention that I'm moving to Florida. I'm moving in with Brad and Megan. They invited me. I guess part of the invitation was because I'm kind of sexually open and in love with Brad. They visited me up here a few weeks ago and we really hit it off. I also won't confess to any incest, should there be any of that lying around. I will confess to wanting to fit into your neighborhood in every way possible just the way Megan does."

"You're hired," I told her. I tossed out a salary figure and she instantly agreed. "Tomorrow, send me your schedule and the other stuff I need to know to pay you, keep the government happy, and have you start."

Holly said, "I'll start a week from Monday, if that works for you. We can do that stuff then. Maybe we can do all sorts of stuff then." She gave a slight giggle.

"It does work for me. See you then. Come over and socialize if you get in town before then." I wondered whether I should be socializing with my staff the way we already were.

By the time Monday came around Dave, Emma, Ginger, Stacy, and I had a long list of things we needed Holly to do for us. The list spanned things like printer ink, stiff paper for report covers, travel tickets and other arrangements, organizing our frequent flyer miles, searching out better hotel bargains, typing up interview notes, organizing our client files on computers and hardcopy, and on and on. Ginger and I both needed organizing.

Everyone else took off for various client sites, and I was left to welcome Holly and get her started. I was going to have her use my desk as her workstation. It already had my desktop computer on it that she could use; as well some of the piles of paper I needed her to organize. After I left I wouldn't see her until Friday, although Dave and Stacy would see her on Thursday and Friday.

Holly arrived right at nine a.m., as we'd arranged. I was already packed and ready to walk out the door to catch an afternoon flight to San Francisco so I could work with Carol and Todd at KMC. I hadn't seen them except on our video calls for two weeks. The calls seemed to be working though.

The first thing Holly did was kiss me. The kiss was really hot and made me shift gears rapidly from being all business to being all something else. At her suggestion, we tumbled into my bedroom and made love. She was hot, energetic, and expressive. I hadn't recalled what an expert at dirty talk she was, but then Megan shared many of those same skills. I also logged that I had again serviced a mother-daughter team.

After our tryst, we showered and redressed. Only then did we get down to business. I showed her the presentation on Carson Consulting LLC capabilities and history, ran through the task list we'd made, and we talked about the company, the people in it, the clients, the leads we had, and what my aspirations for everything were.

Holly also went over and opened my luggage and went through everything carefully. She did the same with my briefcase. She explained, "If I'm to be as useful as you want me to be, I'll be needing to help you pack so you can get back on the road and to working with clients. I'll do the same for Stacy, Ginger, and the others if they want."

I gave Holly a key to the house so she could get into her 'office' and the other desks for Ginger, Dave, and Emma, and left for Tampa airport and my flight. At least on this one I'd be able to get in some billable hours while we were at flight level.

Carol and Todd met me for dinner at my hotel in San Jose. They were pumped with the work and with the successes they were having at KMC. I got an update, and a solid outline of what they wanted me to do while I was there for two days. They were well organized and were thinking well ahead of what was happening that day.

As we talked I nevertheless got the feeling there was some other undercurrent between them and the client that I was missing. The more we talked the more I was sure that there was something else going on.

I finally confronted my feeling aloud, "I applaud all you've done and your planning. I can't think of any contingencies to worry about based on what you said. Nonetheless, there's something else going on that I feel I should know about." I shut up at that point and let the silence build between the three of us. I stared at each of them.

I knew there was something when Carol and Todd kept locking eyes, as though they were silently trying to figure out who would be the one to spill the beans to me.

Todd finally took a deep breath and spoke. "Errr, Carol and I have kind of fallen into a relationship with two people on the client team."

I looked at each of them and sensed what I thought was happening. I smiled slightly, "A sexual relationship?"

Carol nodded before Todd could respond. She volunteered, "A couple -- maybe you remember them because they were in our kickoff meeting: Peter Miller and Brit Collier."

I did remember the two, but hadn't known they were a couple. Peter easily fell in my description of highly competent, tall, dark, and handsome. Brit came across as a ditzy blonde until she opened her mouth and profound analytics and statistics started to spout out. She had a keen and analytical mind, made astonishing linkages about interesting facts she knew, and probably belonged to Mensa.

I asked, "And the two of you?"

Todd blushed, "Think the world of each other and have also formed a relationship."

"Are either of you or Peter or Brit risking a relationship with a significant other?"

"No. We talked about that," Carol said. "We just kind of fell into a dinner with them one night after we'd worked late. Well, we got really chummy over dinner, and chummy turned into romantic. We went dancing and that cemented the deal. We ended up in Todd's hotel room for a night cap and things happened."

I hadn't put any expectations or burden on them to form those kinds of relationships within the client. In fact, having met the two of them I thought that they would remain very asexual and at best form some nice friendships that stayed in the work environment. I had that thought, but then looked at my own experiences over the past year, and then at Ginger's.

I shrugged. "Just keep whatever you're doing out of the workday and the client offices. This is the voice of experience talking."

Without much thinking Todd said, "But you've actually had some of your clients come to the parties at your house."

I shot him a glance. "Yes. And how do you know this?"

"I don't want to get him in trouble, but Dave told me. We kind of talked to them to be sure we were aligned with what was happening with your and Ginger's thinking. We learned about your open marriage, Stacy, and the outside relationships, in the process."

"So, you set out to replicate what I was doing?" I teased.

"Oh, no. But we did think as it started to happen that we weren't exactly forging new ground. We also hoped we wouldn't get into trouble."

I quickly said, "You aren't in trouble, at least as far as I'm concerned."

Both Carol and Todd visibly relaxed a little.

Sensing that I was just fine with what they were doing, Todd strode forward one more time. "There is a slight problem that we're hoping you could help us with in regard to Peter and Brit."

I nodded, "Sure, if I can."

Todd said, "Oh, you can, but 'Will you?' is the question. You see besides Brit there's also Mindy."

"Mindy?"

"Mindy. M. I. N. D. Y. Mindy Marlow. She knows about our foursome and she asked me today whether she could sometimes be a party to the sex we're having. She specifically asked about your availability and said you turned her on and made her wet and horny during the kickoff meeting. I was there; I thought you were just a normal business guy.

"And what is Mindy like? I don't remember her specifically from our meeting with the managers."

Carol pulled out her cellphone and punched at the screen for ten seconds. She turned the phone to me, and there in glorious color was a very cute, tanned, hot looking brunette, about thirty, smiling at the camera with a come hither look that included a crooked finger in my direction. "I took this earlier today right after she asked. I told her you'd ask for more information about her."

"And what is that information?"

Carol said, "I don't know that much. Mindy is divorced after a three year marriage that apparently was kind of stormy. She has a scar on her neck and I'm guessing that has something to do with her ex. She mentioned that she has a five-year restraining order against him. She's really into cyber security, too; probably knows more than any ten experts you could gather together, and she's a whiz about tech problem solving. She's also athletic. She did a marathon a week or so ago. Overall, though, she's an important player on the client team. Everyone will do what she says, even the CEO. I think they're related."

I commented blandly, "Well, I will look forward to meeting Miss Mindy tomorrow. We shall see where this might go."

Peter said tentatively, "We're all going to dinner and dancing tomorrow night -- you included."

I shrugged. "I guess my social secretaries have taken care of my evenings."

Mindy Marlow was a ball of energy. Why I didn't remember her as more significant from our kickoff meeting was beyond me, except I suspect she allowed the CEO of KMC to lead things rather than takeover for him when things faltered. Everything she talked about came with a dose of enthusiasm that felt highly contagious.

Our initial meeting dealt with the problems in collecting some of the data for their acquisition targets. I led her to my laptop and in seconds showed her a couple of online databases that held the source data that could be used to impute the necessary market share and financial information. Mindy didn't take notes; she went back to her office. She showed up an hour later, and commented that other data on the websites I'd showed her allowed even more profound looks into the companies than we'd suspected. She jumped up and down with excitement about the discovery.