Husband Sit (Husband #1)
Read Husband Sit (Husband #1) Online
Authors: Louise Cusack
HUSBAND
SIT
By
Louise
Cusack
Cover design
© Hang Le
byhangle.com
Title:
Husband
Sit
Copyright © 2016 by Louise
Cusack
All rights reserved. By
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permission of the publisher
All characters in this book
have no existence outside the imagination of the author and have no relation
whatsoever to anyone bearing the same name or names. They are not even
distantly inspired by any individual known or unknown to the author, and all
incidents are pure invention.
Praise for the author
:
“Hold onto your panties! Husband Sit by Louise
Cusack is sexy and titillating from page one. But its more than that. It’s also
funny and has a surprisingly deep emotional core that sneaks up on you. It’s
utterly unique.”
Amy
Andrews, award-winning, USA Today best-selling author
"Crazytown. I loved it."
~ NY Times & USA Today Best Seller Kylie
Scott, Stage Dive series
"Just as you think you can predict what will
happen, Cusack throws up surprise after surprise - guaranteeing that you will
be picking up the next book, almost before you have finished the first. This is
addictive storytelling."
DoubleDay Book Club
Crazy Has A Name
Have you
ever had a moment where you had to admit,
I’m not as smart as I thought I
was,
or worse,
I could be a fuckwit.
No?
Well,
welcome to
my
world, of standing in the foyer of a multi-million dollar
Sydney apartment, staring at the front door, waiting for a locksmith to arrive
and let me out. Yes,
out.
I haven’t lost my keys. This isn’t my
apartment. I’m a husband sitter, and the husband I’m currently sitting has not
only fucked me up the ass and whipped that ass until it burned, he’s locked me
into his apartment.
The
money, I need. The danger, not so much.
I
should have told one of my girlfriends what I was doing before his wife went on
holiday and I moved in with him. Then I wouldn’t be waiting for a locksmith
with my teeth chattering and my heart thudding in dread, hoping like hell that
Mr. Domination didn’t arrive home before I got out. I should have used common
sense instead of worrying that my girls would judge me.
If
I was lucky, I’d live to regret that.
Not
that I could regret the sex. It had been
mind-blowing
, and I’d had the
sharpest orgasms of my life. But the whole thing had been overwhelming—my first
experience of bondage and butt-fucking. When it was over, I was aching and sore
and I wanted time-out. Instead, he’d decided he wasn’t ready to stop, so he’d
locked me in, and there was nothing erotic about that. It was stone-cold scary.
In
my moment of terror at realizing I couldn’t escape, I’d rung the last person I
should have—lickable Finn with this sexy green eyes, his clever hands and his
gigantor cock. I’d promised myself I’d never see him again. He was married. Our
husband sit was over. It didn’t matter that his wife was a cheating bitch who’d
only hired me so he could feel guilty too. I liked him too much. I should have
left him alone.
He
regretted his infidelity and wanted to put it behind him, but in my
desperation, my illogical brain had decided that he’d been as ‘bad’
as
me, so I knew he wouldn’t judge me for my current predicament. My girlfriends
would see things differently. Two of them were married and, much as they loved
me, they’d never condone adultery even if the wife was paying for it. Fritha
was single but she’d try to stop me if she heard about this, because she’d
think the money wasn’t worth the risk.
But
it was.
I
might be scared now, but I wasn’t going to let that deter me from my purpose.
Finn would get me back on my feet and I’d put safeguards in place next time.
I’d be more careful, because I wasn’t stopping. The consequences of not making
that monthly payment were unthinkable
.
So I stood in the cold marble
entry foyer beside my suitcases, hands clutched together at my waist, staring
at the door, giving myself the only comfort I could—remembering Finn’s warm,
slightly-rough voice.
Go
and pack, Jill. I’ll text you when the locksmith is on the way. Ring a taxi
when he gets there. With luck, you’ll get out quickly and I’ll see you at the
airport.
Finn
was flying in to help me. We’d work this out together, although, I’d probably
be an emotional basket-case when it was over and we parted again. Funny how
ditching Doug after ten boring years had been easy in comparison. But then
trouble had caught up with me and I’d been desperate for cash.
My
brief shining window into normality had slammed shut, and then a single
conversation was all it took to turn my whole life into a sex tape…
ONE: Ground Zero (one month earlier)
I raised
my head from patting Princess Jasmine to ask, in what I hoped was a normal
voice, “Is the kitty litter stocked up?” Chinchilla fur was spreading all over
the charcoal lounge and my jeans, but I kept my attention on Helen pouring
coffee beans into the machine over at the breakfast bar. I must not think about
the phone call I’d had that morning, although the memory of it churned my
stomach like a washing machine. If I got overwhelmed, Helen would ask what was
wrong and I’d promised that I wouldn’t tell anyone. Not even strangers.
Helen
pushed a button and looked up. “I ordered some online. It’ll be delivered
tomorrow along with a fortnight’s cat food. There’s plenty in the pantry to
last until—”
That
was as far as she got before the coffee maker started with its appalling
grinding sound, echoing all through her cavernous waterfront home, making my
already-stretched nerves twang. The dreadful sound encouraged Princess
Jasmine’s claws to bite into my thighs. As a highly strung feline herself, she
did the same thing if a speedboat roared past on the canal outside, so I kept
stroking her, hoping the noise would abate quickly, but it clunked on for
almost a minute.
When
Helen had finished making our two cups of coffee, she put them on the low table
in front of me before sitting on the lounge at my side, at which time Princess
Jasmine exited my lap in a cloud of shedding fur and stalked over to hers.
I
pasted a smile on my face. “Saying her last goodbye.”
Helen
always got sniffy when it was time to leave her darling—not a result of
allergies as I’d first imagined when I’d started house-sitting for her. This
was separation anxiety, and I did my best not to think it was theatrical. Helen
had no children. Her cat was her baby, and she lavished attention on her.
“Pretty
darling. I won’t be gone long,” she crooned.
I
tried to keep my attention on them, or on anything mundane, but my mind
wouldn’t cooperate. It kept circling back to the phone call from my crazy
little sis Brittany who was lying in a Bangkok hospital bed, desperate for
money to pay her exorbitant medical bills. If she couldn’t find the cash,
they’d threatened jail.
A
Bangkok jail
.
I
shuddered and looked away, taking my time to pick up my coffee cup and have a
sip. I’d promised myself I wouldn’t get the
Too Hard
basket out until
after Helen had left. But the problem was enormous, and time was ticking over.
I had to find a solution. Getting cranky with Brittany for not telling me about
her breast implants wouldn’t help. She was independent. I got that. But she was
also my only family, and it drove me crazy that she was so reckless.
When
her “cheap and cheerful” Asian boob job had gone wrong and infection had set
in, she should have rung me. Instead, she’d booked herself into the only decent
Bangkok hospital that would take her without money up front, and now that she
was on the mend, she’d realized the enormity of her problems. Her usual
quick-fix option of running away wasn’t available because the hospital was
holding her passport until she paid her bill—a hundred and twenty
thousand
Australian dollars.
I’d
asked her to tell me the amount twice, because I couldn’t grasp it. This was so
far beyond any debacle she’d laid at my door in the past. My freelance
secretarial job paid eight hundred dollars a week and I had precious little
savings after my recent car repairs.
Even
more infuriating, she’d sounded cranky, rather than apologetic.
…and
then they told me you need to pay twenty thousand for the first payment. In a
fortnight.
Fuck!
Brat. How the hell do you expect me to—
Borrow
it from Louella. She lives in a mansion.
Oh,
right. Tell her that the Brat who stole her makeup when we were teenagers—
Don’t
you dare tell anyone that I got breast—
Don’t
you think they’ll notice?
Silence.
A rare thing from Brittany.
Shit.
I should never have rung you.
I
knew that tone. It came within seconds of her hanging up.
Brat,
wait! I’ll get the money and I won’t tell anyone. I promise.
Make
sure you don’t! Those bitches already hate me.
They
don’t hate you. Just let me think.
Silence
again before she snapped,
Can’t you just get a bank loan or something?
As if she was disappointed that I wasn’t smart enough to work out how to fix
this, quickly and discretely. It had taken heroic self-control, but somehow I’d
managed to hang onto a shred of patience and tell her I’d work on it and ring
her back. She hadn’t sounded the slightest bit sorry, and I could put that down
to her being sick or stressed, only, she was always like this.
Brittany’s
mere existence created havoc for others to clean up. Usually me. Only this time
she couldn’t run away. This time she had to stay and watch the clean-up. So
while I’d like to imagine she’d learn something about responsibility and
consequences, I knew damned well that her take-home would be the same that it
always was—can I rely on my sister or can’t I?
And
no matter the bullshit she brought, I wanted her to think that she could.
Because neither of us had been able to rely on our parents. Gran, yes, for a
while. But then it had just been Brittany and me trying to navigate a scary
world, and I couldn’t live with myself if I let her down. I just couldn’t.
Unfortunately,
the five different banks I’d rung all said the same thing:
We’ll only loan
that much money if you have an asset of equal value to mortgage against it.
And
I didn’t.
My
only assets were a ten-year-old Ford sedan and a collection of nice shoes.
The
other option, which Brittany had pointed out, was ringing Louella, or Missy
Lou, as I called her, and saying
I need a hundred and twenty thousand
dollars and I can’t tell you why.
Just
thinking about that idea added nausea to the churning in my stomach. Sure, we
went back twenty years. I’d met Missy Lou in high school, along with Fritha and
Angela. Of the four of us, Missy Lou had been the one
most likely
to do
well. She’d come from old money and married a mogul, so she was rich. And
exactly because of that, I’d always gone to pains never to
ask her for
anything. She constantly had trouble with moochers who saw her as a cash-cow and
tried to befriend her. We joked about that, but I could see that it hurt her. I
never wanted her to suspect me of that, for a second.
But
it was testament to how desperate I was to rescue Brittany, that I would even
consider it. And if I did ask, would Missy Lou say yes? Then after Brittany was
blithely on her way to more rack and ruin, would my twenty-year friendship with
Missy Lou be over? Would she think I’d only been friends with her all this time
because she was rich?
A
gagging sickness rose in my throat and I clunked down my coffee cup to try and
shake it off. If I wasn’t careful I’d start losing my shit, and that wasn’t a
good look, not when you wanted clients to think you were reliable. House
sitting was saving me rent money, and I needed every dollar I could find right
now. So I switched off my
poor me
program to tune into Helen who’d
started telling me a story while we waited for her airport pickup to arrive.
It
turned out to be a good distraction, about a society friend whose husband had
just left her for ‘some slut’. Apparently, the friend had been visiting family,
and wouldn’t have minded her husband having an affair, but divorce was another
story. It would uproot her life, her status and her future.
I
nodded sympathetically, keeping my attention on Helen’s face, rather than on
Jasmine’s swishing tail. Even I knew she didn’t like having her ears rubbed.
“…he
should have conducted a sensible fling that ended before Catherine came home.”
I
nodded again, but I couldn’t help wondering why any woman who loved her husband
would approve of a
sensible fling
. Although… I wouldn’t have gone mental
if Doug had played up—might have been a good excuse to leave him sooner, before
boredom had worn a hole in my brain.
“…and
she told me she would have paid a woman to Husband Sit him if she’d known he
was that desperate for new sex!”
Helen
smirked and tweaked those furry years, which only made Jasmine swish harder.
I
wanted to say,
Stop rubbing her ears,
but Helen cut in with. “You’d be a
perfect husband sitter, only, you wouldn’t want to sleep with her husband. He’s
old
.”
I
offered a wan smile, playing along with our standard joke that anyone older
than forty was ancient. Helen was in her sixties but she had a niece my age who
lived in New York.
Her
boyfriend was twenty-three. Helen thought that
was shockingly risqué, dating a man ten years younger, but the twenty-something
men of my experience were over-groomed, over-confident and looked like they’d
be over-too-fast. At least I’d been able to count on Doug’s consistent twelve
minutes, give-or-take. Plenty of time to organize my own orgasm. The fact that
it had felt like
the same old
burger at McDonalds was a matter of
interpretation. I’m sure a new woman would find him steady and reliable.
“…having
said that, older men can be
experienced
.” Helen winked at me and I tried
not to shudder. The last thing I wanted was to picture older people and sex.
Luckily,
Jasmine took that moment to jump off Helen’s lap in a huff, leaving a handful of
fur on her cream wool skirt as she stalked off to the kitchen. Helen brushed at
it absently, then she looked at me over the top of her glasses, “I’m quite sure
you’d acquit yourself admirably, my dear. You’re very good at keeping Jasmine
happy. A husband couldn’t be any more challenging.” Her eyes were alight with
mischief, so I bantered back.
“I’m
sure I
could
keep a husband happy, but I’d have to be paid a lot.”
“Oh,
ten thousand dollars a week. No less!” she said, poker faced.
In
the next second, the world around me paused, and my mind dropped into a deep
stillness where the only sound was a single phrase:
Stop the clock.
I
stared into Helen’s faded grey eyes while my brain scrambled to catch up with
how much ten grand was in relation to Brittany’s medical bills. One twelfth?
Was that right? Twelve weeks and it would be paid?
Fuck.
A pulse started
throbbing at my temples.
“You’d
cook,” Helen bantered on, oblivious to my inner dialogue. “But no cleaning,
and...” She held up a finger. “Be available for sex whenever the husband wants.
But you don’t make the first move.” She winked.
“Absolutely.”
My voice sounded flat, but I batted my eyelashes coyly to keep up the pretence
of a joke. “And there must be a contract. A
binding
contract.”
“Then…”
She paused for effect, mock-serious. “When it’s over you must agree to leave
and never come back—”
“Unless
contracted by the wife to do so.”
She
dimpled, clearly impressed with my foresight. “You are
good
. I’m handing
your number out at airline dinners. Pilots’ wives will be all over this.”
I
forced out a bark of a laugh. “I’ll have my first million before I know it.”
She
patted my hand, then said, “You hear that, Jasmine?” and leant forward to look
into the kitchen where the cat was spreading imported salmon across the glossy
white-tiled floor. “Jill’s leaving you to go and pat husbands.”
“I
hope they don’t shed,” I said straight-faced.
She
chortled at that and shook her head. Then we both heard the taxi beeping
outside.
“Love
my cat,” she commanded, and gave me a hug.
“Easy
peasy,” I replied, as I always did. But after Helen’s departure, I wasn’t
thinking about cats and their proclivities. I was cold and alone in her big
canal-front home with its huge plate-glass windows and sparkling pool—alone
with the terrible idea she’d planted in my mind.
Ten
thousand dollars a week to husband sit.
Could
I even do that? For some reason my brain wasn’t cooperating. It was slowing
down, as if it was clogged with cotton wool, and my cheeks felt cold. Was I was
going to faint? Maybe the very idea of exchanging sex for money was so
terrible, my mind couldn’t deal with. I could have turned on the huge, flat
screen television to distract myself with some inane morning program. But I
didn’t, because I had to face this, and the sooner the better. Unlike Brittany,
I didn’t have anyone rescuing me. I needed to sort out my own problems. And
hers.
Jasmine
jumped back up onto the lounge and I patted her in long, slow strokes while I
forced myself to calculate the fact that on
that
salary I could have
Brittany home by Christmas. I might even be able to pretend those twelve weeks
were remote house sits, to hide it from my girlfriends. I had no boyfriend or
family apart from Brittany, so there was no one watching where I was living or
when. I wasn’t accountable to anyone, and that meant I had freedom, with a good
chance of covering my tracks.