LLP-373 A Mother's Forbidden Passion by Mary Jenkins


Chapter 1


Leaning forward on the rear seat of the taxicab, the tall statuesque 
blonde woman kneaded her handbag with nervous fingers and stared out at 
the familiar and yet strange streets and buildings of Westridge--a town 
in which she had been born thirty--six years before, and which she had 
not seen in five years.

Her name was Bette Clark, and she was a beautiful poised woman with the 
ripe figure of a young girl: her breasts high and proud and perfectly 
rounded, showed no sign of sagging, and her thighs, visible where the 
hem of her short, ice-blue dress hiked up, were firm and tanned, 
tapering into dimpled knees and slender ankles. Her hips, small and 
boyish and yet curved provocatively, moved involuntarily on the seat in 
her agitated state, and she kept moistening full, naturally pink lips 
with the tip of her small, wet tongue. Her face was soft and lovely, 
free of age lines, and yet it contained a certain gaunt quality, a 
haunted quality that was mirrored by her large, expressive blue eyes; 
once filled with laughter and gaiety, those eyes now contained a hidden 
pain and torment that was deeply rooted.

As the taxi sped through the downtown streets of Westridge, Bette 
wondered again--as she had done for perhaps the hundredth time in the 
past week--if she wasn't making another mistake, an even bigger mistake 
than the one she had made five years ago, in coming home again. Maybe 
it would have been better if she had remained in Chicago, if she had 
simply abandoned all hope for a return to normalcy and spent the rest 
of her life living alone with her guilt and her shame. But that was not 
the answer, she knew that--any more than suicide, of which she had 
thought on more than one occasion, was an answer. No, she owed it to 
Tony and to the memory of David, as well as to herself, to try to make 
amends for what she had done, for her weakness.

Bette's mind wandered back those five years as it had during so many 
waking hours recently, to the night she first met suave, sophisticated 
Hale Bixby. She had been at a party alone--David had been out of town 
on one of his business trips--and she had been drinking champagne, a 
beverage which invariably put her in a gay, light mood. She had felt 
like dancing, and Hale Bixby had been there, a smile on his handsome 
face, saying the right words and making the right gestures, and she had 
been drawn to him. At first the attraction was no more than one of 
immediate fun--dancing, laughing and mild flirting. But then as the 
evening progressed and she spent more and more time dancing in Bixby's 
arms, felt his warm, hard male body close to hers, the attraction had 
subtly changed into a physical craving. It wasn't that she had been 
love-starved--David was a competent if unexciting and unimaginative 
bed-partner, and even though he was away three and four days a week on 
his sales route, he was always hungry for her body when they were 
together. She couldn't really, even now, explain what had been the 
cause of her growing desire for Hale Bixby: the champagne, the magic 
atmosphere of a warm summer night and a party, the charm and 
handsomeness of Bixby himself, were all a part of it, she supposed. And 
yet, it was more than that. It was as if she had been slowly changing, 
becoming something other than a faithful wife and a good mother to 
their thirteen year old son Tony; it was as if there had always been a 
wild streak in her, a lusting for excitement and adventure, repressed 
over the years but now breaking through.


End of Page 1. See llp-373.txt for full story.