Chapter One

Lovely Amelia is the sweetest, kindest, most gentle-spoken and unfailingly polite woman I have ever met. Nearly thirteen years my junior my beautiful new wife is a prize beyond compare. I dote on her almost to a fault. Yet as accommodating as I am she is becoming increasingly controlling of me in a manner I find disconcerting. In her quietly insistent way she has caused me to forgo many of my cherished pleasures. Now she is at it again.

Wearing only a floor-length robe of translucent black silk that matches her hair and contrasts wonderfully with her unblemished porcelain skin she wrinkles her cute little nose as she undresses me. The bedroom we’ve occupied less than a month as man and wife is as opulent and expansive as the rest of this mansion on the Long Island coast and I’m frantically eager to once again fall into the enormous bed with this nubile beauty. My cock is tenting the front of my slacks as she slowly unbuttons my shirt. We’ve only been apart three hours. Yet as enjoyable as my weekly poker game always is it seems an eternity since I’ve gazed on that lovely young face, exquisitely slender body and shimmering banner of midnight hair. Upon reaching my navel, however, Amelia pauses. Raising her large, cerulean-blue eyes she looks straight into mine with the tiniest frown carving a line between her elegantly arched brows.

“You said you’d quit smoking, darling.”

“I have, Amelia, I swear it.”

“Well your clothes still stink of cigars.”

“I’ve just come from a poker game, dear. Everyone there but me smokes like a chimney.”

“Obviously! How much did you drink, and how much did you lose?”

“I almost doubled the two hundred dollars you gave me. And I only had the three drinks you asked me to limit myself to: three scotch-and-waters.”

“Good boy!”

Amelia smiles approvingly at me, her naturally ruddy little lips curving up to form the unbelievably fetching dimples in her cheeks that first attracted me to her. She continues unbuttoning me. The shirt falls open at last and her hands slide like silk over my belly and sides. Then still speaking with irresistible sweetness she drops her bombshell.

“Nevertheless, I want you to stop going to these poker games.

“The drinking isn’t good for your heart, or your belly.” She grips my little love handles significantly. “And the smell of smoke nauseates me. How can I get in the mood for you if I feel like puking every time we get close like this?”

Helplessly I scrabble for some kind of compromise.

Doesn’t every guy deserve at least one night out with his friends? Already she’s put a stop to any bar-hopping, and refused to finance keeping my impossible-to-get season tickets to the Rangers. The poker games are the last of my pre-marital masculine social occasions. It’s not that I need time away from her – I could