Frenchy was a good-looking woman in the low light that was prevalent inside the Redlite Ranch – but get her in good light, and a little more of the truth was revealed. She did look a little more of the age that she had to be, her hair was obviously dyed, her face showed age, and she was a harder looking person. But out around the table in the dining room in the morning, that didn’t keep her from being a friendly and open person, and Danny suspected that was what she might be like in her real life at home, not the rather tough domme that she could turn herself into at the drop of a credit card.

And home wasn’t far off for her, now; Frenchy’s three-week shift was drawing to a close, and on this slow morning sitting in the dining room drinking coffee alone with Danny, she was looking forward to getting back to her husband and her kids again. "Three weeks really is a little on the long side," she commented, "Especially with the kids in school. I get a little out of contact with them, and they’re not going to be around that much anymore. At least I’ll be home for the holidays with them."

Danny had already learned that her son, Jeff, was thirteen, and her daughter, Stephanie, was sixteen. He was smart enough not to ask her real age, but doing a little math made her out to be in her mid to late thirties, at a minimum. "I can imagine," he said. "It seems like you could come up here for shorter times, a little more often."

"I suppose I could," she said. "I may do it when they’re both out of the house. But it’s a long drive up here, and I really don’t like driving, so it cuts the running around down a little. All in all, though, it has been pretty handy. I’m able to be a suburban mom and be home for them a lot. Most of the women I know work fulltime jobs and try to keep a family life going as well, and it gets to be a drag for them. Since I’m home so much, I get to spend more time with the kids, and more time on their school stuff."

"I don’t know," Danny grinned. "I mean, it’s hard to imagine you as a suburban mom who makes cookies for the PTA bake sale."

"I do," Frenchy snorted. "In fact, I make a mean chocolate chip cookie. And I’m president of the PTA at my son’s middle school, and vice president of the Band Boosters at the high school. That does not mean president in charge of vice," she added with a grin.

Danny just shook his head. "Frenchy, I have to say that we’re getting into hard-to-believe country."

"Well, I am," she snorted, then smiled. "But I agree, it does seem a little weird when you stop and think about it."

"I’ll bet the PTA doesn’t know about your job up here," he smirked.

"Well, of course not," she laughed. "But I get a lot of people who envy me for the time I get to spend with my kids. Really, it’s been a pretty good deal. I mean, except for this one thing, which I admit is a little on the unusual side, we really are a pretty typical suburban family, maybe a little happier and closer than most of the people I know, and it beats the hell out of working a forty-hour week and trying to be a mom to my kids at the same time."

"You know," Danny nodded. "I guess I envy you that. Really, when you get right down to it, that was the dream I always had about me and Marsha. Not trying to be a millionaire or something, just a happy family, a couple of kids, a decent house, and the rest of the American dream." He shrugged and sighed. "Guess it wasn’t supposed to work like that for me."

"It’s not too late," she nodded, realizing the pain he was showing at the statement. It was never far from the surface, and she’d learned that it was fairly easy to touch. "You’ve got plenty of good years left."

"Yeah, I know," he sighed. "Damn it, Frenchy, I tried to do the right thing by Marsha for years and got kicked in the teeth for it every time I turned around. Maybe I got burned a little too bad, but to me now it’s not much more than an impossible dream."

"Come on," she snorted. "How impossible a dream would it have been for me when I was twenty and in court for soliciting? Maybe I got a little lucky, but it worked out, Danny. There’s no reason it can’t work out for you. You’re basically a nice person, and from what I can figure out, a better person than Marsha deserved, anyway."

"I don’t know how nice I am," he shook his head. "I mean, what I did to Marsha when I left her really wasn’t very nice, but it damn sure felt good, after all the shit she gave me."

"You’ve hinted a number of times that you did a pretty good number on her," Frenchy smiled. "What’d you do, beat her up, or something?"

"No, not that," Danny said, and let out another sigh. "Not that I didn’t feel like it, and not that she didn’t deserve it."

"What happened, anyway?"

Danny was silent for a moment, then shook his head. "It’s kind of a long story."

"We’ve got time," she shrugged, "well, unless the buzzer goes off."

Danny thought for a moment, and decided that he might as well tell her. Along with Patty, Frenchy had turned into a friend he could talk things out with. If she was too appalled at what he’d done, she’d be gone soon, anyway, and wouldn’t be back here on shift again until long after he’d left. "Frenchy," he began, "you remember that I told you I walked in on her and Sheena, and I said I couldn’t make up my mind whether to kill them both or just walk out?"

"Yeah, I remember," she nodded. "It had to hurt, to catch her like that."

"It did," Danny nodded. In a way it seemed like a lot longer than three weeks ago, but in other ways it seemed like it had just happened seconds ago. "Maybe that’s why this place, and you, for that matter, seems so surreal. I mean, your husband knows you’re up here, he knows you’ve been doing it for years. Doesn’t he get a little jealous of you getting it on with a lot of different guys?"

"Not really," Frenchy smiled. "Maybe a little jealous of the fact that he’s not a woman so he could do it himself. But like I told you, he knew what I was when I met him, and he accepted it, and accepted me for what I am. We’ve always been pretty honest with each other, and never tried to pull the wool over each other’s eyes. He’d rather have me up front about it, rather than sneaking around behind his back."

"Does he cat around on you?" Danny asked.

"A little," she nodded. "Not much, and not around home. He comes up here once in a while, not more than once or twice a year. It’s never been while I’ve been here since I have to be home with the kids when he’s gone. Maybe after we get them both in college we might try it together some time. I think it’d be kind of cool to be in the lineup when he comes in. Maybe even have him pick me out."

"And you don’t mind?"

"Of course not," she snorted. "I mean, considering everything, how could I mind? Hell, I usually have to urge him to do it, just to sort of even things out and keep them honest between us. I take it that things didn’t work like that between you and Marsha."

"No, hell no, of course not," Danny said. "She had two sets of rules, one for her, one for me. Any similarity between the two was purely accidental." He sighed again. "Hell, when you get right down to it, it wasn’t so much the finding her in bed with Sheena as it was the fact that she had to sneak around behind my back to do it. I mean, I think I could have dealt with her telling me about it up front, but it was the fact that she had to lie and cheat that hurt so much."

"Yeah, that’s it," Frenchy nodded. "That’s what Charlie and I have tried to avoid. Let’s face it, sneaking around with this could have blown things up real good. But I’m just a little curious. If you didn’t kill both of them, and you just didn’t walk out, then what did you do?"

"I’m not that mean and nasty," Danny shook his head. "But I was extremely pissed. I mean, I knew that was the final straw, but I also knew I just couldn’t leave without giving her something to make her remember just how pissed I was."

"So, what happened?"

Danny took a sip of coffee and said, "What you have to understand is how this came about. I worked normal business hours, but I was on the road a lot, and probably spent a couple nights a week on the road, on an average. After a while, those got to be nice to look forward to. Marsha works at a place where they work late on Wednesday nights, so to make up for it, they don’t start work till noon on Wednesday, so she would almost always be home on Wednesday when I was out of the house. Well, I had to be on the road Wednesday night, so I went into the office normal time, but I realized I’d left a couple things at home, so I took a swing back past the house to pick them up."

"And she wasn’t expecting you?"

"If she had been, would she have been in bed with Sheena?" Danny snorted. "That was actually a good example of how blind I was. I got to thinking about it later, after I had that in front of me, well, some of the things that she’d said in the past, a couple of odd pieces I hadn’t been able to put together made me realize it had to have been going on for years."

"And that pissed you off even more?"

"Well, yeah," Danny nodded. "But a lot of that didn’t get worked out in my head until I was on my way out here, so it just kept me from feeling guilty about what I did to her."

Frenchy smiled and shook her head, then took a sip of her own coffee. "I keep nudging you about what it was, and we don’t seem to get any closer to it."

"Like I said, a long story," Danny smiled, starting to get into the warm feeling of revenge that welled up in him. "I mean, I knew from the first instant that it was over between us, it was done with, I was out of there one way or another. It was just a question of how hard I was going to show her my disgust in the process. Anyway, I went back out, got in the car, and drove down to where the channel runs in from the ocean, and just sat and thought about things. And, I came up with a couple pretty good ideas."

He smiled again, and took another sip of coffee before going on: "I have to admit I’d thought about a couple of the points in the past, but I never quite put it together the way that I did until then. Now, Frenchy, what you have to realize is that I spent most of eight years selling herbal dietary supplements and vitamins. Most of that shit is pure quackery and horseshit, but in eight years I learned quite a bit about it, and some other interesting things along the way. My ideas were still coming together, but I knew at least part of what I was going to do."

He spent the next several minutes going through the story. He stopped off at a hardware store to get a few things he was going to need, explaining that he realized that if he was going to leave her, he was going to leave his job, too, which he hated about as much as he did her. In effect, he quit right then without bothering to tell them about it. He drove on out toward Cypress Quarters, which is located up on the north end of Lake Okeechobee. Once he got out of town a ways, he found a nice quiet little patch of forest, and went for a walk until he found a nice little patch of cowhage.

"Cowhage?" Frenchy asked.

"It’s sort of a weed," he explained. "It has these seed pods on it, and this time of the year they’re all nicely dried out." He told her that he put on rubber gloves and spent an hour or so gathering seed pods, and he probably had a gallon or so by the time he was done. Then he found a motel out by Cypress Quarters, checked in, spread some plastic out on the desk, put on a respirator and a plastic raincoat, and took a knife and started in on the pods. He explained that the pods are covered with tiny little hairs, and they’re easy to scrape off. He spent two or three hours, working very carefully, and finally had perhaps a quarter of a soda can worth of them. Then, he took a piece of fiberglass pipe insulation he’d bought from the hardware store, clamped it between two boards, and started into it with some coarse sandpaper. In an hour or so, he had about as much fiberglass sawdust as he had cowhage hairs. To top that off, he had a couple bottles of capsules of ground rose hips in his sample case; so he pulled them out, took the capsules apart, and collected all the contents. He then mixed everything together, put them back into the rose hip bottles, and other bottles of samples he emptied down the toilet, sealed everything up tight, and finally went outside to take off the plastic raincoat and rubber gloves. "That was the hard part, to get all that stuff off without getting any of it on my skin," he told her.

"I can’t figure out what you were planning to do with all this," Frenchy smiled. "But it sounds evil."

"I think so," Danny grinned. "I mean, all the while I was doing this, I was thinking about how much I was going to enjoy using it."

By then, it was getting late, so he went to bed, and thought of a couple other things that would help make things go better, so the next morning he got up and drove down to Miami, since he didn’t think he’d manage to find what he needed any closer. He found the items, then drove back up to Ft. Pierce, did a few other things that needed doing, and went home like nothing had happened. "Usually on the trip I was supposed to be on, I got in a little late and I made sure it was a little later than normal," he told Frenchy with a smile. "Well, Marsha was as snotty as usual, but we sat around and watched TV while I had about six cans of soda. After a while we went to bed."

"Did you hit on her to party one last time, just on general principles?" Frenchy smiled.

"Shit, no," Danny said. "I didn’t want to louse up my plans. I was disgusted enough with her, it was hard enough to keep a straight face. Well, in a few minutes she was sawing logs big time, and I figured I’d better get a little sleep myself. I didn’t want to set an alarm clock, which is why I drank all those sodas. About two in the morning my bladder couldn’t take it any longer, so I got up, took a leak, snuck out to the car and brought in the stuff I had for her."

Among the things he’d had to go to Miami to get were four pairs of cheap handcuffs. Since Marsha was out like a light, it was no problem to get hold of one of her wrists, get a handcuff on it, and fasten the other side to one of the bedposts. Her other wrist went about as easily, but getting her over on her back and getting the handcuffs fastened to the other bedpost caused her to wake up.

"Frenchy," he smiled. "Do you know what a penis gag is?"

"Sure," she smiled. "I do a lot of domme stuff, after all. I’ve got one back in my work room. It’s a gag, with the inside part that goes in the mouth sort of shaped like the head of a penis."

"Marsha never had mine in her mouth," he smiled. "So I thought she deserved to know something about it. She started yelling about what the fuck I thought I was doing, and it was still in the dark so she couldn’t see I had the gag, so I stuffed it in her mouth and fastened it. This one had a hole in the center of it, so she could breathe through it. Well, even with the gag, she was yelling and raising hell, but since I already had her fastened down pretty well, it wasn’t any trick to get the cuffs on her ankles and fasten them to the foot of the bed."

"Snug, spread-eagled and helpless?" Frenchy laughed. "I start to get the picture."

"Well, I left her a little loose, so she could squirm around a little," he laughed. "I figured she’d feel even more helpless that way. Then, I went out to the kitchen, got a big butcher knife, and cut off her pajamas with it."

"I thought you had a thing about nude women," Frenchy frowned. "And a butcher knife?"

"Well, yeah," he said. "That was the point. Well, one of them. I didn’t want her getting me horny by being spread-eagled and helpless. Well, anyway, I sat down on the bed with the knife in my hand and told her to settle the hell down, because she was going to listen to what I had to tell her if I had to leave her like that all week. She didn’t like that much, either, but after a while she got tired enough that she settled down some." Danny let out a sigh and went on, "Frenchy, I didn’t intend to really hurt her, but I wasn’t about to tell her that. For that matter, I didn’t even hit her, but I wanted to thoroughly terrorize her. Of course, she saw that knife and she went totally apeshit, which is probably why it took her a while to settle down."

"Well, Jesus, yeah, I guess," Frenchy shook her head. "It would have scared the shit out of me, too."

"That was my intention," Danny grinned. "Well, anyway, I told her that I’d seen her with Sheena, that I wasn’t going to take it anymore, and this was the end of things. And, just to give her something to think about, I mentioned that the way she was laying there sort of reminded me of back when I was a kid, deer hunting, and that was kinda like how you’d lay a deer out to gut it out."

"Oh, my God!" Frenchy laughed. "Yeah, that probably did a pretty good job of terrorizing her."

"I sort of thought so, from the way she acted," he laughed. "It was a little hard to tell with the gag in her mouth, but I got the general idea. She even shit the bed on me. So, I started packing up clothes and stuff and hauling them out to the car, just letting her wonder. Well, after a while I thought I’d better get something else for her to think about. Frenchy, do you know what capsaicin is?"

"No idea."

"It’s the stuff that makes chili peppers hot. It’s a very interesting little chemical, very powerful. To give you an idea of how powerful it is, normal deep heating rubs use it, in a concentration of about five hundredths of one percent, and that’ll warm you up pretty good. The company I was working for had a rub that was a little stronger than that, about three tenths of a percent. In other words, about six times more powerful."

"Uh-oh," Frenchy grinned. "I get the picture."

"You’re dern tootin’" he laughed. "I tried that stuff exactly once. It burns like fire. So, I got on another pair of rubber gloves and gave her a little rubdown. I guess I’m just as glad I had the gag in her mouth, since she’d have done a number on my eardrums with her screaming if I hadn’t. It was still pretty loud."

"And it gets worse?"

"Like they say up where I come from, ‘Yaaah, you betcha.’ I don’t think she was noticing me finishing up my packing up too much there for a while, but when she settled down some, I gave her another treatment. She didn’t like that much, either. In fact, by then I’d almost suspect she’d rather I’d taken the butcher knife to her."

"Well, Jesus," Frenchy shook her head. "I would think so. So where does all this stuff you spent so much time on the day before come in?"

"The pièce de résistance," he laughed. "The actual capsaicin in that rub is in an oil carrier, and it dries out pretty fast. When she was nicely dried out and her pores were still wide open, I gave her a rubdown with my special little baby powder. You ever see itching powder in a novelty store?"

"Oh, my God!" Frenchy shook her head. "You are evil, Danny! Evil! You really were pissed with her, weren’t you?"

"You damn betcha," he smiled, savoring the memory. "Actually the powdered rose hips is what you get in a novelty store. It’s not all that powerful. There’s a high-powered stuff you can sometimes find –that’s the cowhage hairs – but it’s usually a special-order item, and I didn’t think I could come up with it on short notice so I made my own."

"And the fiberglass powder?"

"It’s not as itchy as the other two and takes a while to get started," Danny said. "But it goes on and on. The other stuff will sort of wear off as the body absorbs it, over a few hours. Not the fiberglass. It gets under the skin and stays there till the top layer of skin wears off. We’re talking days, maybe even weeks. But, I have to admit, she was already going pretty good by the time I wrapped up. I had a little of the powder left over, so I dusted down some of her underwear with it. She was busy enough that I don’t think she noticed. I mean, she was laying there handcuffed to the bed, itching and burning and swollen like the giant hemorrhoid that she is, and wasn’t able to scratch anything or do anything else about it. Well, by that time, I had the stuff out of the house that I wanted, so I told her that I was going to offer her a fair settlement, and if she didn’t accept it she was going to feel a lot worse, and walked out."

"Leaving her gagged and handcuffed to the bed?"

"Yeah," Danny grinned. "It was still kind of early, and I wanted to get to the bank. I knew she’d cashed her paycheck the evening before, and mine was direct deposited, so I cleaned out the accounts, then called and cancelled all the credit cards, except for one that was only in my name. Fortunately, they were pretty well paid down. It took a while to get all that going, and it was the middle of the morning before I could hit the road."

"And you just left her there?"

"Well, yeah," he said. "I did call Sheena and told her that Marsha needed to see her. She said she was going to be tied up in a meeting, and she wouldn’t be able to get there until after work, and I said that would be just fine, she’d be waiting at the house. So, I got back in the car and drove off. I guess I didn’t mention that I left Sheena a note, too."

"A note?"

"Yeah, written on Marsha’s belly in permanent marker. It said, ‘Sheena, she’s yours. Do what you want to.’"

"Evil, evil," Frenchy grinned. "So, what happened?"

Danny shrugged. "I called about six that evening and Sheena answered the phone, so I didn’t say anything and hung up. I’m guessing she hadn’t gotten Marsha loose yet, but since she was there I pitched the handcuff keys out the car window. Sheena must have got her loose sooner or later, since a few hours later she called my dad and bitched him out real good. I don’t know whether they called a locksmith, or whether Sheena took a hacksaw to the handcuffs. Either way, I think I made my point, but I don’t think I’m going back to Florida again before the statute of limitations on spouse abuse runs out."

"Might be a wise idea," Frenchy nodded.

Danny shook his head. "I feel a little guilty about it," he said. "I mean, damn, that wasn’t a nice thing to do. But she’d hurt me so much I had to get back at her somehow. In spite of everything, I don’t think it adds up to an even payback, since that would take years."

"I think I understand," the blonde prostitute nodded. "You’re right, it wasn’t a nice thing to do. But what else could you do?" She shook her head. "Everything else being the same, though, Danny, I don’t think that I’d want you to get pissed like that with me."

"I could never do that," Danny said. "You’re fundamentally a nice person, and you try to be honest and fair with your husband. I’ll have to admit, if I were your husband I’d have a hard time being as understanding as he appears to be, but yeah, if I knew about what you were doing ahead of time, and I knew you were going to be honest and not go behind my back, well, I think I could accept it a lot easier than I could accept Marsha’s messing around with Sheena, sneaking around and lying about it."

"That’s what I mean," she nodded. "Danny, you’re a decent guy. She had to piss you off pretty bad to do something like that to her. But Charlie knew what he was letting himself in for when he hooked up with me, and I didn’t give him many illusions. Marsha, well, you didn’t know about what was going on ahead of time and she gave you a lot of illusions and lies along the way, so I guess I don’t blame you for being pissed off. Speaking as a woman who’s doing something that would piss most husbands off to the point of murder, you had every right to be pissed, and I think you managed to work out a lot of your anger in the process."

"Yeah, I think I did," Danny nodded. "Thanks, Frenchy. I’m glad you understand. Maybe it’ll help me come to terms with it."

"Well, that’s how I feel, speaking as a woman," she smiled. "But, speaking as a domme, I do have one question."

"What’s that?" he asked.

"How do I get my hands on this cowhage stuff? And, what’s the name of the outfit that does this high powered capsaicin stuff?"

Danny shook his head. "You’re kidding!"

"No, I’m not," she smiled. "We have this guy who comes up here every once in a while, and he has a standing challenge for something new and excruciating. Handcuffed to the bed, itching and burning and swollen like a giant hemorrhoid? I like that!"

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