PROLOGUE

      She lay there, in a small heaven of sorts.

       This is the definitive rampant fling.

      She grinned widely, partly because her clitoris was being rubbed, partly because she suddenly envisaged her actions set down in type, immortalized, in a racy bestseller. I could sell these details to Jackie Collins, she thought, as her right nipple was being nibbled and her left was being kneaded. This kind of thing is right up her street.

      Yes, nibbled nipples had a certain titillating ring to it (titillating, oh very droll), but would also look good on the printed page. In her mind’s eye, she inverted the ‘b’ and played with the ‘p’:

      bb

      pp

      nibbled

      nipples

      and thought that Jackie C would really rather like them. So, while he left her nipples to traverse her body, she penned a few thoughts.

      Dear Ms Collins, this is what happened. No, this is what’s happening: I’m lying on my back with my legs wrapped around the back of a most glorious superstud, his ‘throbbing manhood’, his ‘enormous dick’, his ‘stupendous cock’ is surging into me. My neck is thrown back and is being licked greedily. This man on top of me has the physique of a Rodin sculpture, Ms Collins, a Rodin sculpture with an insatiable sexual appetite.

       I am grabbing on to a pair of buttocks so firm, so exquisitely honed, that it is only their warmth and a slight fuzz of hair which persuade me they are real and not perfectly hewn marble. We’ve been going at it, this fast-motion super-bonking, for the best part of two hours, so you see real people really can keep it up (literally).

      Hello hello, I am now being flipped over and I am on top, in the driving seat. I am grinding down on him, now I am lifting myself off. Plunge, lunge, down I go again. I think I’ll sit upright and throw my head back alluringly – just in case he can see me through those eyes glazed with near-fulfilled desire. He is surging, making that ‘pumping’. He is abandoned to the sensation. And do you know what? I am doing this, I am making him feel this way. He is putty in my hands, but he is hard as a rock inside. A ‘rock-cock’ – now there’s a jaunty little phrase for you, Ms C. Oh, up he sits, a moment’s tenderness too. Kisses are slower, more lip, less tongue. He’s actually rather nice, sweet and gentle, but tonight I want wild and rampant. So, here I go, pushing him down, covering him again. Forget in-out, I’m rotating fluidly and what a pelvis I have! Ten years of ballet had its merits after all. Our legs are so entwined, so taut, that cramp threatens in my left thigh, but a potentially mammoth orgasm is very much on the horizon. Here it comes. Here I come. More more more.

       Yes.

       Jesus.

       Oh!

       Pure bestseller material, that’ll be me. I’ll give your previous heroines a run for their money. I’m coming to your rescue, Jackie. Oh!

      As the regular throbs racked her body, her brain (which was really quite a good one, having gained a First from Bristol University) was working energetically too.

      On second thoughts, Ms Collins will not have this, not for a while at least. No, this will be for me, this shall become my secret, my own touchstone. When I am either a) an aged spinster (she was 25 – the official age, she’d recently read, for spinsterhood to commence) or b) a good little housewife, cooking and breeding superlatively, then shall I derive much pleasure recounting to myself (be it in a rocking-chair or at a school play), the time I was an outrageous vamp, a shameless slapper, an utterly debauched nympho.

      She came to her conclusion as he came to his. He started to pant raspingly and called out ‘Oh my God, oh goddo goddo Goh’ with enormous conviction. She felt rather proud of herself.

       No, Mister Man, it’s ‘goddess’ actually, oh your goddess. For that is what I shall be. That is who I am for today, and for the times when I shall again allow you to experience such delicious sex with me.

      Inadvertently, she gave out a little sigh, one of satisfaction, intellectual rather than physical. It was answered by a sucking kiss from the man whom she straddled. She smiled. He smiled. She smiled again, with ulterior motives. He smiled back, oblivious but ensnared.

       Ho ho! So my secret is safe. Look at you, smugly grinning, proud as punch, purely because you think you’ve taken me to heaven and back. Which you have. But who was it who was in control? I shall strive hard to keep it that way, and I shall strive to keep it hard. I shall not fall in love with this man. I shall not day-dream wistfully of babies and scones baking in an Aga. Nor must you fall in love with me, only lust and long for me until you positively ache. Even if you marry and live in blissful domesticity, you will frequently think of me and surge inside on remembering the joy and liberation of sex with me.

      I must, she decided, become an enigma. Remain one. To everyone, henceforth. A wave of absolute exhilaration coursed through her. This is it; this is not a search for self but the creation of it. I shall play and I shall act and I shall have much fun. I shall be the conductor. The baton is in my hand and the balls are in my caught.

      She rushed to the bathroom with Handel’s ‘Hallelujah Chorus’ careering around her head. Predictably, the orgasm had sent urgent messages to her bladder and, sitting in the silence of her bathroom, she contemplated the release of pee versus an orgasm on the pleasure scale. Today, peeing came second. She checked it was really her in the mirror.

       Gracious Good Lord! It is me! Sally Lomax, what on earth have you just done?

       I’ve just had rampant sex.

      She smiled hugely, winked, said ‘Go for it, girl’ out loud, and flushed the toilet with triumphant force. The phone had begun to ring. Sally gave herself another beaming smile and then sauntered, positively swaggered, to answer it. It was her mother, officious as ever, voice shrill, no time for a greeting.

      ‘Darling I’ve been ringing for hours, I thought you’d be busy marking essays?’

      ‘No, I had to be elsewhere, something far more pressing,’ Sally said truthfully.

      ‘What?’

       Oh, you know how it is, Mum. When there’s six foot of beefcake in your bed, more handsome and brawny than in your most incorrigible dreams, great hands, a wonderful mouth and a dick to die for; obviously marking a ten-yearold’s ‘What I did over half term’ rather pales into insignificance.

      Taking a sharp bite on her tongue, Sally, however, did not speak her mind. My, how she would have relished the ensuing stunned silence of matriarchal disbelief. How she would have loved to have breezed straight on with mundane enquiries about the health of the cat and the younger sisters (in that order). Today, though, decorum won. The ravaged Rodin was diplomatically replaced by an old friend who would have been quite compliant had she known the circumstances (she was, in fact, holidaying in Tunisia).

      ‘Daph is a little low, so I’ve been with her.’

      ‘Darling, did you remember Aunt Martha’s seventieth?’

      Sally had forgotten.

      ‘Is blasphemy really necessary? I suggest you phone her right this minute.’

      So