Chapter 70: Divesting. Flight to St. Croix

Mark

The weekend after our large party with eighty or so guests was quiet. I got some time in with Scott working on my instrument rating. I finally had mastered the concept of the instrument scan. Miraculously, I’d stopped focusing on one instrument until I got that right to move onto the next one and find that in the meantime, several other indicators had gone to hell and the plane was doing something I didn’t want it to be doing. Instead, I smoothly scanned the entire panel and made small corrections with assurance that other things wouldn’t fall apart. The analogy that Scott made to running a multi-billion dollar conglomerate wasn’t wasted on me.

I invited Scott, Wes, Vanessa, and Anna out to The Meadows for dinner and play. To my surprise, Scott told me that Van and Anna were in L.A. working on a new porn film for one of the name studios. I bit my tongue and didn’t spill my own secret regarding taking them to Denmark with a few of the others in our group to do some European porn. I knew their girlfriends would get a big charge out of something like that.

Instead, Scott and Wes came out for a barbecue that evening. Alice decided to hang around with us for the weekend with a sketchbook and her laptop working on Club Infinity when none of the other girls were looking over her shoulder. When she had a chance she’d show me some of her work.

Our friend Don also came in midafternoon ostensibly to use the pool. He was also a bachelor for the weekend since Edie, his wife, had flown to Florida to see her parents. Deke was at The Meadows to give a shooting lesson to Elsa, Cindy, and Melanie. Carter came by too after a call from Elsa who’d sized up the situation and the need for satisfying males. When Stacy showed up, I knew we had a hot little party going on for Saturday evening again: six males and eight females again.

Stacy gave me a sixty-second update on the To Do List when no one was nearby, and then gave herself into the party atmosphere that resulted from fourteen horny people being in one place. I had expected her to be clingy after the weekend before, but after our naked kisses in the pool she squared off with Carter, and the two of them turned up the heat on each other. I did see her check in with Elsa frequently regarding acceptable protocol with the guys and sex.

I had Alice and Izzy for the first round after dinner. We were out on the pool patio on a large double chaise that served more like a king-size bed. We worked on some of my favorite positions: swapping around as we shared the wealth. I loved it when Alice was on my cock in the cowgirl position and Izzy was riding my mouth and tongue facing Alice. I knew the two of them were making out and stimulating each other in other ways because I peeked once in a while when I didn’t have a pussy and cute ass entirely blocking my view.

Between rounds, Elsa cued me in that she had talked to Stacy about not being too clingy. She thought that Stacy’s initial rejection of being with me might have been due to her talk, plus her desire to try one of the other men and to test her boundaries. She did confirm that Stacy was all ga-ga eyed about me, totally smitten and in love.

Elsa posed with a cute look, “And how does Mark feel about Stacy?”

I admitted that I had feelings for the cute little Goth girl who had a bunch of tattoos and piercings scattered around her body. Elsa nodded knowingly; she read me like a book.

Stacy and I coupled together for round two and there was no doubt it was the highlight of her weekend; she beamed and put her all into our lovemaking using some muscles I’m sure she’d never used before to show me how desirable she was when we made love. I poured on the coals and made the scene very romantic for her: music, candles, sweet loving words that made her swoon, a start with a gentle massage with aromatic oils, and then some romantic lovemaking that started with some oral orgasms and progressed up to a head-banger as we both came together in a matched pair of beautiful his and her orgasms. I was especially attentive to her in our afterglow as well.

Everyone stayed over, only the combinations that slept together were not necessarily the ones that had taken place earlier during the lovemaking. Izzy joined me with Stacy, and we had a third round together, where everyone ended up feeling very romantic and good about the others. I had the smallest girls for the night and loved both of them. I was less attuned to who else went off with whom that evening.

Sunday morning, our party broke up after an early breakfast. Cindy and Elsa went off for some high speed driving practice at a local track, then back to The Meadows for martial arts and another round of weaponry practice with Deke. KC had a special exhibit that day at her gallery that included some of her recent work and that of another artist. I wanted to buy it all, but she insisted otherwise so she could get known in arty circles. She declared that she wanted more of the beautiful and erotic sexy photographs around the house and condo that Brite Reber did in her Minnesota studio, some erotically showing the sex act in all its glory.

Melanie and Izzy took Stacy and they went clothes shopping; they had instructions from me to get Stacy some nice things. Stacy protested but I just walked away from the trio, thereby leaving them with the dilemma of whether to follow my wishes or not. I heard Mel explaining that when I wanted to shower presents and gifts on someone, I didn’t want a back argument about who paid what for it. Stacy’s attitude convinced me that she was not after me for money.

Alice went back to her home and office to work on the Club Infinity. The guys scattered, and I had a morning of meetings despite it being Sunday, followed by some intensive air work with Wes in the Cessna 210.

Tuesday morning, Elsa meandered down to the hangar. Alice and Stacy pulled their cars into the hangar to park them, and the three of them took off on a little survey of some top rated and well-attended strip clubs in Nebraska and Alabama.

I expressed some concern about three single women in a strip club without protection. Elsa reminded me that Marcia was accompanying them, and that two of the four in the group could take out an Army platoon with one hand tied behind their back. Further, they were armed and dangerous with their urban survival skills. I still worried.

While they were away, I flew to Washington to meet with my state delegation and to testify about the role of government in promoting advanced technology in the United States. My answer to that was so predictable, it was pathetic that they’d ask me. I lambasted the government for being not years, but decades behind in what they thought of as advanced technology in many of their own operations. Further, I had about fifty examples where Federal laws inhibited the expansion of technology into key areas because of protectionism or interference of the religious right wing that didn’t think certain areas of research were to be pursued because it was God’s will – whoever she was.

My overall theme was lead, follow, or get out of the way – don’t block; currently the Feds were more in the way of progress then they were either of the other two, particularly by insisting on funding some technologies that were already outmoded and failing to fund those that would have far-reaching and positive impact on the economy. Congress acted notoriously shortsighted and reacted to the corporations that funded their elections; bad design all around and I intended to lay it out for them in detail.

I also took the opportunity to brace the Congressional panel about the lack of response to rising waters that in a couple of generations would impact every seacoast of the country in Gulf, Atlantic, and Pacific waters. The waters were rising, yet no one was changing standards of construction regarding berms and levees, heights of new construction to anticipate new sea levels, or any other area impacted.

Tuesday night, I got a text from Elsa that they’d visited three clubs in Nebraska with great success in terms of getting information to help launch Infinity. She told me that Alice had taken about a thousand photos too.

I texted back, ‘Where are you now? What are you doing?’

‘In the Club Wonder in Lincoln, NE – it’s ladies night and we’re ladies. Met three nice guys – railroad men. Learnin’ sooooo much about railroads. I think we’re going to call it a night pretty soon and head to bed alone. RR men not that exciting. We luv U. Elsa, Stacy, Marcia, and Alice’

I knew that Elsa wouldn’t be drinking. She was the pilot and had rigid rules about time between drinking and flying. I also knew they wanted to get down to the Mobile area by lunchtime, so that meant an early departure from Lincoln for the 850 mile trip. I’d checked the weather, and she’d do the trip VFR in two hops. I guessed she’d refuel in Branson.

Sheila came to me with some thinking about my personal real estate holdings. She’d been going over my holdings and gotten into my personal stuff instead of the business side of things. She asked about the real estate that I owned.

Besides the condo in the city and The Meadows nearby, I also had places in Florida, Aspen, Napa Valley, near Kyoto, outside of Johannesburg, London, and Marbella, Spain. Most I don’t use that much, but with my enlarging family I wondered if that might change.

She sat with me with a map. “Mark, some of those real estate holdings you haven’t used very much, some of them not for years. I wanted to see if you wanted to divest any of them. The worldwide real estate markets are pretty good about now, especially for high end properties such as you hold.”

“Which ones?” I asked.

“Let me take them in no particular order. Johannesburg; you own an estate there worth about ten million. You were last there three years ago for three nights. You sold off your corporate interests there and haven’t been south of the equator in that continent since.”

“Sell it.”

“Kyoto. You bought the property and antique home of a Samurai warrior eight years ago. You have stayed in the home a total of one week since buying it – two trips. Three years ago you agreed to open it to special tour groups and students of that era.”

“Sell it, or donate it to their historical society.”

“Napa Valley. You own a winery and about five hundred acres of grapes. The tenants that run the farm would like to buy the property and have made a good offer. You would be a mortgage holder, and I think they’re good for the money. If they default you get the property and equipment back.”

“Do it. Sell. Give them good terms ... and get some wine from them for here and The Meadows.”

“Marbella, Spain is next. You own a penthouse condo overlooking the harbor and Mediterranean. You have spent a total of five days there, and not been there for four years. I think you bought it to entertain some bankers you were doing a deal with in Barcelona so you could prove you loved their country.”

“I do love their country, but sell it. What’s left besides the condo and The Meadows?”

“You have a flat in London on Hamilton Terrace, near the cricket grounds; a ski lodge in Aspen you saw once in the summer when you bought it four years ago thinking you’d take up skiing because you liked snow that year; and a condo on Fisher Island, near Miami, you bought the next year because you wanted a place where it didn’t snow.