Chapter 9

It took over three months for the sale to finish, and for us to refit the hotel; it was sold to us at a knocked-down price because it needed extensive renovation, but Maisie came up with enough friends and tradesmen to help us without denting our budget too badly, and although she never told me what she did, I could make a very educated guess that their wives and girlfriends paid our bill for us.

We agreed that the secret of the zappers would stay a secret and so whatever Maisie did do, I'm sure her friends and tradesmen didn't know the whole story. She also made up with her parents and blamed her attack of lust at the pub on hormonal imbalance. Once her family thought she had a mild medical complaint, that she told them she was getting treatment for, they seemed to disregard the shameless public transgressions.

The same could not be said for Rebecca: the anger she felt for her parent's favouritism had not rescinded, and when Elsie and my new business partner (Maisie and I agreed to give her a third of our venture) met to discuss "that night" in a café in the centre of a shopping centre, they descended into fierce shouting, and Rebecca surreptitiously dosing her sister with a strong quantity of my zapper, before fleeing the scene; I know Elsie was eventually arrested, much to Rebecca's amusement.

As for me, I had not bothered to contact my sister; Maisie's negotiations would have left an ill-taste in the mouth for her, and I wasn't that sure what to say. The fact that I also saw the remnants of her sexual antics dripping down her legs, not to mention her engaging in pee play, were also good reasons not to open communication channels. Katie would contact me if she needed to, or we would see each other at Christmas and pretend nothing had happened; this cowardly apathy suited me.

The Lovers' Hotel was situated around thirty miles from the town I lived in, and was a fifteen minute walk from a tiny village that possessed a pub, a post office and a sporadic train service. It's previous use as a conference centre-cum-hotel meant that there were a couple of big rooms on the ground floor and we remodelled these to provided a "blue" room where the men congregated and had their "lesson" on seduction and sex, and a "pink" room where women had massages, before they both lead through big double doors into the dining room.

We could then send all the couples after dinner to the "couples bar" which had twenty high-powered transmitters in the bar, ceiling and wall. The three of us discussed the mechanics of this and decided that it would be wise to let them buy a drink each (for profits) before we left the room and turned on the hidden zappers. We only needed to be absent for thirty seconds, but it would be unwise to have the staff as loved up as the guests: it was our business not our pleasure.

We had six of our eight rooms booked for the opening night; Maisie had managed to find dozens of desperate people in sexless marriages on the Internet, and her website had persuaded four men and two women to join us for the night, with their partners. I felt butterflies as the first couple checked in – a dumpy woman with red, puffy eyes accompanying a scowling middle-aged gentleman - and Rebecca gleefully showed them to their room.

It didn't feel like a great start: arguing with each other would not make for a happy evening, and the second couple hardly looked much better. I wondered how many relationships were at "last chance saloon" and mentioned my reservations to Maisie but she scoffed as she busied herself with excitement.

Maisie had arranged for local masseurs to visit in the afternoon as a "standard outcall" and was banned from the room as Rebecca oversaw the nervous ladies getting a gentle massage from some incredibly sexy masseurs while Maisie and I had to "lecture" half-a-dozen reluctant men, while we wore white togas.

Maisie was brilliant and had organised so much of the experience by herself. Towels and togas, each colour-matched to their partner, and their allocated suite, awaited for the gentlemen on the seats and she argued with one of the guests when he almost point-blank refused to take his mobile phone upstairs as "Arsenal were playing later." There was reticence when she demanded nudity and angrily barked into the room, "who wants to get laid tonight? And make their partner orgasm repeatedly?"

Nervously, our students looked at each other, and disrobed, to sit on the towels provided while Maisie and I delivered a lecture using slides taken mostly from pilfered pictures and videos from the Internet. We had only rehearsed a couple of times together, but we discussed aphrodisiacs, foreplay, intercourse, "the art of compliment" and "effortless seduction" until a buzzer sounded and my business partner wrapped up her lecture and then put a picture of how to tie a toga on the big television screen.

Watching six middle-aged men try to tie togas was amusing, and I had to help a couple fasten the unwieldy cotton sheets: "real men wear togas," Maisie cried: she had been a fantastic actress all afternoon as she told them the act of wearing the toga signified their successful completion of the seduction course. I could not believe that they were so gullible, but in my heart I knew that most of them were here because they needed hope. They wanted to believe it was true, and that they had new found powers to woo, please and satisfy their partner.

The aphrodisiac-laden dinner, cooked by our part-time retired chef looked delicious: griddled asparagus spears, oysters with ginger followed by avacado, banana and honey salad and chocolate chilli figs. The intimate dining room with flickering candle lights, smiling and flirting, was buzzing with excitement and our business plan seemed to be working.

After coffee, the couples joined me in the bar and every man happily charged £60 to their account to buy a bottle of pink champagne for him and his partner: Maisie's small lie that it was a proven aphrodisiac (and we gave them a glass with their dinner), seemed to convince the desperate men to part with their money, and we happily sold six of the overpriced bottles of cheap bubbly.

I must admit my nerves were a little frayed as I stepped outside the bar; if the zappers failed for whatever reason at this point, then our entire scam would be rumbled and I closed the door to the bar as I entered the store room and watched the six couples on the CCTV camera we had set up. My clammy fingers hovered over the key to activate my technology and slipped as I turned it, priming the zappers before I unleashed several seconds of intense arousal into the bar.

The reaction was immediate: every member of the bar held onto their toga-clad crotch with a pained expression and I breathed an audible sigh of relief as I counted the half-minute before wandering back to our guests. Two couples frantically grabbed each other as they hurriedly left the bar, scrabbling at their togas as they scrambled towards their private rooms.

The other four couples were not waiting, and we suspected some couples might not when we designed the hotel. I watched as the first couple – a slightly dumpy, dour woman on her knees with her equally as uninspiring partner's cock bobbing in her face. I had wondered throughout the day if there was a wild tiger hidden inside her dreary exterior, and she was far from the colourless lady I first thought.