Her name was Rose and she was the love of my life. When she died, for a while there I really didn’t want to go on without her. I think in the end it was simply knowing how disappointed she’d have been in me if I just gave up, that got me through those first few terrible days.

A guy called Mathew Arnold ran her off the road while he was driving while drunk. He’d already lost his license for previous DUI offenses; some people just don’t learn.

He’s since committed suicide, well he probably would have if we’d waited long enough. We, being myself and Eddie Pastoll, who was my head of security. He’d been with me since I set up the company fifteen years earlier and wasn’t well known for his patience but then, come to that, neither was I.

They say he screamed on the way down from the roof of his apartment block. Apparently, suicides don’t tend to do that; I guess nobody told Mathew that.

The only problem I had with that solution was that Eddie wouldn’t let me be the one to throw him off. Looking back on it I guess he was right, it really wasn’t a job for an amateur.

Some good friends helped me through those first few weeks and then I went into therapy at the Heartland Wellness Center in Indiana for four months while they put me back together.

My second-in-command, Archie, looked after things while I was away, and he let me know, when he thought I could handle it, that my only son, Charles, had been sucking up to the other board members on the qt trying to put doubts in their minds as to whether I should be allowed to come back or not. As my only heir, he probably thought he’d take over if he could force me out. I’d sooner sell the whole thing for a dollar than let that asshole get control of it, but I didn’t let him know that.

I guess he got off on the wrong foot when he nearly killed Rose in childbirth. She was tiny and gorgeous, and she’d really wanted to give birth naturally. After four hours of very difficult labor, the doctors finally stepped in and delivered him by caesarian; for a while, it had been touch and go if they would both survive.

Even without that bad start though he quickly proved to be a conniving little git and I couldn’t stand him.

After I got home from the clinic he announced that he’d made a few changes to the household. It was a big old house with twelve bedrooms and, before I went away, we’d had a staff of four to look after it. He’d sacked three of those and locked up all of the unused rooms, thereby saving a fortune, or so he said.

It sort of made sense, but I’d have been far happier if he’d spent his time earning some real money rather than trying to save a few dollars here and there. In the end, I just couldn’t be bothered to argue with him, and I let it go, thinking I’d sort it all out later.

Everything was fine for about a month, then I started to have fervid, erotic dreams about Rose. I’d wake up in the middle of the night, disorientated and confused, sometimes convinced that Rose had been there, and I was always covered in cum. Often I could smell Rose’s perfume in the air and sometimes I swore I could hear her calling to me.

I have to admit it really shook me up. I’d thought all of the hours with the shrinks and discussion groups had taken the raw edges off my grief, but obviously not.

One night I actually thought that I saw her. She was standing by the open door of my room and her tiny figure and waist-length black hair were unmistakable.

She was wearing the skintight iridescent, jersey dress that she knew drove me crazy. She used to wear it with no underwear and I’d be hard all the way through dinner, and then fuck her senseless the second we got in the door, while she giggled like a little schoolgirl.

I rubbed my eyes but, when I looked again, there was no sign of her. I was actually shaking. I couldn’t remember ever shaking before in my entire life, and I wasn’t sure if it was arousal at the memories that the dress invoked or fear that I was falling apart again.

From then on I would keep smelling her perfume at odd moments and it would jar my concentration badly. It even happened at work a few times, on one occasion making me lose my train of thought completely during a board meeting.

Then, one night, I woke up, again dazed and with a raging hard-on, and I could swear I saw Rose standing in the doorway to my room. She was wearing a knee-length diaphanous nightgown through which I could see her amazing little body.

The pert little B-cup breasts, tiny hourglass figure, and her pussy were all perfect, just as I remembered. My heart leaped with joy at the sight, even though deep down I knew it couldn’t really be her.

I jumped out of bed and immediately fell to my knees from overwhelming dizziness. I scrambled up just in time to see her move down the corridor to the left.

I ran after her, bumping into the walls as I went, and saw her turn the corner. When I followed there was no sign of her. I tried all the doors in that section of the corridor and they were all locked. The only way out was the full-height double windows at the end which were wide open. I went to them and looked down, leaning against the low wrought iron balustrade, but, thank God, there was nobody on the terrace two floors below.

Could I have imagined it? I could smell her perfume lingering in the air, but then I’d been smelling that a lot recently.

I walked slowly back to my room, crawled back into bed, and it was hours before I finally got back to sleep.

In the morning Charles made some snarky remark about me running around the house in the middle of the night but I just ignored him, the little shit.

The following night I woke up, again erect, and the smell of Rose’s sex was all over my cock. I couldn’t believe it and I started to shake uncontrollably. It was wonderful and awful all at once. I lay there breathing it in remembering our passionate lovemaking, with the beautiful smell of her, rich and sweet in my nostrils. I even rubbed my fingers in it and raised them to my nose to savor it better. It was intoxicating, and I put the fingers in my mouth recalling as I did the last time I’d eaten her lovely pussy.

I was convinced now that I was losing my mind, but I knew that if the other board members found out that I wasn’t competent to carry on, they’d act against me, so I resolved to tough it out.

I got up, poured myself an extremely large brandy, and then had a shower.

Three times more I woke up to see Rose, completely naked now, and I chased her down the corridors only for her to disappear again. Always the windows at the end were open, even though I checked before going to bed that they were shut and bolted.

I stood looking out and wondered, in my daze, if this was Rose’s way of telling me to jump and to join her. In a way, at that moment, it seemed quite an attractive idea and I seriously considered doing it. In the end, I walked away, I guess I still wasn’t quite there yet.

Then, the following Saturday, I saw Charles leaving one of the locked-up rooms. He hadn’t seen me and I backed away before he could.

Curious, I checked the door, and it was securely locked. I remembered that there was a drawer in my study which had a bunch of key rings in it but, when I tried all the keys, none of them fit the lock. I waited until Charles had gone out, and then asked Eddie if he could send someone round who could open a locked door for me.

Eddie himself came round with a little guy who had the door open inside two minutes flat. I opened the door, took one look inside, and asked the other two to wait downstairs. As he was leaving I whispered to Eddie, “If Charles comes back keep him downstairs, use force if necessary.” He nodded to me and smiled. He liked Charles about as much as I did and I knew he’d be hoping to be able to use that force.

There was a PC in the room with three wrap-around high-res screens all displaying four outputs from CCTV cameras, apparently covering many of the rooms in the house.

There was a board of switches with handwritten labels: “Gas”, “Antidote”, “Voice1”, “Voice2”, “Perfume1”, “Perfume2”, “Windows”

There was also a remote control with the labels on the buttons covered with tape and more writing on them: “Control”, “Sandy”, “Corridor4”

I pushed ‘Control’ and heard a whirring as a mechanism on the back of the door behind me rotated the lock. I pushed it again and watched it rotate in the other direction.

I hadn’t given my anger full reign yet. I looked at the screens until I saw what I’d suspected. There was a room with the label ‘Sandy’ that I didn’t recognize.

I picked up the remote and went along the corridors pushing ‘Sandy’ until I heard a whirring noise. It was the last door on the right and I opened it and stepped inside.

It had clearly been occupied by a woman, and I looked around until I saw what I was looking for, a wardrobe containing, among other items, the dress and see-through nighty I’d seen Rose wearing.

I also found a long black wig and a bottle of Rose’s perfume: ‘A Goodnight Kiss’ by Roja. So it had been this Sandy person pretending to be Rose all along.

I examined the remote and it seemed to be a standard infra-red one. I looked around the door frame and saw a small rectangle near the top which appeared to be covered with white gauze or tissue. I covered it with my thumb and pushed ‘Sandy’ again: nothing. Uncovered, and the door locked.

I unlocked it again and went to my room. I had a programmable IR remote there and I trained it with the one from the control room. I checked that mine could cycle each of the locks, and then went to the PC that was running the surveillance system. Luckily for me, they’d been quite organized and each of the rooms had a separate folder and, within each of those, the video clips were named with the time and date.

It was an easy matter to find the last one from my room. The recording must have been started by motion detection because it began as soon as a girl came into shot: Sandy I presumed. She was completely naked apart from a gas mask.

I watched as she went over to the bed, pulled back the covers, and started wanking me. Her other hand was busy between her legs and, every now and again, she would wipe that hand on my cock. She was using her own juices to make me think I’d been fucking Rose! If nothing else I had to give this girl top marks for her thoroughness.

Eventually, her hard work paid off and I watched myself cum all over my abdomen. She made a thumbs up to the camera, waited a few minutes, then took off the mask and hid it under the bed. Then she walked out of shot, and a few minutes later I watched myself stumble across the room.

I thought I knew what was going on but, just to be sure, I ran the tape of Sandy’s room just after the last one ended. Sure enough, there was Sandy coming in the door. This was the first good look I’d had of her and she really was a cute little thing. I let it run for a bit, admiring her body. She was a dead ringer for Rose and I wondered where the hell Charles had found her. A little heavier across the hips and her tits were a bit smaller but, other than that, she looked just like Rose had done when she was in her mid-twenties.

I was just about to shut it off when I saw Charles come in the door. Sandy held up a robe to cover herself and I saw Charles looking all hurt. I clicked on the speaker icon so that I could hear what they were saying.