Chapter 1

Amanda Hurst-Fanshawe looked up from her book. She stared goggle eyed and with a renewed mixture of fascination and horror at her friend Deirdre Harris. Deirdre was still the most beautiful girl that Amanda had ever known but the prize idiot was busily trying to destroy her feminine allure in the most frenzied and systematic way! Amanda sighed sadly and returned to her book.

Deirdre, meanwhile, kept fanatically on with what had been her daily routine for some months now. At the time the story begins, she was doing a series of exercises on a chin bar, raising her body up by the strength of her already brawny arms and s-l-o-o-o-w-l-y lowering herself, the sweat trickling in shiny rivulets off her naked body as she did so. She was already on the one hundred and fiftieth of this particular torturing exercise and a half admiring and half worried Amanda knew that this evening's self inflicted ordeal for her friend had only just begun. After the present voluntary torture was finished, all of Deirdre's other muscle systems would receive equally fearful and systematic character building abuse. Madness! Sheer madness, thought Amanda for the thousandth time.

Amanda herself was a slim girl - not frail, but slim. Deirdre, her flatmate, had once had a delightfully willowy figure before she had embarked upon her current obsession with body building and her allied and secondary interest in self defence. Now she was awe-inspiring - a veritable latter day Amazon! What man would look at her now, other than a total nut and weirdo, thought a despairing Amanda! Amazing what six months can do to a previously graceful girl!

Amanda had shared a luxury flat in Mayfair with this delightful but increasingly obsessed companion for almost a year now. Her Guardians had thought the two of them would be good for each other. At first they had got along famously and then Deirdre had been mugged and very violently so.

Amanda would never forget the night that Deirdre had staggered back into the flat, her face cut and bleeding and her clothes half ripped off. The robbery had happened at the end of the street and her distressed friend had scarcely been able to half walk and half crawl the few yards back to their shared and previously happy home.

A call to the police had elicited the usual half-baked and useless response. The attackers had never been caught. Deirdre had been offered "counselling." Her unladylike, robust and obscene response to this offer had sent the WPC who had made it off into the night, her cheeks burning red with embarrassment. After this, a venomously angry Deirdre had vowed, "Never fucking again, my sweet friend!" And so had begun her dedicated transformation into what she vowed would be a "woman men won't ever fucking piss around with ever again - not if they know what's fucking well good for them!"

Amanda was of a more philosophical bent. And, in any case, she valued her diminutive, elusive charm and the devastation it could cause among the strongest of men. Poor Deirdre had been unlucky bumping into those thugs, but such occurrences were very rare - lighting never strikes twice, and all that! No need for Amanda to become some kind of female version of Mr Universe - or Deirdre, for that matter!

Amanda did love Deirdre, though! The girl had introduced her to Life!

After her parents had been killed in a plane crash she had been brought up by the good people appointed as executors to her parents' Will. She had spent several years at one of the country's top girls' schools and then left at the age of seventeen, storming out, angrily determined not to tread the academic paths that her well meaning Guardians had prepared for her. She was going to Live with a very capital "L", when she became of age! No stupid Higher Education for her! Not when she was going to be worth millions in a few years!

And so the perplexed and well - meaning Guardians had fixed her up with Deirdre and the pair had quickly fallen into a very pleasant routine of tennis, swimming and parties. Until, that is to say, Deirdre had met with her defining moment and commenced her self-transformation into a Woman of Iron. After that, Amanda was counting the days until her eighteenth birthday and the time she would at last come into her inheritance!

She gave another glance at her straining, sweating friend and let out another sigh. There was a buzz from the entry phone. A visitor!

"Go and see who it is Amanda! I'm too busy" said Deirdre.

"Yeah! Busy turning yourself into a freak!" thought Amanda. She said this silently. Her friend was a lot more aggressive, lately, what with all this pumped up brawn! A sore Amanda still had the bruises to prove it, if she cared to strip off (which she definitely did not)!

"Yes" she said into the phone.

"It's Peter"

"Oh! How nice!" She had a very soft spot for Peter! "Come right on up!"

Amanda came back and told Deirdre their friend Peter was coming up to see them.

"Best put something on, Deirdre! He might get ideas!" said a despairing Amanda, knowing full well that her friend had no intention of doing anything of the sort.

Deirdre merely grunted and paused not in her routine. The sweat continued to roll off her and Amanda sniffed the air. My God! She thought. This place stinks like a back-street gym! You could bottle the body odour and sell it to the hippies!

Hoping to cleanse the air of Deirdre's rancid body smell, she opened the window as far as it would go and an icy draught wafted into the room. Amanda shivered but Deirdre merely grunted. "That's better - was getting too hot. Thanks darling!"

Peter Stranger-Adams walked in at this point. He was still dressed in his outdoor clothes and Amanda moved to take his coat. He pretty soon regretted the loss of this warm garment and sat down, wrapping both arms around himself in an obvious attempt to stave off the cold. The flat never was very warm at the best of times, thanks to Deirdre's strenuous routine and increasingly Spartan lifestyle, and the open window on this February night made a cool room into something out of "Scott of the Antarctic."

"Hi, Pete. Good - to see - you. Don't mind - me! Amanda will look- after - you." said Deirdre between grunts as she continued her exercises. As ever, nowadays, she seemed not a whit embarrassed by her nudity and the other two shifted uneasily in their respective arm chairs as they watched her nearing the end of her allotted marathon pull-up session.

She finally finished this part of her routine and went out to a rear room where the rest of her extensive collection of exercise contraptions was situated. A kind of West End torture chamber, Amanda often thought! The gasping continuation of her fanatical transformation from the slender Deirdre of old into a woman of iron could be clearly heard by the other two!

Amanda sighed with relief and closed the window - not a second too soon for either her or Peter!

"Gosh, Amanda, doesn't Deirdre look wonderful nowadays? " enthused an admiring Peter. "You'd never have though it possible six months ago! I wouldn't want to be in the shoes of any guy or guys who tried to mug her another time! She's fantastic!"

Amanda agreed mechanically. Inwardly she could scarcely believe her ears! She went over to the drinks cabinet and poured a couple of gin and tonics, going very easy on the tonic and extremely hard on the gin in her case! How could any man prefer this increasingly muscle bound hunk to a sweetly dainty girl like her? Life was SO unfair sometimes! She sat next to Peter wriggling against him and putting her arm on his shoulder. He seemed infuriatingly unresponsive, but she kept up the pressure nonetheless. Persistence and Patience - these were her watchwords!

Peter was beginning to respond to Amanda's gentle hand on his shoulder and he moved his arm so that it lay affectionately across her slim frame. She quivered deliciously, feeling a wonderful warmth in her virginal loins.

"You surely to Goodness, don't really think Deirdre looks wonderful with all those muscles, Peter, my love? Surely it turns men off, that kind of thing! And it's so utterly shameless the way she lets men look at her naked body the way she does. You're not the only bloke she's shown herself to - don't kid yourself!"

Peter sat up and withdrew his arm, clasping his hands together and hunching his shoulders. Amanda glanced fearfully at his face, her stomach churning painfully at the sight of that lovely lock of fair hair dropping over his forehead. He was so gorgeous and she really loved him! Alas! She saw with awful sadness that Peter really DID like the superwoman Deirdre more than he liked her.

"I'd have said the same as you once" he said after a long silence. "But Deirdre has blossomed somehow since she took herself in hand. I admire her dedication and single-mindedness and I think she looks really beautiful with that fantastically strong body she's built for herself. After all said and done, this is the Twentieth Century, Mandy! Women have come into their own in the last thirty years, and I applaud that. Why should Deirdre not be proud of what she's done with her body and want it to be there for people to see?"

"My name's Amanda!" snapped our near tearful heroine. "Don't you ever dare abbreviate it again. I HATE it when people do that!"

The couple sat in embarrassed silence for a while. Then Peter recollected why he had come and said a few words to Amanda. He kissed her briefly on the mouth, causing her heart to flutter madly, and left, asking her to give his regards to Deirdre, who was still sweating and exercising all too audibly in the back room.

It was getting rather late by this time and Amanda was feeling tired and not a little sad. She was not yet eighteen and Peter was her first real passion. He was twenty three and her rival and flatmate Deirdre two years his junior. She felt she was being treated like a baby sometimes! It hurt a lot.

She went over and looked into the other room. There was her mad buddy, still exercising. Her thighs were being mercilessly pushed to their limits by this time. Amanda looked away in horror at her friend's abundant and sweat damped pubic hair and at the sight of the pink womanhood peeping out from underneath its bushy cover. How gross!

Going into her own bedroom, she was soon undressed and in bed reading Ibsen's Ghosts. Her attention pretty soon wandered from the text and she began to drift into sleep. Just as she was finally going off for the night, the door opened. It was Deirdre, still naked, and looking distressed again.

Thank heaven the girl had showered!

"Can I slide in next to you, Amanda? Pleeease? I'm feeling pretty awful at the moment, darling. I tried to sleep but I saw those awful men as if it were happening all over again. Please let me stay with you - just for a while at least!"

Amanda happily moved over to allow Deirdre to get into bed next to her. She ran her hand affectionately through that cropped spiky hair, leant across and kissed the upset girl on the forehead.

For weeks after the attack, Amanda had thus comforted her distressed and shaken companion. Night after night she had allowed a weeping Deirdre to share her bed, clasping her tightly and with loving patience while the poor girl cried herself to sleep. By day the her friend was dedicated to building her body, but after dark the mental scars were all too sadly evident. Nights like this were getting, mercifully, much less frequent, however, and this was the first in a month.

"I'm so awfully sorry I hit you the other day, sweetheart. How are the bruises coming on?" asked Deirdre, thankfully relieved not to be on her own any longer.

Amanda pushed back the bedclothes and let her friend see her ribcage - still not a pretty sight.

"Oh, Amanda dearest, I'm so terribly sorry!" sobbed a penitent Deirdre.

"Forget it! What are friends for? And I was very rude, if I recall correctly - calling you a female Sylvester Stallone!"

"Yes. Comparing me to him!"

Deirdre sniffed and then smiled through her tears. " Now, if you'd called me a female Arnie - that would have been fine!"

The couple giggled together, recapturing some of the easy camaraderie of their early months together. Then Amanda remembered something and sat bolt upright.

"Golly! I almost forgot to tell you why Peter came around! He's got the use of a mate's villa in Tenerife for a fortnight. We can all go off in a couple of days, if you like! He needs to know in the morning as soon as poss. There's a gym there, so you should be happy! And a private beach so you can sun that hunky body in the nude if you can spare the time away from all that exercise equipment. I really think we ought to go. Do us both a power of good! And another thing, Deirdre..."

Deirdre agreed that they should accept. The couple fell asleep without saying any more. Amanda did not withdraw her arm from around her friend. It was past seven when they woke up.

"What other thing?" was Deirdre's first question as they rubbed the sleep out of their eyes.

"Oh. Peter really digs you! I think it's the real thing, Deirdre! He obviously has a thing about strong women and the sun shines out of your arsehole as far as he's concerned! I hope you return his undying passion! I could just about stand losing him to you - but not to anyone else!"

Deirdre did not respond but Amanda guessed her friend was not by any means displeased at what she had heard. Amanda continued to lie in bed after Deirdre had gone back to her own room. She shed a few tears over Peter. It had cost her an awful lot to say what she had to that girl, but she was rather glad she had. And!!!

It was a lovely sunny day, with more than the slightest hint of Spring about it and Amanda was a healthy seventeen, getting on for eighteen year-old girl who had her whole life ahead of her. The loss of Peter just might not be quite the end of the world!

She got up and readied herself for the day. The first hectic hours were spent phoning for the tickets, getting out her summer gear and then going off to swim and play tennis - not any more with the iron-pumping Deirdre, alas, but with a good set of girls and guys, even so.

One of the other fellows brought a friend along to the pool with him called Gervaise. Gervaise was really lovely and obviously very taken with Amanda, asking her out before leaving, although not before the pair had swum twenty lengths together and laughingly tried to drown each other a few times. Life wasn't THAT bad, after all!