Chapter 1

The Old LaDY Who Lived In A Shoe - a naughty nursery rhyme.

There was an old woman,

Who lived in a shoe;

She had so many children,

She didn't know what to do.

She gave them some broth,

Without any bread;

She whipped them all soundly,

And sent them to bed.

Angelique Bolynski was a woman who was happy much of the time, and almost always unhappy the rest of the time.

It was simple really. She had married young and married well to a bullish man named Horace, who was a banker. He was, it was said, a very good banker, which means he made lots and lots of nice money.

All that money made Horace... well... horny. And being a bullish man, he came home every night and just fucked Angelique's socks off. Angelique didn't really mind, except for all those socks lying all over the place, hanging from the chandeliers, and lying on shelves, and curled up under the furniture.

And when I say all over the place, I really mean it. Horace was not one to wait to fulfill his bullish destiny. Wherever in the house he found his lovely young wife, that's where he fucked her socks off. It got to the point that she started going around barefoot, just so she didn't have to locate her errant socks each day.

The other problem was, what with all that fucking off of socks, Angelique was practically perpetually pregnant. She basically popped out babies like a Pez dispenser.

That was fine when they were little. Angelique was so competent at servicing her husband's needs that Horace could fuck her socks off while she managed to change three diapers.

But babies grow up. First they toddle, and then they speak, and then suddenly they're old enough that, as they do what children do, they may end up seeing their mother's socks being fucked off and begin to ask questions.

It was at just this very stage of her eldest twins lives that, unfortunately, Horace fucked Angelique's socks off one too many times. When he wasn't banking, or fucking his lovely Angelique's socks off, he ate quite heavily. It was part of what made him bullish. It also gave him a massive myocardial infarction.

A Myocardial infarction, just in case you're interested, is the rapid development of myocardial necrosis caused by a critical imbalance between the oxygen supply and demand of the myocardium. This usually results from plaque rupture with thrombus formation in a coronary vessel, resulting in an acute reduction of blood supply to a portion of the myocardium.

In other words, he had a heart attack and died.

Angelique noticed right away, because he stopped moving. He had made a sound that was clearly reminiscent of the sounds he made as he was making her pregnant again, so that wasn't so odd. But his apparent continued interest in lying on top of her after he had made her pregnant again was distinctly different. Usually Horace hopped up and announced how hungry he was.

Well, the legal system being what it is, and Horace's will being long and tedious, it was several months before anybody figured out that he had left his entire fortune to his beloved Angelique.

It was a shame, said some, that during those several months, Angelique could not pay her bills and was evicted from the wonderful big house in which she had become accustomed to getting her socks fucked off in.

She was, to put it succinctly, thrown out, and her fifteen children were thrown out with her.

Do you have ANY idea what it's like to go house hunting with a suddenly miserable credit score? Not to mention fifteen children tagging along.

She turned a lot of gold jackets puke green, and the air in that hot air balloon cooled off right quickly, let me tell you.

The only realtor who would touch her was Marcus Goodman, who, in contravention of his last name had been convicted of peeping in windows and served fifteen months in jail. After that no one wanted to hire "the pervert" as he was commonly titled. He studied hard and got his realty license. Imagine that! A convicted felon selling real estate! And you thought all those real estate sales people were pure as the driven snow.

Anyway, he'd been in business for a while and wasn't doing all that well, since almost everybody around knew he was a pervert. But Angelique didn't know that. All that time everybody else in town had been using to catch up on local gossip, Angelique had been using to take care of children, never mind all that sock hunting she had to do.

Angelique couldn't even find his office at first. It seemed the "Goodman Real Estate" sign had fallen into some disrepair, some of the letters having fallen off. It now read:

"Good Real Eats" The "s" had been replaced by Goodman one day after he had tippled perhaps one too many Old Crow's. He stuck it up there where his bleary eyes thought an "s" might want to go, and then promptly fell off the ladder. He judiciously decided not to climb back up.

So now, his sign basically said "Good Real Eats" and Angelique thought it was a restaurant.

When you have fifteen children, you don't patronize many restaurants. In fact, she only stopped in to inquire as to where the realty office was. She turned out to be the answer to one of Marcus' dreams. He had a listing that he'd had on the books ever since he hung up his now decrepit figurative shingle.

Which is how Angelique and her fifteen children ended up living in a house designed and built by Roderick P. Hopkins, the eminent architect.

Except that this was the very FIRST structure that Roderick had ever designed, and he had decided to make a splash on the architect scene immediately, instead of working his way up. He thought a motel shaped like a Victorian era high button lady's shoe would be the way to do that. He was quite sure that, since shoes suggested traveling, everyone would want to stay in one while they were on their trip.

He was wrong.

Nobody thought it was "interesting", or "brilliant" or "the next new thing". In fact, nobody had ever lived in it. It was available. It was cheap. And it had twenty-seven bedrooms.

Now you know why Angelique, who was over thirty by now, and therefore, by definition, "old" came to live in a shoe.

Ah, but the story is just beginning.

Was that a moan I heard? Stop that! Read on. There's sex! I promise.

Now, where was I? Oh yes. She moved into the shoe.

The next thing Angelique had to deal with was the fact that she barely had enough money to pay the mortgage payment, which meant that there just wasn't enough money to buy food for all her children at the same time. Oh, she could have gotten them all fed breakfast on a given day, and maybe lunch, but by nightfall the cuboards would be empty if she did that.

So, for lack of anything better to do, she put her children on a rotating meal schedule.

The baby drank from her luscious breasts, so that was no problem. In fact, Teddy, age three, Mindy, age two and little William, who was just a year old, joined their little brother at the font of sweet white milk for at least one meal a day, even though they had been weaned for some time. The rest of her children had to eat on a rotating basis. What that meant was that if they got breakfast, they skipped lunch and then got dinner. If they got lunch, they skipped dinner and then got to eat breakfast the next day, and so on.

Bullion cubes were cheap, so she got several bottles of them, along with some of that nasty generic breakfast cereal that they sell in all the discount houses. You know the kind. It looks like Cheerios, but tastes like dust bunnies from under the couch. Bread would have been nice, but the stores were WAY too proud of the bread they owned, sometimes wanting as much as three whole dollars for a single loaf! You could buy three whole BOTTLES of bullion cubes for the same money.

So, the menu was broth and cereal. If you really watched your p's and q's, you might get Momma to squirt a little breast milk on the cereal.

As you can well imagine, this led to a lot of moaning and groaning and crying and such, which is why they drove Angelique to the point of minor child abuse. She didn't actually whip them, but she shouted really loud and gave a couple of them swats on the behind to get them into bed without supper.

It IS true that she didn't know what she was going to do. That part got written down right.

One of her husband's friends - a man from the bank - happened to see her at the store, buying bullion cubes and generic cereal and began giving her small personal loans, and that helped, though she was a little worried about the terms of the loans.

They were very informal loans. The man, named Kirt, knew that she'd come into a lot of money eventually, and he wasn't worried about getting his money back. What motivated Kirt to get in good with Angelique was that, even after giving birth fifteen times, Angelique was a stone fox.

It shouldn't be surprising when you think about it. After all, running around after fifteen kids is a day-long workout. Feeding fifteen kids, all of whom breast fed and were lusty eaters, pretty well turned her breasts into large, well-formed milk taps that basically never dried up. Her nipples, used to being sucked pretty much every day for fifteen years, were long and fat and there wasn't a bra made in the world that would press them flat against her firm breasts. Had those breasts dried up, they probably would have laid in her lap.

But they didn't. They kept producing sweet milk, and one baby or another (not to mention the one, two and three year olds during what she called "the dark days")kept emptying them so they'd keep right on working, twenty-four, seven. Her youngest child was only eight months old. Horace had been trying to knock her up again when his heart gave out. It wouldn't have been politically correct, but if his headstone had read "He was well and truly fucked" it would have been true in more ways than one.

At any rate, her slim waist, and blue-black hair that hung to her hips when it wasn't in a bun, accompanied by eyes so blue they seemed like the sky had decided to park in them, all screamed at any man who saw her. That scream was a primal one that begged for a well-fleshed prick to be made available to this woman instantly, if not sooner. And, because Angelique had married Horace so young, and had been busy ever since, she had no time to learn that many people were anything but nice, or good, or pleasant, and was as innocent and unjaded as a thirty-one year old woman can be in today's society.

In short, she was sweet, and loving, and just oozed raw sexual appeal.

And so, the terms of the loans made by Kirt were unnecessarily vague.

"Just do what you have to do Angelique." he said gently, each time he handed her money. "I know you'll pay me back when all this is settled. We'll talk about interest later. Don't worry your pretty head about such things."

Well, when the lawyers finally had spent as much time (which they billed, of course), as was necessary to dot each "i" and cross every "t", and finally coughed up her husband's money, Angelique found that she was very, VERY wealthy. It had taken eight months, and she had been in a pretty bad way there for a while, trying to feed fifteen children AND make a house payment, all pretty much on the small loans Kirt gave her, along with the babysitting money her two older children generated around the neighborhood. They worked cheap, especially if the patron said they could have the leftovers in the fridge. Still, after hiding some of the money to use for the odd candy bar, they contributed the rest to the family, and Angelique got by.

And then, one day, Angelique had all the money she could even think about spending.

The first thing she did, out of pure appreciation for Kirt, was put all fifteen kids in the big van her husband had bought for them, and drive down to the bank.

Have you ever seen a woman trying to move fifteen children through a public area? It's a little like that phrase "herding cats". Each of the older children were given responsibility for two younger ones. Angelique carried the baby on her hip, a diaper bag over one shoulder, and had a six year old's hand in hers. The six year old had to go potty, and he thought that the potted plants in the bank lobby were the perfect place to do so. Four others wanted to play hide and seek, and kept trying to... well... hide and seek. The oldest teenage girl, Victoria, was embarrassed that, at fifteen, she had to handle her two and three year old brother and sister, instead of parading like an almost adult should be able to do. The result was that she tried to parade, and then get control of the two little ones, which she had lost while she was parading, and then try to parade again...

Victoria's brother, Horace Jr., had control of the four and five year olds, except that Horace Jr. was one of the kids who wanted to play hide and seek, so Juniper wandered around while Millie played the game. The younger twins, Suzie and Rachel, also wanted to play hide and seek, but they just carried the one and two year olds with them.

Anyway, you get the idea. Business was disrupted, noise was generated and commerce generally ground to a halt as people stared in wonder at the circus going on in the bank. Well, one bit of business got taken care of. Angelique stopped at a teller cage and got remarkably quick service.

Finally, the crowd got to Kirt's office and Angelique told him she was there to pay him back.

"Angelique, my dear," he said in smooth tones. "Why didn't you just call? I'd have been happy to drop by the... shoe... er... house."

"I don't have a phone yet." explained the harassed Angelique. "That was a luxury, so I waited. So here's the money." She handed him a wad of cash that she'd just obtained from a teller outside in the lobby.

"Ahh, yes... thank you." said Kirt. "As to the interest..."

Angelique waited. Eight month old Timmy wiggled, trying to get down from her hip.

"Why don't I stop by some evening and we can discuss that." he caged.

Angelique didn't have to think long. She owed this man a lot. He had practically saved their lives with those frequent little loans. She knew she had plenty of money, and that his interest couldn't be too bad. And, she had gotten kind of used to feeling good when she saw him. People handing you money when you're starving will do that to you. I think they call that behavior modification or something like that. Anyway, Angelique just smiled at him. "That would be lovely."

"Are you going to move soon?" he asked.

Angelique frowned. "Actually, the shoe is quite roomy, and everything's already moved in. I thought I'd tear my hair out, moving the last time. I think I'll just stay there." she said. "Tell me when you're coming and I'll fix something for dinner."

Kirt thought about fifteen children, crowded around a dinner table.

"Why don't we arrange a babysitter and I'll take you out to dinner." he suggested. "You could probably use a little break, don't you think?"

Angelique tried to think of what a break might be like. She couldn't remember ever having one.

"I've never hired a babysitter before." she said, worriedly.

"I know of a company who provides nannies and babysitting services. Let me take care of everything." he said.

Angelique smiled. "OK, thanks Kirt. That's awfully nice of you."

Kirt found out, when he called the service, that their policies would require that no less than six sitters be hired in this situation. The two oldest children would be fine on their own, or at least with minimal supervision. The younger children would be looked after at the rate of two children per sitter, with the exception of the three youngest, who would all be handled together.

Kirt took a long lunch and visited the shoe, where he found Angelique happily taking care of her children. They were, all in all, fairly well behaved, and he had a chance to talk with her for a few minutes.

"I have an idea." he said. "I live all alone, except for my staff. Why don't I arrange a picnic? We can eat in the shade on the patio. I have a pool too. We could go swimming if you like."

Kirt wanted badly to see what Angelique looked like in a swim suit.

"I love to swim." she nodded, feeding baby food to one-year-old William. "I used to have a suit, but I have no idea where it is now. I haven't been swimming in years."

"Well, if it's all right with you, I could have my secretary pick something out for you. If you're too busy to go shopping, I mean." he said.

"I suppose that would be fine." said Angelique. "I'll probably look awful, no matter what she gets."

"I doubt that seriously." said Kirt suavely. "You're quite a lovely woman, Angelique."

"Why thank you!" she said, beaming. "Horace is the only man who ever said that to me before. It's kind of nice to hear."

"My pleasure." said Kirt, thinking about other ways he'd like to pleasure this woman. "I'll arrange for the sitters to be here Saturday morning and we can just have the day together."

"That will be nice." said Angelique, wiping up a spill where creamed spinach had drooled out of William's mouth while he examined the strange man standing beside his mother.

Back at the office Kirt called his secretary Jennifer to his office.

"Jennifer, I'm having Mrs. Bolynski over for a picnic Saturday. She said she might like to swim, but hasn't a suit. She's so busy, I wondered if I could prevail on you to pick her out a swim suit."