Free Body and Soul by Roberta Latow

could not have been more different.
    Ben Gage was fifty years old when she met him and they fell in love, a friend of her mother and father. He managed their investments along with several other friends of the Sidds. He was not particularly handsome nor did he have a great physique, but he had a marvellous New England conservative charm about him, was kindness itself and had a sweet smile. He was irresistible to women. They adored his dependability and a certain sexiness in him that was evident no matter how subtle he was about it. He had always been well dressed, smooth around women and kind, a good pal to his men friends. He was that rare thing, a businessman with heart and compassion and a genuine love for art. Ben was happily married to an intelligent sweet woman who ran a rather slapdash house of considerable size for him and their family. They lived on the outskirts of Boston and were socially prominent among the people he had grown up with. They frequented the music and art worlds and collected modern paintings, Rothkos and de Koonings, Marini sculptures and Henry Moores, when hardly a soul they knew was buying them.
    Ben Gage adored his three sons, seemed outwardly content with his calm, peaceful existence and his attentions to his wifewere envied by every woman in their circle of friends. But there was at the same time in him something quite secretive, a nurturing of secret desires he kept strictly to himself.
    He had watched Eden grow up and both he and his wife Nora took her under their wing once she had lost Marshall. They and their children loved and admired Eden and were pleased when she gravitated towards them. Reviewing her time with him, Eden could hardly remember when she’d first realised she was deeply in love with Benjamin Gage, that she yearned to have an intimate life with him, that anything else was impossible to contemplate. What she loved most about Ben was the stable life he made for his family. Once she had become a part of his life and that family neither of them wanted to live without the other. Every time she went away on tour she fantasised that she could leave them, that she would be strong and give Ben up rather than demand a more intimate relationship. But passion, sexual desire, built up in her to such a pitch that on one occasion when Ben was driving her to the airport, she broke down and confessed her love and frustration at not having a sex life with him.
    That first sexual encounter at the Copely Plaza was thrilling. The fear she had that they might be discovered added to the excitement of at last having sex with him. His passion for her, to feel him for the first time taking possession of her, remained still one of the highlights of her life. The control he showed in satisfying her sexual demands was frightening in itself. With exquisite care he devoured her body and soul. He wrung one orgasm after another out of her until she cried with the pain of pleasure on such a grand scale. Ben was an imaginative lover who introduced her to new sexual delights that she was able to enjoy because she trusted him implicitly.
    That first night established a sex life for them that neither could live without. They added to each other’s lives and, deceitful as it was, Eden made up her mind she would never allow their affair to infringe on Ben’s life with Nora and the boys. She had never been happier. She had his family, his heart, a thrilling sex life with him. There came a time when he could not bear to be apart from her and so often she travelled with them on exoticholidays and always they found stolen moments to be alone together and have sex. They viewed the art galleries and collected paintings, dined in fabulous restaurants, the Gages attended her concerts, often flew to wherever she was playing merely for the evening. Ben and Eden’s life was a series of sexual escapades and phone calls filled with erotic innuendo, conversations that left her warm and wet with lust for him.
    Their sex life