Read Amanda's Young Men for Free Online Page A

that was it – a preference for ‘young stuff’. That’s what
she
had a fancy for, after all. The security guard, Trevor, was younger than she was, but not by much. He was close enough to her own age that she’d been able to accept a submissive role, just as if he’d been older than she was. The uniform had likely helped.
    He’d been fun, but the next man she made it with was going to be much younger, she promised herself. Any age over ‘legal’ would do. But she wasn’t going to find a boy-toy in Forsythe Footwear’s offices. She had to get out and about.
    It was then that she realised she was approaching the company’s problems from entirely the wrong end. Everything, the overstaffing, overstocking and the low sales, all originated in one place, or rather, in 31 places – the cash registers of the shops. That’s where she should be looking for answers.
    Nola breezed in with a tray.
    ‘You can take that back to the cafeteria,’ Amanda told her. ‘I’m going out.’
    The sour look on Nola’s face was a joy to behold.
    Amanda knew, from her explorations on Roger’s PC, that the shop that was losing the least was the one in the heart of the business district, so she decided to start there. Unfortunately, she had no sense of direction and the city’s core seemed to be all one-way streets that headed the wrong way. It was getting near to closing time by the time she found it, and then she had to park on the top level of a concrete honeycomb, which made her even later.
    This branch of Forsythe Footwear was sandwiched between a trendy young women’s clothing store and an internet café. It only had about fifteen feet of frontage, two five-foot windows flanking a five-foot-wide, twenty-foot-deep entranceway. To Amanda’s mind, the window displays were far too cluttered and the cartoonish beach scene backdrops were clunky and old fashioned. And this was the shop with the best performance?
    Surreptitiously checking her reflection in the window, Amanda parted the slit in her skirt to just above the lacy top of her gunmetal stocking. If she was going to subtly probe the shop’s staff for information, it’d be as well to offer them some distraction.
    Inside, the shop went straight back for about forty feet before opening up into a circular space with a circular outward-facing bench seat wrapped around a truncated leather cone in the centre. A rather attractive tall thin girl with wavy blond hair and wide-set soft-grey eyes was at the cash register, putting a smart thirty-ish woman’s purchase into a plastic bag. Further back, a slender young man with a floppy cowlick of pale-brown hair was fitting a pump on to the foot of a woman who looked to be a well-preserved fifty , but was still dressed as she likely had as a teen, in a very short pleated skirt and a fuzzy angora sweater.
    The young blonde asked Amanda, ‘May I help you?’
    ‘Is that the manager down there?’
    ‘Yes, madam, he is. I’m the assistant manager, if I can help?’
    ‘No offence, but I’d like the manager to take care of me.’
    The look that crossed the blonde’s face told Amanda that she was used to older women preferring to have a young man kneel at their feet. ‘No problem, madam. He’ll be right with you.’ Calling down the shop, she asked, ‘Rupert, it’s five after six. Should I lock up?’
    Rupert glanced back. His eyes were the very pale-blue of Alpine lake water. Amanda almost shivered. She had a weakness for pale-blue peepers – the same colour as hers but an entirely different hue.
    He said, ‘Go ahead, Meg, and then go on home. I can manage.’
    ‘Thanks.’ The blonde granted Amanda a smile that was just this side of a smirk.
    Instead of dropping her eyes, Amanda gave it right back to her, along with a nonchalant little shrug. If the blonde was saying, ‘He gets this all the time,’ then Amanda was saying, ‘So do I, honey. So do I.’
    As she took her purse from behind the counter, the blonde started singing