FREE FLYING HEARTS -- A collection of short stories from Tonig73

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To say that Beth Montgomery was an interesting and unusual woman would be stating the obvious.  Her physical appearance commanded you look at her for a start.  A hair under 6 feet tall, with tousled flame red hair and amber eyes to match, freckles covered her nose and cheeks.  Her figure demanded more adjectives too ; voluptuous, statuesque, an Amazonian goddess.  She sported a few discreet piercings, and one tattoo you couldn't miss.  When she entered a room, everyone paid attention.  She didn't walk, she strode, purposefully, as if trying to get somewhere in the shortest amount of time.  Her staff couldn't keep up with her, not even the men.  And at the least it made her look confident and impressive, dangerous even.  

Her face belied her age somewhat, making her look a tad younger than her 43 years.  She wore a natural complexion, with very little, if any, makeup.  She dressed casually, even for work, but it was a very tailored kind of casual.  She could always make that 'flung together' look work so well, and it looked effortless, because it was.  But she always looked immaculate.  

Her body was the envy of her friends, and she told them not to be.  She didn't diet, ate more or less what she wanted, and if she wanted chocolate cake at midnight, she damn well had it.  Other than that, she ate pretty healthily from choice.  She only exercised if it was fun, walking and swimming being her go to's, and she meditated for her mental health, and did she ever need to do that, she thought at times.  Everything else was too much faff and effort, and she lost interest quickly.   With an hourglass figure, she would happily and proudly call herself  'a big girl'.  Her friends called her 'gorgeous', and men called her words she tried not to think about.  She'd heard it all, from sexy and beautiful and stunning, to fit, phat and fuckable.  Extremely fuckable.  

She hated men.  Well, no, that wasn't true, but there were very few that she actually liked, except her son Avery, of course.  He could do no wrong in her eyes, and of course, he never did.  His was, at one and the same time an awesome, yet awful mantle to bear, having to try to live up to his mother's expectation of what the male version of the human species should be.  Yet, he did it, every day without complaint.  Some of who he was, was actually him, but a lot of it wasn't.  And he was good at it.  So much so, he had pushed himself to the bottom of his being, so far down he couldn't reach himself anymore.  It wasn't an altogether bad thing.  To have his mother happy, was worth it.  It was.  

Beth rarely dated, there being an acute shortage of intelligent, funny sexy men in the backwoods of rural southern England.  One of these qualities would be good, two would be phenomenal, all three ?  Non existent.  Here was where the nouveau riche lived in their second or third homes, or the old money, in their stately piles, sequestered away behind high walls where the riff-raff couldn't reach them.  And Beth was interested in neither.  In the south of England, pretty and green and too quiet, with it's artisanal coffee shops and trendy restaurants and natural clothing stores that sold only cotton or linen or hemp at extortionate prices.  The only silver lining to all this wealth floating around, was that the charity shops could guarantee last seasons designer togs for a fiver.  

However, on the whole, she liked her life, and she liked herself quite well, and she was proud of what she had accomplished and achieved since her father had died.

Flashback

Beth sat across the large table from her three brothers, in her fathers' lawyers office.  While Jamie and Giles either looked down at the their hands, or smiled at her softly, her eldest brother Max was red faced with rage.  He slammed his fist down on the table, making everyone, except Beth, jump.

"How come she gets everything ?  What the fuck was he thinking ?"  Max questioned the solicitor. "Can we prove he wasn't in his right mind ?"