Divine Temptation

When Shaun read that e-mail, he was intrigued, but when he saw her photo, a rattlesnake could have bitten him, and he would have died a happy man. The woman was the epitome of loveliness. For almost an hour, he sat at his desk affixed to her picture. It was as though, she had placed a hex on him.
The phones in the office were ringing off the hook, but he was too engrossed with her beauty to hear the sounds. Finally, he came out of his trance and forwarded all calls to his voice mail. The last thing he wanted to do was talk.
He immediately got back to her and wrote:

Dear Ms. Ono:
It was a pleasure hearing from you. I would be delighted to meet with you and discuss the possibility of buying your publication. If you give me your arrival time, I will send a car to pick you up from the airport. I have lodging at my loft, and you may stay here as my guest. Looking forward to hearing from you shortly.
Shaun

Divine got back to him. She would arrive at LaGuardia Airport at two in the afternoon and graciously accepted his invitation to stay at the loft. Lisa was not due back on the job for another two weeks.
On Friday morning, Shaun called in a housekeeping service to get Divine’s room ready. Lisa usually took care of those details when out-of-town couples reserved one of the suites for their honeymoon and would make the room personal and alluring. He gave the team instructions to make the suite hospitable and romantic.
Chocolate covered cherries decorated the pillows; red, pink, and yellow rose pedals accentuated the bed, and scented lit candles filled the bathroom. One would have thought he was planning a night of hot and sultry lovemaking with this woman.
Divine’s flight arrived on time. The limousine driver met her at the airport and drove her to the loft. When she entered Shaun’s office, the two embraced and exchanged salutations.
He went on to say, “It is a joy to meet you, Miss Ono. Make yourself at home. I took the liberty of making dinner reservations for six o’clock this evening at a popular restaurant in Manhattan, unless you prefer to eat in.”
Her response was, “That sounds nice. I am looking forward to having dinner with you in the city. If you could show me to my room, I would like to freshen up, and please, call me Divine.”
He agreed and took her to her room. When she entered, a sense of desire overtook her. She quickly unpacked, and took a cold shower. After getting out of the tub and drying off, she primped her hair, touched-up her makeup and slipped into a red tight-fitting short dress. She was now ready to play the most diabolical role of her life.
Shaun and Divine arrived at the restaurant, which had an intimate and a quaint charm. As they sat down and ordered drinks, she immediately started to talk about herself.
Born in Cameroon, she and her family moved to the UK when she was sixteen years old. She attended college, had planned to major in writing and journalism but dropped out in her sophomore year.
Her first job was as an advertising sales rep at a local weekly singles’ newspaper. Several years later, the paper collapsed.
She had received a large inheritance from her father, who died in an unsolved plane crash, and started her own dating newsletter. What started out as a plain quarterly twelve-page bulletin grew into a popular and colorful high-glossy magazine.
If Shaun was paying attention to what she was saying, it was not evident. As she continued to discuss the selling points of the publication, he was gazing at her like a vampire ready to take his first bite. Her exquisiteness and exotic features had him salivating as a dog would at the site of food. She enchanted, teased and turned him on, until he could no longer concentrate.
Just by observing his body language and facial expressions, she knew he was now under her control.
After dinner, they promptly left the restaurant and hailed a cab. It took about thirty minutes to get back to the loft.
Like two horny ticks, they started to undress each other and dashed up the stairs. He picked her up and carried her into the bedroom. They made love for over four hours. She was a sexual force, which he could not resist, or as some folks would say, “She was a feline in heat.”
She definitely lived up to her name and gave him an awesome and a memorable spiritual awakening. He never experienced these kinds of erotic feelings in his thirty-three years. This woman had more moves than a worm slithering in and out of wet terrain.
For hours, he begged her not to stop, and she rewarded him with her carnal maneuvers. Eventually, they fell asleep.
When Shaun woke up the next morning, he knew Divine was going to be his lover and partner for life. He fell for her, as a meteorite would fall to earth, fast and hard.
The two had breakfast and talked more about the magazine. Her asking price was US$250,000.00. She did not have to twist his arm. He agreed to her offer, asked her to stay on as managing editor, and to set up residence in the United States.
She had a better idea: “Why don’t you move the business to the UK? We could work together as a team.”
His response was, “What a superb idea.”
She explained how wonderful it would be for him to live and work in the UK. They could expand the magazine along with GMMS throughout the UK market. Office space was inexpensive, and he would not have any problems officiating marriages or getting members to join his service. She highlighted that over half of the British population had registered on at least two on-line dating sites, while many of them have been on a dating site at some point.
A third of those who registered found long-term relationships; a quarter of them were still going strong, and six percent had gotten married.
Wow! He was impressed with those statistics, and concluded that relocating to the UK was the prudent thing to do. The two made tantalizing love until late afternoon.
For the next several days, they did some sightseeing, took in a play on Broadway, attended a couple of street festivals, and shopped along Fifth Avenue. They were having the time of their lives.
Two weeks later, he asked her to marry him. She accepted his proposal.

It was now Monday, and Lisa was on her way to work. She could not wait to see Shaun and wondered how he managed without her. After all, she was the glue that held that company together. Her creativity and advertising capabilities were responsible for the company’s continuous growth in sales and profits.
All she dreamed about was being his lover and eventually his wife. She would have slept on a bed of nails to be with him.
When she walked into the loft, he was on the phone and waved at her; she waved back. After he got off the phone, she went into his office. He welcomed her back, and she gave him a big hug, but his reaction was more professional than personal. He asked her how her family reunion and vacation went.
“Great! I saw family members and friends that I had not seen in years, but I missed being here with you.”
Before he could respond to her, Divine walked into the office and introduced herself as his business partner and fiancée.
With a look of shock, Lisa stood there as though someone had thrown a bucket of ice-cold water in her face; she felt the blood curdling throughout her body. If her fury had any powers, Divine and Shaun would have been burning in hell.
“How could he do this to me, and who is this Divine woman, and where did she come from?” Lisa asked herself.
With a pretentious smile, she replied, “It is a pleasure to meet you, and congratulations on your partnership and engagement. Best wishes to you both.”
Lisa walked out of the office, went to her desk and held back the tears.
In a couple of weeks, Divine was planning to return home. She contacted her lawyer to draw up papers for the sale of her magazine. Once she received the money, Shaun would have the title and the rights to the publication. It would take about one month to complete the deal.
He explained to Lisa how the two met, the agreement they made, how they fell in love, and his plans to move to the UK. Sitting there attentively, she had a sneered expression, like the tempest in a teapot.
Divine was getting ready to leave for the UK, but before she left, and to make their engagement official, Shaun called her into his office and gave her a two-carat diamond ring. She came out of the office and with a sly smile on her face, approached Lisa and said, “Look at the ring Shaun gave me. Isn’t it stunning?”
When Lisa saw that ring, she became more infuriated and in a restrained manner said, “Yes, it is beautiful.
Divine then said, “It was a pleasure to meet you. I hope to see you at the wedding next year.”
The next day, Divine left for the airport. When she arrived home that evening, she e-mailed Shaun and gave him her bank account number. Two days later, he wired $250,000.00 into her account.

Shaun was making plans to move. It would take up to a year to get all of the papers needed to leave. He called Lisa into his office and asked if she would stay on until the business relocated to the UK.
With a phony smile on her face, she answered, “Yes. I will take care of the web site and inform all of our members that the company will be going to the UK, sometime in the near future. Just leave everything to me.”
He would not leave until the lease on the loft was up, or plan any more ceremonies or events. In a couple of weeks, he would go on leave and return in two months.
Before Shaun left, he handed Lisa an envelope, and thanked her for her loyalty and continued support. When she got home that evening and opened the envelope, in it was a bonus check for $5,000.00.
“What an insult. He would give a stranger a quarter of a million dollars, but thought very little of my contributions to the success of the company, and to add insult to injury, he is going to marry that strumpet!” she thought and immediately went on-line to do a search on this woman and her magazine.
She typed in the name of the magazine; its address and e-mail came up. When she inquired about Divine, no one at the company knew this woman nor was she ever employed by or associated with the publication.
Lisa laughed and thought, “What a pathetic fool Shaun was; how he could have been so easily taken in by this woman was beyond comprehension.”
When she got to the office on Monday, she went on Shaun’s computer and checked the account number that received the money. It was located in an offshore account. One week after receiving the money, Divine closed the account.
As Lisa promised Shaun, she was going to take care of business. It would take her three weeks to plan her revenge.
Her first line of attack was to check the company’s bank account. There was a total of $950,000.00 in the account.
What Shaun did not know was that she had set up a dummy corporation and a secret bank account in the Cayman Islands and had the money from GMMS’s account wired into hers.
She then purchased a plane ticket to fly to the islands, but before leaving, she had several more tasks to accomplish. She bought hard drive eraser software and got on Shaun’s computer, went on-line and permanently removed and closed the web site. She then erased all private files, photos, documents, members’ contact information, and records pertaining to GMMS, and the loft, from all the hard drives.
Paper files, floppy disks, DVDs and CDs, which stored backed-up files, programs and operating systems, were shredded. Then, she went home and erased all data from her computer.
One week later, she arrived in Grand Cayman, went straight to the bank, withdrew all the money, closed the account and left the island. Only her shadow knew where she went.
When Shaun got back from his vacation and walked into the loft, he called out to Lisa, but there was no answer. He figured she was coming in later.
There must have been over five hundred messages on his voice mail. He thought that was strange, because she would have never allowed calls to gather like that. He decided to call her at home, but the phone was not in service. He started to wonder if something had happened and immediately went to her place in Brooklyn. When he got to the building, he went to her apartment and knocked on the door.
The superintendent approached him and said, “The apartment is empty. Lisa moved out abruptly and left no forwarding address.”
Shaun stood there in total disbelief and did not know what to think. He went back to the office, turned on his computer, but the screen was blank. He went to Lisa’s workstation, and her screen was blank too.
At this point, he was confused and thought there was a power failure. He went to the file cabinet to retrieve the backed-up disks, but they were gone. At first, he thought there was a break-in, but there was no sign of a force entry, and nothing else was missing.
Expensive equipment lined the office. If thieves were going to steal anything, they would not have just taken disks and software. If he was at a loss as to what was going on, he was about to get the worst shock of his being.
To see what the problem was Shaun called in a technician to examine all the PCs.
The expert informed him that someone had scrubbed the hard drives cleaned of all files, programs and software, and they were irretrievable. The operating system and programs that were previously on the PCs would have to be re-installed. However, this was impossible because all of the recovery, boot disks and software applications were gone.
When Shaun checked his telephone messages, callers were inquiring about GMMS’s web site. Paying members wanted to know what happened to the site, and if GMMS was still in business.
Complaints were coming in left and right and accusing the company of swindling members out of their money.
The building manager sent a warning that two rent checks had bounced, and Shaun had five days to submit payment, or management would evict him. Next, he got a letter from the bank informing him that the business account had a zero balance.
In a panic state, he left the loft and went to an Internet café to check his e-mail. The box was flooded with criticisms and protests from irate customers who threatened to report him to law enforcement and the Better Business Bureau for fraud.
He sent an e-mail to Divine to explain what was happening. Within five minutes, the e-mail came back with the following message: “Mail could not be delivered. Box is closed.”
It did not take long for Shaun to realize that Divine had conned him, and Lisa had methodically destroyed his company.
He could almost forgive Divine for her cunning conduct, but he could not understand why Lisa had done such an unspeakable and unforgettable act and started to think back to when the staff at the shop had accused him of embezzling money to finance GMMS.
He wondered if she was the one stealing the money.
By the end of the year, he was impoverished and had to move back in with his parents.
It did not take long for the scandal to get back to the clothing shop about Shaun’s troubles. The customers and employees could not stop talking about Lisa being responsible for bringing down Shaun’s empire, and a woman whom he met on-line and fell in love with, had duped him out of a quarter of a million dollars.
The employees did not know Divine, but what Lisa did, surprised no one. Everyone knew she had the hots for Shaun, but he was too blind to see how deep her love for him went, and to have fallen in love with another woman was downright dumb on his part.
Like an ostrich, his head must have been in the sand, many surmised.
Of course, there were those who felt he got just what he deserved, using the shop and the customers to further his business, only to have it destroyed by a scorned woman.
Fate dealt him a deserving payback, they concluded.
It took a long time for Shaun to get over the deception and pain caused by these two women whom he trusted so dearly, but one good thing came out of this horrific situation. The ministry that ordained Shaun offered him a position to oversee weddings and marriages at one of their sites in Arizona.
It took almost two years to get his life back on track.
Still single, he is now more cautious about any woman he meets or falls in love with, lives a humble lifestyle but continues to ask, “Where is Divine, and why did Lisa betray me in such a vile manner?”?