Page 1 of Keeping The Virgin

Chapter 1

The driverfrom the Highest Bidder escort service stops our town car in front of a set of massive iron gates. Behind the ornate bars, a breathtaking Tuscan villa-like mansion waits for me, palm trees waving in the Miami summer breeze.

The driver turns to me and offers a creamy envelope, and I swallow, trying to calm my raging heartbeat.

“You’re to give this to Mr. Bryant when you see him,” the man says.

“All right.”

I take the sealed envelope as the driver waits. He has a kind face, and I wonder if he looks at every Highest Bidder girl with this mixture of sympathy and curiosity. I shouldn’t be that much of a mystery to him—every girl he drives has signed up with the exclusive website to be auctioned off to a rich client, and I’m sure he’s met more than one escort who’s given away her v-card for $50,000.

I’m just not sure that every virgin has needed the money because she’s in as much trouble as I am.

Can he read the desperation on my face?

My hand shakes as I clutch the envelope. My nerves are screaming, but I’ve come this far, and I’m going to go through with this and then get back to my normal life, including finishing my final semester of college. There’s no other choice for me.

The driver hands me one more piece of paper. This one is just a strip with typed numbers on it.

“This is the passcode for the gate,” he says.

“Oh. Thanks.”

He winks at me. “You’ll do fine. All the girls do.”

All the girls. I suddenly feel like a product fresh off an assembly line, a sex toy that walks and breathes and is designed for a good screw, but that’s what I signed up for. And even if a flush of embarrassment is covering my skin, I won’t complain.

After I thank him and get out of the car, he drives away, leaving me standing in front of the massive gates with only an overnight bag, the passcode, and the envelope. The hem of my flirty little summer dress plays around my thighs, tickling them as if to cheer me up.

So I put on my best cheer face. I’ve seen pictures of Cage Bryant, and he’s… Well, to put it mildly, I lucked out in the sex sweepstakes. He’s beyond hot. This job won’t be as tough as it could’ve been under other circumstances.

I’m going to get this done.

I walk up to the gate’s keypad and punch in the code. As the iron bars swing open, I feel like Dorothy walking the yellow brick road, except the bricks here are as red as sin, the road lined with hovering palm trees instead of gnarled, thick ones.

I refuse to think about lions and tigers and bears, and in their place, I start running over the details of my client that I read in a dossier the site sent to me.

Cage Bryant, 27, billionaire.

Boss and money and brains (oh, my).

Then I think of those pictures of him—his thick, unruly brown hair; his dark eyebrows over a pair of blue eyes that seem to penetrate the camera lens; a luscious mouth that doesn’t seem very used to smiling. He towers over every woman he’s been photographed with, filling out his designer suits with his broad shoulders and thick arms. His skin is tanned, bringing out the color of his eyes, but in every picture, those eyes make it seem as if he’s ready to stalk over to the paparazzi and tear the camera out of their clutches. The thing is, he doesn’t seem to give a shit about what anyone thinks of his stone-cold moods.

In those pictures, there’s also a barely contained anger in those eyes, a challenge to anyone who gets too close.

He’s a boss, all right. Some googling told me that, by the tender age of twenty, he started working at a low-end car dealership where he became a top salesman. He quickly graduated to a luxury vehicle dealership, and his kick-ass boss reputation only grew as he voraciously worked his way up to management, landing better and better positions one right after the other.

When he was twenty-one—twenty-one! Only one year younger than I am!—he started a headhunting/recruiting business, Bryant Industries. It went from a one-man operation to an enormous behemoth headquartered in New York City, and it now does business all over the world.

All of this before thirty. And now, besides conquering the business world, he’s listed in New York Magazine as the number one eligible bachelor in the city, and the paparazzi loves him. Women crawl all over him, and I’ll be one of them tonight.

Sex and money and freedom.

Oh, my…

Thinking of what I already know about him soothes me. Giving my virginity to someone so handsome might not be as bad as my nerves are warning me it’ll be, and, after tonight, I’ll have enough money to buy my freedom. I’ll be able to breathe again.

I arrive at the arched doorway where huge dark-wooded doors loom. After exhaling, I ring the bell, hearing it chime inside. It echoes, as if traveling through a cavern.

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