Page 3 of Master Class

Flash!

The Congressman took several more photos, careful just to capture the length of his cock and nothing that would identify himself in any images. He smiled to himself, then stepped back from the bed with a shudder and a sigh of remorse. He tucked himself back inside his pants and drew the zipper back up. Clarissa was still on her hands and knees. She was frowning in confusion.

She looked like a goddess on the bed; a vision of pure sexual desire that could have been ripped straight from the pages of a men’s magazine centerfold. The Congressman congratulated himself on his resolve.

“Aren’t you going to…?” Clarissa looked bewildered and a little embarrassed. “Aren’t you going to fuck me?” she asked shyly.

Congressman Jansing looked appalled. “Fuck you?”

“Yes,” Clarissa scraped her fingers through her hair. A long golden tendril fell down across her eyes and she hooked it deftly behind her ear. “You paid sixty thousand dollars for my virginity,” Clarissa said.

The Congressman was slowly shaking his head, and then the smile on his face corrupted into something sinister. “I paid sixty thousand dollars for your virginity,” Jansing agreed. “But that doesn’t mean I have to take it.” He took another step back from the bed like an addict distancing himself from his particular weakness.

“What does that mean?” Clarissa felt something creeping and cold run chill down her spine. Suddenly she felt very vulnerable and exposed. She changed her position on the bed so that she was kneeling with her legs pressed tightly together and her arms across her chest to cover her naked breasts.

There was a chair in one corner of the bedroom. Congressman Jansing dragged it away from the wall and sat. He crossed his legs, reclined and elegant, and rolled the cigar between his fingers. For a long moment he seemed intrigued by the gently rising spiral of smoke that spread across the low ceiling. Finally he sighed.

The Congressman smiled. His lips pressed together like a thin blade. “Your name is not Nikita. Your name is Clarissa Oldham. You’re twenty-one.”

He watched amused as the shock showed on the girl’s face. The little bit of color still on her cheeks drained away from her features.

“You know my real name?”

“And a lot more,” Congressman Jansing’s eyes were cold and ominous. “I also know that you’re not a waitress. You are in fact a volunteer for one of the local Washington politicians – he’s a low level functionary, but you’re not working there for the money, are you? No. You’re working for the experience because somewhere in the future, you have political aspirations.”

Clarissa said nothing. She felt the world beneath her tilt. She swallowed down on a rising sense of fear and panic.

“I also happen to know that when you were just thirteen, you were arrested on a pickpocketing charge.” He paused and his expression became almost confidential. “You got off lightly.”

Clarissa blanched. She opened her mouth but the Congressman went on smoothly, talking over the top of her and drowning her into silence.

“And I know that you decided to sell your virginity out of desperation. You need money, don’t you? You need money badly.”

Again, Clarissa said nothing. The man’s eyes were cold and grey, the urbane exterior shedding like a reptile’s skin before her eyes to reveal something cold and infinitely menacing. His voice snapped with authority.

“In fact you need forty-three-thousand, eight-hundred-and-sixty-four dollars – the precise amount that your grandfather’s bank is demanding to avoid foreclosing on his farm and selling the property out from underneath him.”

“You know?” Clarissa gasped. She felt herself overcome with a wave of giddy nausea, and there was a sudden roaring rush of blood hissing in her ears. Her legs felt weak beneath her. She slumped down on the bed. “How do you know all this?” she whispered. The enormity of how vulnerable she was struck her numb.

The Congressman got to his feet and crushed the cigar out beneath the heel of his handmade leather shoe, grinding the ash into the expensive carpet without a thought. “I know because I was the one who engineered the situation,” he said. “I have very, very good friends at that bank. Men who are indebted to me…” he let the implications dangle in the air like a threat.

“You?”

“Yes. Me. And it was me who planted your new friend Gail in the office where you work. And it was me who told Gail to encourage you to consider selling your virginity to a wealthy man as a way to raise the money your poor dear grandfather needed.”

“You did that?”

“Yes,” the Congressman rocked arrogantly on the balls of his feet. “Gail is one of my personal staffers. I put her in your office just long enough to win your confidence and to set the idea about the auction in the back of your mind. Then I just let your desperation do the work.”

“Why?” Clarissa was incredulous. “Why would you want to cheat my grandfather out of his farm? He’s been on that land all his life. It’s been in our family for three generations.”

The Congressman’s face turned cynical. “I don’t want your family’s farm, you silly girl. What I want is much more valuable.”

“What?” Clarissa hissed, overwhelmed and drowning. She felt hopelessly trapped in a web that was beyond her comprehension.

“I want you,” the Congressman smiled in triumph.

“But you have me,” she felt herself struggling for breath. She felt tight with turmoil and emotion. “You bought my virginity.”

“I didn’t buy you to fuck, you idiot,” the Congressman hissed suddenly with so much violence that it frightened Clarissa and made her flinch. There was a white froth of spittle at the corner of his mouth. “I bought you for something much more important.”

“What?” Clarissa felt on the verge of nausea.

Congressman Jansing’s smile turned evil. “I bought you as bait.”

Chapter 3:

Clarissa went to the bathroom and threw up in the sink, the vomit rising like scalding acid, raw in the back of her throat. She ran cold water and rinsed her mouth, then washed her face. Her makeup smeared down her cheeks. She didn’t even seem to notice. She was numb and dazed. She leaned her forehead against the cold white tile of the wall and gasped out a sobbing breath of trembling fear.

The realization of her plight struck her with cold brutal clarity. The Congressman waiting for her in the bedroom was one of the most powerful men in America.

He knew who she was… and he had just taken photographs of her; the kind of images that would hang forever like a blackmailable millstone around her neck.

Congressman Jansing had bought her virginity for a night, but had ended up with a far greater prize; now he owned her for life.

She paced in a circle around the bathroom, feeling trapped and overwhelmed. There seemed no escape other than to do his bidding.

Bait?

What did that mean?

Clarissa shuddered, and her hands turned cold and clammy.

She had been so careful to conceal her identity, and yet all her precautions had been for naught. She shook her head. Her mind felt stuffed with wool, making her thoughts jittering and incoherent.

When her grandfather had received the foreclosure notice from the bank, Clarissa had been desperate to help the old man in any way she could. With both of her parents long deceased, her grandfather was the only family she had, and those blood ties came with a sense of duty. Although Clarissa no longer lived with her grandfather, she still drove down to Georgia whenever she had the opportunity to spend a few days on the farm and check up on the man who had mentored and cared for her. Ever since the fatal fire had claimed the lives of her mother and father – and inevitably altered the course of her own life – her grand

father had been the one constant in her life.

She had gone to the bank personally to plead her grandfather’s case. There seemed no logical reason for the foreclosure demand. She had been frustrated at every turn… and now – finally – she understood what powerful influences had been working behind the scenes.

Congressman Wilton Jansing.

But why?

What was so special about her that one of the most powerful men in the country would exert influence on a bank, and then take advantage of her desperation to steer her towards the dire taboo prospect of auctioning off her virginity to raise the money?

And then – after all the conniving and manipulating necessary to get her exactly where he wanted her – why not take the sexual reward he had apparently been so desperate to win?

Clarissa shook her head. Clearly the man knew everything about her – even the pickpocketing charge from so many years ago. His research had been so thorough, Clarissa felt intimidated. She was sure there was nothing – absolutely nothing – the Congressman didn’t know about her. And he would use that knowledge; she knew he would.

Bait. The word rattled around in her head as a foreboding sense of peril lurking just below the surface.

She looked about the bathroom, feeling the walls close in about her with no possible escape. It seemed an apt allegory for her predicament. She had been manipulated into a corner by forces that were beyond her ability or strength to resist.

Now she would be sacrificed, and she was utterly helpless to stay the executioner’s axe.

She went back to the mirror and tried on a brave, confident face. It collapsed. Her bottom lips started to tremble and then her eyes welled with fresh tears. She felt her shoulders slump and then the strength went from her legs. She clutched at the vanity counter to support herself.

There was no escape.

When she came back into the bedroom, Congressman Jansing was standing at the high windows, staring out across the city. He had his hands in his pockets, relaxed and urbane. He turned when he heard her soft steps in the thick carpet. The merciless smile on his face struck a new chilling dagger of fear into Clarissa’s heart.

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