He held my ass and drove me up and down over his enormous dick. “I want you to come all over my cock.”

Before long, my muscles released and did just that, climaxing like never before. An endless mushrooming of color and bliss. I became that flower blooming under the heat of the sun.

Normally, I needed it dark and dirty to come like that, and it seemed this was enough, considering his wife was in the other room.

Within a moment of my own release, his thrusts increased, and his grunts intensified into a guttural growl that filled the room as he came almost violently. He sounded like he was in agony.

We fell back on the bed, and he panted as loudly as if he’d been running a marathon, while I allowed the heat of sex to continue tingling through me.

“You’re the best fuck I’ve had in ages,” he finally said. “If ever.”

I rolled over to my side to look at him, and he returned a gorgeous smile. Yes. I could quite easily fall for this handsome older man. But I had other plans. And starry-eyed romance was not one of them.

After we enjoyed a piece of cake and some more champagne, I let him take me again and again. Many orgasms later, I’d turned into a sated kitten, and he’d become a very satisfied tomcat who lay with his arms around me in a deep sleep.

Unable to sleep due to sensory overload, I untangled myself from his arms when dawn arrived, careful not to wake him. A quick shower helped me gather my senses, then I dressed and headed off.

It was six in the morning as I headed to the nearest station. I could have hailed a cab, but I felt like walking. The drug still buzzed through me, and it was Sunday, so I didn’t need to be anywhere in particular.

As I headed in the direction of the train line in search of the station, Harry Lovechilde entered my thoughts, despite pleasant memories of Gregory fueling my steps.

Something told me it wouldn’t be our last encounter.

Chapter 3

ThebleakstreetinHackney where my baby girl now lived reminded me of what my life might have been had I never met Rey.

But then, a year ago, I could never have imagined living in Notting Hill with its charming, gentrified period terraces painted in mid-tone colors. Mine was sky-blue with a bay window that flooded my living room with sunlight.

I stood behind a gnarled tree, symbolic of that rundown area, in the hope of seeing my daughter. I tried my best to remain invisible but had to hide to do so, because wearing a plaid Dior coat, gifted to me by a generous Swiss banker, I looked quite out of place in Hackney.

Oily cooking odors clung in the air, stirring memories of my early years growing up in that awful council home on the outskirts of London. Now my baby, or more accurately the child I gave away, lived in a similar grim street made up of maudlin high-rises.

What if she ended up the same way I did, forced to escape a dirty pig of a man meant to be protecting her? My stomach twisted in a knot just thinking about it.

I’d even knocked on the door one afternoon, but my daughter’s new mother threatened to call the agency if I didn’t leave. It was not the done thing, she reminded me, which I knew well enough.

I’d signed her away, after all.

Apart from designer coats and lavish dinners, one of the advantages of sleeping with powerful men was the way information fell into their laps as effortlessly as half-naked dancers working in those debauched gentlemen’s clubs.

The details of my daughter’s address had come at a cost, of course. I had to meet up with that one for a second date. Something I rarely did. There was only one man I’d gladly see again, despite my shunning his recent advances.

Gregory would need to work harder to get me. Or was that just a game I liked to play, a reminder that I wasn’t that free and easy after all?

My daughter was now a year old, and while her new mother reassured me she was doing fine, I harbored this uncomfortable yearning to hold her. Maybe even to take her away, especially now that I owned a home in a safe and comfortable area.

But then, how could I rear a child conceived in such a violent manner?

There wasn’t a day when I didn’t think about her, however, and it was worse at night. Barraged by endless images of her little body attached to mine, and our separation at the cutting of that cord, I’d lie wide awake in the dark, imagining what it would be like to hold her.

Despite my refusal to see her or even touch her at the hospital.

Why hadn’t I held her? Fed her? The milk that leaked out of me had gone to waste, and when the nurses asked if I wished to feed her, I went stone-cold, turning away as though they’d asked something unnatural of me.

Reywaitedformeat our usual café, a fine establishment close to Westminster that was frequented by the rich and mighty. Of course.

Like wearing a soft, luxurious fur on a chilly day, I enjoyed mixing with that cohort of nice-smelling, well-spoken men. I’d become an actress who’d grown fond of her role. I enjoyed all the comforts that came with money, something I discovered the moment Reynard Crisp—in his shiny Italian shoes and tailored sports jacket—walked into my life. I’d caught the tube with my last pennies that day, heading to the swankiest bar in Mayfair, where I’d planned to sell myself to the richest man I could attach myself to. I couldn’t stomach another day of menial labor, the pay barely covering the rent for my tiny, deplorably damp bedsit. All it took was one drink with this red-headed titan for me to sign my soul away, and in only a matter of days, I found myself mingling with London’s elite.