Virgin For The Billionaire's Taking. Penny Jordan

      Not even the full spread of her fingers was enough to encompass the length of him, hard and pulsing with a driving demand that her own flesh ached to answer. His tongue probed between her lips, his fingers plucking rhythmically at her nipple, swollen and tight in its eagerness to entice him and be pleasured by him. If they hadn’t been out here in the garden he could have removed her dress and pleasured it properly, with his mouth as well as his hands.

      As though he had read her thoughts she felt him reach for the zip on her dress and slide it down. Instead of objecting, she shuddered with excited pleasure.

      Jay felt her body’s reaction to his touch, and a thin, cruel smile curled his mouth as he released hers from its possession. Not a true professional, then. If she was she would not have allowed her own desires to be so easily read. She was more of a greedy, highly-sexed woman, who had learned that men were willing to pay for her pleasure and their own sexual satisfaction.

      Overhead in the courtyard fireworks started to explode, the noise shattering the highly charged sexual spell Keira was under and bringing her back to reality. As the first bright pink stars fell down to earth Keira pushed Jay away with a vehement, ‘No!’

      What on earth was she doing?

      Clumsy, but effective, Jay acknowledged. Get a man so wound up that he was prepared to do anything to get satisfaction and then demand a sweetener. It would be a new experience for him to pay a woman for sex—normally they ended up begging him for it, not the other way around.

      Keira watched dazedly as Jay reached into his jacket pocket and removed his wallet. But it wasn’t until he opened it to withdraw some crisp notes, demanding coldly, ‘How much?’ that she realised what he was doing.

      Nausea clawed at her stomach, humiliation burning her like acid.

      ‘No,’ she repeated, stepping back from him so that he couldn’t see how badly she was trembling, how dirty and ashamed she felt.

      She was turning him down? How dared she—a woman he had already seen take money from one man tonight? Jay could barely contain his fury.

      ‘I wasn’t offering to pay for more,’ he told her in a voice as soft as death. ‘Having tested what’s on offer, I find you aren’t worth buying. I was simply offering to pay for what I’d already had. Here…’

      As he stretched out his hand to push the money down the front of her dress Keira pushed his hand away and stepped back from him, telling him fiercely, ‘I’m not for sale.’

      ‘Liar.’

      He had gone before she could say anything else, leaving her to struggle to re-zip her dress and then hurry to the nearest cloakroom to repair the damage to her face and hair before going to join the other wedding guests in the courtyard.

      It was an effort for her to behave normally. She was still in shock—a double shock now, after the accusation he had flung at her. She felt more frightened and alone than she could ever remember feeling. Even as a young girl, when she had first realised exactly what her mother was.

      ‘Your mam’s a prostitute. She goes with men for money.’

      She could still hear the sharp Northern tones of the boy who had cornered her in the school playground and chanted the words to her. She had been eight, and well aware that her home life was different from the lives of the other children at school—children whose mothers waited for them outside the school gates and pulled them away when they saw her, children who didn’t go home to a mother who slept all day and ‘worked’ all night to pay for her drug habit.

      Sometimes it seemed to Keira that she had always known shame in one form or another, and that it had been her single true companion for all of her life, shadowing her and colouring her life—her future as well as her past.