Chapter One
Lila
Dirty.
That’s what I was. How I felt, at least. How my world seemed at that moment.
Dirty, and so much of a disaster I hardly recognized myself anymore.
It had been that way for weeks, going on a few months.
But even though I hated the filth, I had no way to climb out of the mud pit that had become my life.
No, I was stuck, groveling and humbled, all while working hard to suppress the growing hatred in my stomach.
“Eat,” Dimitri Petrov commanded in a thick accent that didn’t hide his Eastern Bloc origins. “Eat your food. Now.”
Without breaking his gaze, I picked up my fork and speared a large serving of pulled pork.
As I watched him, and he watched me, I ate the bite with measured slowness, making sure to elongate my chewing and enhance my pleasured grunting.
He’d paid for it, so he deserved to be satisfied.
Well, maybe not deserved. More like, expected.
“That’s good,” he murmured. “Very good.”
He moved backward on the hotel room bed and spread his legs.
The outline of his tan trousers told me he had an erection.
Five bites in, and I’d gone a long way toward giving him what he wanted for the evening.
Thank God this night would only include watching me eat half a pound of pulled pork covered in a tangy barbeque sauce.
We hadn’t booked anything else, and I’d made it clear I wouldn’t do anything more. We had other women for that.
Besides, some things simply weren’t for sale. My dignity, for one.
Still, as I shoved another bite in my mouth, I felt used and gross.
It wasn’t the act of eating, or that I did so while wearing a black lace bra, matching thong underwear, and black garters.
The fetishization of the whole thing bothered me.
Who would have guessed there were a legion of sick bastards out there willing to pay to watch a twenty-five-year-old woman chew food?
And who would have figured I’d be the one doing it?
“You’re hot, Rose,” he said while I chewed, using the name the agency gave me as part of this whole sick act.
All of us had flower nicknames, which Ingrid, the owner, insisted made the sordid clientele think her girls classier than any others peddling similar services in South Florida.
Dimitri Petrov had certainly seemed to buy the lie.
Sweat beaded on his brow and dampened the stiff collar of his black dress shirt.
His toupee looked like it might fall off his head from all the anticipation.
“Do you know how gorgeous you are? Simply stunning.”
“Thank you,” I replied after a dramatic swallowing of my latest bite. “That means so much.”
“I wish I knew about you before. I wouldn’t have ordered any of the other girls, because you’re everything I wanted, Rose.”
I suppressed my growing revulsion. How many times have I heard something like what Petrov just insinuated? As if, had he known me outside of our roles, I would be who he wanted. Not on his life.
The only reason I was in his presence was because of the income.
The job. No, Petrov, I never would have been what you wanted.
Giving him a joyless smile, I glanced at the plate of barbecued meat.
Ten or twelve bites to go before I’d finish the serving, and the show would be over.
I better make each one as sexy as I can.
A man like Petrov would want the best value for his money, and I couldn’t risk him complaining about the two thousand dollars he’d paid to watch me ingest cooked meats for an hour.
I raised the next bite to my lips and pushed the sheer misery of it away.
Never mind that I hated pork right up until ten seconds before this appointment.
Never mind that he seemed to get harder with every morsel I swallowed.
Never mind that just looking at Dimitri Petrov made me want to puke. Never mind.
I had no other choice.
“May I eat some with extra sauce?” I pointed at the small bowl next to the plate. “Mmm. The sauce is my favorite.”
“Fine.” He grinned. “But first, I want you to rub some of it on your breasts.”
What a sick jackass. A sexual freak. I didn’t care how much money he had or who he knew on the island.
If I ever saw him after tonight, I would ignore him, would look right through him, a silent revenge for the humiliation of these sixty minutes.
I might have been powerless in the room at this moment, but once we stepped into the sunlight, I’d regain the advantage I’d lost. Cockroaches like him never liked the daytime anyway.
But none of that altered the game we were playing. In this scenario, I had to do what he wanted. Or else.
I dipped my index finger in the sauce and rubbed a long streak of it across my décolletage. Then I smiled and licked the rest off the tip of my nail. “Tastes good.”
“I bet it does,” he replied, his accent thick, his voice heavy. He looked like he might orgasm in his pants.
Pathetic.
Still, I had a talent for this, and I knew it.
I might even have been great at it. A myriad of satisfied clients seemed to think so, along with everyone else associated with this sordid world.
In the last few months, I’d risen from newbie to one of the most in demand girls in Ingrid’s stable.
If I kept this up, soon I’d be number one—not that I’d ever aspired to that kind of distinction.
I gave the clock a quick glance. Twenty more minutes of this hell. Then it would be over, and I’d be ten thousand dollars freer. I supposed there were worse things in this life.
“Would you like to me to put the sauce anywhere else?” I asked.
One side of Petrov’s mouth curled upward. “Oh yes, little one. Oh, yes. I certainly, certainly, certainly would.”
A short time later, I left the hotel room and made the required phone call to Ingrid. She picked up on the first ring, so she must have been waiting for me to check-in. “How did it go?”
“Petrov seemed very satisfied,” I said as I slipped into the driver’s seat of my car. “He begged me to stay, but of course I didn’t.” I turned on the engine. “As you told me, we’ve got to leave them wanting more.”
“They’re always better when they are distracted.”
“That’s true.” I glanced at the hotel. “By the way, Lilly is in there now, finishing him off.”
Ingrid let out a raspy chuckle, her voice jagged from years of smoking a pack of cigarettes a day. I pictured her on the other end, sitting in her office, her baggy eyes gleeful from another successful session. “Stupid bastard.”
I shook my head, even though Ingrid couldn’t see me do this through the phone. Unlike her, I didn’t relish taking advantage of these men, and I wouldn’t be doing it if I’d had a different choice. “He passed out at the end,” I added. “Exactly the way you said he would.”
Ingrid’s chuckle changed into a full laugh. “So, it wasn’t hard to get it, was it?”
“No,” I replied, thinking of the thumb drive in my purse, the real goal of the afternoon. As soon as Petrov had fallen asleep, I’d removed it from the small video camera attached to the back of the television set in the room, just as I’d been instructed to do. “Actually, it was too easy this time.”
“Good job. Alexi will be very pleased.”
I cringed. Ingrid might technically own this agency, but Alexi had the real power as her main investor.
He was the man behind the curtain, and while I had never met him in person, I sensed he liked it that way.
Getting others to do the less desirable aspects of his enterprise meant he could focus on the bigger goal—controlling all of South Florida through a silent network of power.
“Like you said, that’s another forty grand in payment on top of the regular fee, right? ”
“Yes. He’s a man of his word.” She paused. “I don’t suppose you’ve had a chance to think about his proposal.”
“I’d hardly call it that.”
“He’s been very pleased with your efforts lately. You might—”
“I told Alexi already. I’m only doing this under certain conditions. I’m not a whore.” I sucked in a deep breath. Shit, I shouldn’t have said that. “I mean. You know what I mean—”
“I do,” she replied. “Still, you should consider his offer. It’s easier money than you think.”
“Not easy enough.”
We ended the call and I tossed my phone on the passenger seat with a long sigh, hoping that would help relieve the tension in my neck.
Didn’t work. Still tightly wound, I fished through my purse and retrieved the drive, which I’d attached to a small key ring after leaving the room.
It looked like the others that’d I removed in the last few weeks from hotel rooms and rented condos all over Palm Beach.
I held it up, studying it. This was Alexi’s real operation—the women were just a ruse.
Two weeks earlier, I’d turned on the evening news, only to see one of the videos I had recorded running as the lead story.
The carefully edited footage might have obscured my face, but I recognized myself, right next to a very married and very evangelical Senator Owen Updike of Coral Gables.
A few days later, he held a press conference and resigned in disgrace, saying his career in the US Senate had come to an unceremonious end.
Yuck.
Who am I becoming? I didn’t have a good answer, but I knew I’d need a long shower after getting back to the house. At least today’s job was over, and I could go back to being myself, Lila Montague.
For now.