LITMIR.BIZ

      CONTENTS

      CHAPTER ONE

      CHAPTER TWO

      CHAPTER THREE

      CHAPTER FOUR

      CHAPTER FIVE

      CHAPTER SIX

      CHAPTER SEVEN

      CHAPTER EIGHT

      CHAPTER NINE

      CHAPTER TEN

      CHAPTER ELEVEN

      CHAPTER TWELVE

      CHAPTER THIRTEEN

      CHAPTER ONE

      CARLY glanced discreetly at the small mixed party she was minding in her role as partner in one of the country’s most prestigious and exclusive event-organising businesses, and wondered how long it would be before she could leave. The event was a fortieth birthday party for a banker and he’d chosen to have it at the London Nightclub CoralPink. It would not have been the venue she would have chosen but in a business where ultimately the customer was always right that was not her decision to make.

      Already, though, she could see that their client’s wife was beginning to look less than pleased at the amount of attention her husband was giving the upmarket eye candy on view. There were already half a dozen empty bottles of Cristal champagne on their table, and another of the men was chatting up a girl who had been walking past, inviting her to join them. Male libidos and wifely tempers were both beginning to rise ominously in the club’s hormone-drenched heat, Carly realised dispiritedly.

      She had balked at this assignment all along, knowing it wasn’t her cup of tea. She preferred the kind of event she had supervised over the weekend—a jolly surprise eightieth birthday party held for a sharp-witted grandmother by her large family. It had taken some delicate finessing of finances on Carly’s part to ensure that everything they had wanted was achievable within their modest budget, and she had been justifiably proud of the end result.

      Mike Lucas’s wife was going to explode in a minute if he didn’t stop flirting with the young girl he had grabbed. Carly swiftly got up and made her way towards him, intent on defusing the situation before it got out of hand.

      Ricardo didn’t know why the hell he had allowed himself to be persuaded to come here. His appetite for the proposed business deal that had brought him here had already soured. The whole set-up was everything he loathed, and could best be summed up as rich, immoral men being pursued by greedy, amoral women, he decided cynically.

      His attention was caught by the occupants of a table several feet away. A group of forty-something men, paunchy and sweating from a combination of the club’s heat and the effect of the skimpily dressed young women thronging the room. Their wives and partners might be younger than they, but they were nowhere near as young as the girls the men were watching—apart from one. She was younger than the rest but still a woman and not a girl, and as Ricardo watched her she got up from her seat and walked round to the other side the table, where one of the men had started to paw a giggling leggy brunette for whom he had just ordered a bottle of champagne.

      ‘Mike.’ Carly smiled as she leaned towards him, strategically placing herself between him and the unknown girl.

      ‘Hello, sexy. Want some champagne?’

      Mike Lucas made a grab for her, pulling her down onto his knee and putting his hand on her breast.

      Immediately Carly froze, warning anger zig-zagging through the glance she gave him, but Mike was too drunk to notice. Still grinning, he pulled the other girl towards him as well. Unlike Carly, she made it plain that she was enjoying the attention.

      ‘Look what I’ve got,’ Mike called out to his friends, one hand on Carly’s breast and the other on the other girl’s. He jiggled them inexpertly and boasted drunkenly, ‘Hey, what about this for a threesome, guys?’

      Ricardo’s hooded gaze monitored the small unsavoury scene. The sight of women selling their bodies was nothing new to him. He had grown up in the slums of Naples, and these women—these spoiled, pampered, lazy society women, with their designer clothes and their Cartier jewellery—were, as far as he was concerned, far more to be despised than the prostitutes of the Naples alleys.

      He pushed back his chair and stood up, throwing a pile of banknotes down onto the table. The man who had invited him to the club was talking to someone at the bar, but Ricardo did not bother to go over and take any formal leave of him before quitting the club.

      As a billionaire he had no need to observe the niceties that governed the behaviour of other, less wealthy men.