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  The woman looked blank for a second of comprehension, and then her eyes turned manipulating. “Do you want one of these other girls to join you? I can discount the fee if you want another?”

  The man shook his head. Instead he turned to the girl and stared blatantly into her eyes. She felt compelled to meet his gaze.

  “Well?”

  “Yes,” the girl said softly, speaking for the first time. Her eyes were swimming with some unfathomable emotion that swirled mysteriously in the depths of her gaze.

  The man straightened, and his demeanor changed in an instant. Now he was abrupt and business like. He tugged on the lapels of his jacket and then adjusted one of the diamond cufflinks at his wrist. He smiled coldly to the madam.

  “I’ll be staying at the Stratton tonight. Send her there immediately. I’ll have the money deposited into your private account within the hour.”

  He turned and strode purposely from the dungeon, like a man who had important things to do.

  He did.

  Chapter 2:

  The man came out of the elevator on the top floor of the Stratton hotel and paused at a window to admire the view of Washington like the city was his domain; his kingdom. His phone in his pocket rang. He ignored it.

  After a moment of silent contemplation he turned and strode down the wide corridor. The carpet beneath his feet was plush and muffled his every step. Not that it mattered. The secret service man guarding the door to the penthouse was watching him approach. He’d had eyes on the man since he had left the elevator. The agent spoke quietly into a microphone attached to his shirtsleeve, then nodded to the man.

  “Agent, Willis,” the man nodded back.

  “Sir,” the agent acknowledged deferentially.

  “Is she in there waiting?”

  “Yes, sir.” The agent’s face was straight, devoid of any emotion. He stared at the man with dark blank eyes. “She arrived twenty minutes ago.”

  The man nodded. “Has anyone else been in the room?”

  “No, sir.”

  “Is she alone?”

  “Yes sir. She arrived with an escort, but he left her at the elevator doors and has since departed the building.”

  “Good.” The man smiled thinly. He straightened his tie, and took a second to compose himself.

  “I told her to wait in the bedroom for you, sir.” The agent stepped aside.

  The man sauntered to the door, into the penthouse.

  The penthouse was lavishly decorated; a vast open-planned living room from which connected doors to bedrooms and a kitchen. The walls were painted an interesting shade of grey, and from the ceiling hung a glittering chandelier. The furnishings were luxurious, and lamps lit the corners, resting on small antique tables. There were floor to ceiling windows across the opposite wall, giving a grand panoramic view of the Capitol at night. Paintings and mirrors hung from the wall.

  The man crossed to a side table and selected a cigar from a humidor. He took his time, preparing the end carefully with a knife and moistening it between his lips. He lit the cigar with a gold-plated lighter in his pocket, and then drew deeply with his eyes closed, savoring the experience.

  He went to one of the mirrors and smoothed his hands through his hair, gripping the cigar between his teeth while he studied his reflection with an elegant turn of his head. He smiled to himself, but it was a cold enigmatic twist of his lips; the leer of a predator stalking trapped and unsuspecting prey. He blew a thin feather of smoke at the ceiling and turned towards the bedroom.

  When he pushed the wide double doors open, the girl he had bought was sitting on the edge of a grand bed, staring out at the night lighted view of Washington.

  The man took a moment to catch his breath – struck yet again by the remarkable similarity. He shivered with delicious malevolence.

  The girl turned her head towards the sound of his entrance, and her long blonde hair swished like a velvet cascade across her shoulders. She was wearing a short figure-hugging black dress. The man could see high up her long brown thighs. Her face was a pale oval of apprehension. Her eyes were wide with fright. Then they widened even further.

  She recognized the man.

  “You?” she whispered incredulously, making the question sound more like a scandalous accusation.

  The man smiled enigmatically and drew himself to his full imposing height. “You recognize me?” he wasn’t entirely surprised.

  The girl nodded her head. “You’re Congressman Wilton Jansing.”

  The man chuckled. “I suppose I should be flattered,” he said. “But I suspect you recognize me from all the recent television coverage rather than my years of dedicated service to the American people.” He hadn’t moved. He was still standing in the open doorway. He waved the cigar like a baton, and it drew a thin cloud of smoke in the air about him. “And you are the sweet and delicious Nikita, right?”

  He saw it in her eyes; the guilt of her deception behind a thin veil of bravado. She lifted her chin and met his glare.

  “Yes,” she said softly. She licked her lips and swallowed down a lump of apprehension that rose dry in her throat.

  The Congressman said nothing.

  He went to the edge of the bed where Clarissa was sitting and stared down at her. “Get the dress off.”

  She moved like an automaton, standing and reaching for the hem of her dress. Her hands were shaking.

  Clarissa pulled the dress up over her head and let it drop to the floor. The Congressman nodded his approval. She was wearing fresh lingerie; a red bra and red lace panties. The color suited her. He peeled off his jacket and draped it carefully over the end of the bed.

  “Lay down and spread your legs,” the Congressman spoke in the manner of a man accustomed to command. Clarissa slid into the middle of the vast bed, propped her head on one of the pillows, and then slowly parted her legs. The man was standing over her, his expression intense.

  “Wider.”

  She spread her legs wide. The Congressman’s cock was hard. Clarissa could see the bulge tenting the front of his pants. He reached into his pocket and held up his cell phone. He took a full-length photo of her and then another that was a close up of her face.

  Clarissa felt a rise of sudden alarm. “What are you doing?”

  “Isn’t it obvious?”

  “But why? There was nothing in the contract I signed that said you could photograph me.”

  The Congressman smiled coldly. “There was nothing that said I couldn’t,” he countered. “And besides, this is my personal phone and these photos are for my personal collection.” He took two more quick photos of her, then moved to the opposite side of the bed.

  “Take off the bra.”

  Clarissa balked. She felt off-balance. She felt like she was losing careful control. She trapped her bottom lip between her teeth stubbornly, but she was helpless to resist. She knew her share of the sixty thousand dollar fee wouldn’t be released to her until this man was satisfied, and she had lost her virginity. She had sold herself.

  Now she had to pay the price.

  Clarissa reached behind her back and unfastened her bra. She tossed it aside with a petulant flourish.

  “Good,” the Congressman said. “Now lay back again and put your hand down inside your panties.”

  Clarissa closed her eyes and did as she was bid. She was starting to tremble. It was warm in the room but her forearms were bristling with a rash of gooseflesh.

  The Congressman snapped three more photos, then one from the foot of the bed showing Clarissa’s spread legs and naked pussy in the foreground, with her face still distinct and identifiable in the background. He stood back for a moment, shuffling through the photos, then unzipped his trousers.

  “Now, I want you to take my cock in your sweet little mouth and suck me.”

  Clarissa crawled to the edge of the bed obediently and took the Congressman’s hard cock between her painted red lips. She felt a wave of apprehension wash over her. She was about to give herself to
this man for a night of sex, and although she had known this moment was always going to happen, now it was upon her, she felt unprepared. Her mouth was dry as a desert. She licked her lips.

  “Look up at me.”

  Clarissa opened her eyes and looked up.

  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.