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CHAPTER ONE
GLORYALBRIGHTTHOUGHTshe might be in trouble when the first naked woman sauntered past her.
When a second followed, Glory realised she was totally out of her depth.
So. It appeared the rumours about how wild the parties at Castor Xenakis’s Malibu mansion got were true.
Wild didn’t even begin to cover it.
She pulled the cloak she wore tighter around her shoulders and concentrated very hard on the bookshelf in front of her rather than what was happening around her. There was a small sculpture sitting on one of the shelves. It was of a woman being embraced by a man and was carved out of white marble. The man had his hands...
Oh.
Glory blushed as she suddenly realised what kind of sculpture it was and wished she could turn around and find something else to look at, but since turning around might mean potentially seeing more naked people, the statue was clearly the lesser of the two evils.
This was a stupid idea. She shouldn’t have come.
In the room at her back, she could hear people laughing and talking and shrieking. Music throbbed like a heartbeat. From elsewhere came the sounds of smashing glass and yet more loud laughter. Then a splash from the pool area.
Someone brushed against her as they walked past where she stood near the bookshelf, and she shrank away in discomfort.
Infamous parties/orgies at luxury Malibu beach houses were so far out of her comfort zone that she may as well have been on the moon, and if she’d had any choice in the matter she’d still be safely at home in the run-down apartment she shared with her sister, curled up in front of the TV watching reruns ofFriendsand eating ice cream.
But she didn’t have a choice. Okay, perhaps that wasn’t exactly true. She didn’thaveto decide she wanted to pay for her sister to have IVF treatment. And the plan she’d come up with didn’tneedto include gatecrashing the party of one of the most notorious playboys in the world. Neither did ithaveto involve her virginity, and selling said virginity to said playboy.
Then again, Annabel couldn’t afford IVF and after the sacrifices she’d made in bringing Glory up after their parents’ deaths, Glory thought helping her achieve her dream of having a family was a small price to pay.
Yes, the idea of selling her virginity to an infamous playboy might be a bit wild and wild wasn’t Glory at all, but how else could she get a lot of money in a short space of time, and legally?
And thiswasCastor Xenakis after all. She hadn’t spent months looking at the pictures of him in the gossip magazines for absolutely no reason. He might be a very bad man and she might tell herself she was doing this for Annabel’s benefit, but the deeper truth beneath that was that she wanted him.
Those pictures had led to an obsession with him that she couldn’t deny. An obsession that she was tired of and was hoping a night in his bed would cure her of.
Anyway, it wasn’t as if she’d just dreamed her plan up on the fly. It had come to her after months spent reading said magazines at her job behind the counter of Mr and Mrs Jessup’s grocery store, and then paying quiet attention to the customers who visited the store. Customers who talked. Customers who let slip certain things...
The plan was utter madness, of course, and totally alien to Glory’s quiet nature, but when you were a dirt-poor checkout girl and your beloved older sister had given up a lot of dreams for you, then you did what you could to give those dreams back to her.
Exactly. And you didn’t come here to stand in front of the bookshelf staring at naughty statues.
No, she hadn’t.
She’d come to one of Castor Xenakis’s notorious Malibu parties to find the world’s most debauched and dissolute playboy himself, then offer him her virginity.
For a price.
It wasn’t totally out of the realms of possibility that he’d accept. She had, after all, reada lotabout him in those magazines that stood on a stand near the counter, because he was in those magazines constantly. And if the rumours about his parties were true, then she might have a chance.
He was supposed to choose a woman for the night from amongst the partygoers and whichever woman he chose apparently didn’t go away empty-handed the next day. Money, jewellery, expensive purses were some of the gifts he gave to his lovers. One was even rumoured to have been given some expensive sports car.
Glory had been in the middle of reading one of those gossipy articles when a couple of women had come in, chattering about all the work they had to do for the party coming up that weekend.
She had sat there quietly, not drawing attention to herself, which she was very good at, just listening. Being able to fade into the background was a useful skill, since if people didn’t notice you, they’d talk about all kinds of stuff.
Such as how the party was going to be a big one and how the boss himself was going to be there, and how he did like everything to go smoothly.
The two women were regulars and Glory knew they worked at Castor Xenakis’s Malibu beach house, so he must have been the boss they were talking about.
Castor Xenakis, CEO of CX Enterprises—a multinational with interests in finance, shipping, construction and various other industries—and party circuit regular, had been linked to all kinds of scandals and was reputedly one of the most infamous womanisers in the western world, if not the entire globe.
