Chapter One

 

There are things in life you do because you have to, or think you have to, and things you do because you want to, because they're fun and exciting. I think the ultimate goal in life is to do as little of the former as you can get away with, and as much of the latter as you can survive.

Live hard, die young, and leave a beautiful corpse, right?

I grew up in a penthouse apartment on the upper east side of Manhattan. My world was enormous from the start. The views out the big plate glass windows were always fascinating, and the inside had large rooms and high ceilings everywhere. I never felt closed in.

On the other hand, I grew up speaking Spanish almost better than English because much of my care was in the hands of my family's nanny, Elena, who was an illegal alien from El Salvador.

My fluency in Spanish and lack of same in English caused Elena to be removed from my life when I was about five, and replaced by Deirdre, who was twenty years younger than Elena, and an illegal alien from Ireland.

My parents had told her to speak to me a lot and get me to speak back, and my English language skills improved immensely. The only problem was I began to speak with a distinctly Irish accent. My parents didn't notice for some time, and then when they did thought I was simply imitating Deirdre. When I spoke accented English in front of others they'd threaten to punish me.

When I was eight, Deirdre was given the boot, probably because of remarks from strangers about my Irish accent caused my parents to fear they might be criticized for spending so little time with me themselves.

Not that they intended to spend more time with me. They simply didn't want it made so abundantly clear to others that my closest companion and major influence on my life was my nanny, and not them.

Since I was now eight, they decided I didn't need a nanny anymore. The housekeeper and maids could take care of my basic needs, and the butler could ensure I was supervised and generally keep track of me when not in school.

The butler, Patterson, was sixty two, and hard of hearing. He was very good at ensuring I kept to my highly regimented schedule of school and extra-curricular activities, but not so good at giving affection, which he can hardly be blamed for.

Once Deidre left, then, I lacked any close proximity to anyone who would show any great degree of love or even affection for me. I saw my parents about as often as, I am given to understand, royal children once saw theirs. Which is to say, rarely. They had busy lives, and I was not a part of them except on what I came to refer to as 'show and tell' events.

Mostly I was to be shown, and they would tell, while I kept silent. My parents had a very old-fashioned belief that children should be seen and not heard. My opinion was not sought on anything, including what I ought to be doing with my life.

Whatever sports or other childhood activities occupied my time outside of school, and there were many, were decided for me without consultation. I like to say I had a full time job by the time I was six, and spent a lot of time being shuttled around in the back of the limo in New York traffic.

Needless to say, when a girl lacks affection and love in her life she will find it where she can, and I started making out with boys well before puberty. By eleven I had already figured out that the prettier - which in our society meant sexier - I was, the more guys would like me. And guys were my main source of affection and affirmation.

I had always been a very fashionably dressed child, for image was important to my parents. I focused that fashion sense more narrowly, though in a cunning way designed not to provoke adult commentary which might get back to my parents.

I was aided in that my father was tall (and handsome) and had married a model - my mother - who was likewise tall. I had benefited from their genetic material and was quite tall for my age. I also began to fill out early in life, allowing me to pretend to a greater age than I owned.

My school was very modern, and provided a perfectly splendid bare-bones education in reproduction and sex, but my real sexual education was on the internet, where I studied various sexual behaviors and techniques and tried to practice and imitate them.

I learned to deep throat at a shockingly young age, first using a variety of found objects, then the real thing. By fourteen I was notorious at school, with boys giving eye-popping descriptions to their friends of my amazing skill set.

I was already bored with them, though, and beginning to experiment with girls.

Again, the internet was a great teacher, at least in the physical aspects of lust, if not love. Girls, I found, were more genuinely affectionate than boys. You can hug each other with deep affection you might even think is love, for long, long periods when you're both girls. Boys lacked that patience. Or perhaps, that need.

At sixteen my parents became at least partly aware of my sexual proclivities, not because of the many young men and women who slept over in my room, or the number of nights I slept over at theirs (which they never noticed) but because the school reported my being found en flagrante delicto, as they say, with one of my guidance counselors in her office.

Rather than being upset by this they seemed delighted, or at least, my mother was. It seemed having a gay child was very fashionable among her set (very liberal), and she assured me of her deep respect for my sexual choice while ignoring my protests that I hadn't made one.

They took a strange quiet pride in publicizing my gay nature in a number of different ways, which inspired me to drop girls and start becoming notoriously slutty with boys, well, men, and preferably the most unsuitable ones I could find.

I had been a quiet rebel since about twelve, but my rebellion now burst out into the open in ways designed to challenge, infuriate and embarrass my parents. That included a good deal of experimentation with every conceivable type of alcoholic beverage and narcotic.

At this point my parents decided they had a 'troubled youth' on their hands and sought professional advice. I was sent to a very posh rehab center in France, and then to a very strict 'finishing school' in Monaco, of all places.

Now you've probably heard of Monaco as a gambling mecca and a place where they race sports cars. But you can also think of it as one of the world' capitals of depravity. If you have money, anything goes in Monaco. Combined with the generally lax sense of sexual morals prevalent in southern France, it was probably not the best place to send a 'troubled youth'.

I endured the rehab, though I didn't really need it. I had not become specifically addicted to anything, at least not physically. I was emotionally addicted to anything which got me high, though, and the treatment did little for me there.

The Gray Rocks School for Youth, where I was taken afterward was something else again. They searched everything which came into the walled and gated campus, and regularly searched the students' rooms, too. Narcotics were pretty much impossible to obtain there.

But not long after I arrived, I had a birthday. Certainly my parents, who rarely remembered my birthdays, took no notice of it, but I did. It was my eighteenth. I was able to contact a lawyer, who issued notice to the school, which had to release me.

And that was that for school - and my parents. I didn't feel I had need of either of them. I had something even better, you see. I had a trust fund. My grandfather had started it, and my father had put considerable money into it over the years, largely, I believe, as a tax haven.

Most of the money wouldn't become available until I was twenty five, but an 'allowance' would be made available at eighteen, and that would be doubled at twenty one. I was able to rent a small, but comfortable apartment for about ten thousand euros a month.

When I say small, I mean it. It had marble floors but it was a one bedroom without a lot of extra space. That didn't really matter to me. I didn't intend to spend a lot of time there. I was going to party like there was no tomorrow, and the hell with my parents.

The last thing I'd done before coming to Monaco was an act of defiance. I had got my hair and nails done in a very posh salon. I had quite fair skin, and chose a delicate shade of pink and gray for my hair. It was, in fact, a complicated coloring which melded underlying layers a soft white with various shades of pink and red intermixed so that the overall impression, mixing the dark pink with the white, was a very soft pink - well, a whitish pink.

I was a rich girl who liked to party and wasn't going to hide it.

Now that I was more mature, that is to say, an adult, I considered changing it to something more mature, something more dignified, but disregarded the thought. I was a rich girl who liked to party, and that was what I was going to damn well do!

My first night out I met a most unsuitable man. He was a twisted, perverted man, which was just dandy with me. My mind was so screwed up that any amateur psychologist could have diagnosed me in an instant. Hunter was screwed up, too, but in a completely different and yet highly compatible way.

I was eighteen. He was thirty five. Not quite twice my age, but very nearly. He was extremely handsome, with an excellent body. Like me, he'd grown up rich, and was sophisticated and jaded. Unlike me, he'd had enough years to have a fair idea of who and what he was, and had no compunction about going after what he wanted and taking it by any means necessary.

My sophistication, by comparison, was a relatively thin veneer. And any idiot could have told me I was simply looking for love - in all the wrong places.

I was wearing, at the time we met, a high necked pink silk slip dress which fell only a few inches below my buttocks. It was form fitting, but loose enough not to hug me tightly. Unless I bent over, of course.

My hair fell thick and soft and mostly straight, halfway down my back, framed my high cheeked, oval face, and spilled delicately across my forehead. I was wearing pink lipstick, and felt very slyly girlish. That is, in all that pink and white I saw myself as looking quite innocent, when of course, I was anything but. Or at least, so I was pretending.

I was noticed, of course. I meant to be noticed. I meant to be seen as casually sophisticated but sexy. Gray noticed me. I saw his eyes as I sat down at the blackjack table. I met them with my own, first challengingly, then ironically, before looking away.

I usually didn't look away, but there was something about him which told me he would never be the first to do so, and a staring match would have been so déclassé.

He was wearing a tailored three piece suit in dark gray. Most men would have added some strong color to offset that but he wore a shirt in lighter gray, and a wide tie in very tiny white and gray checks. They gray man, I dubbed him, letting my eyes pass over him again, mockingly this time.

He caught them, and his... got slightly cold, in a way which made me catch my breath. He had incredibly deep eyes! His face was more square than mine, rougher, with a strong jaw. He had short dark hair and full lips.

I took the cards and glanced around at the others at the table, smirking mentally at most. It's easy to feel contempt for people at eighteen, after all, especially when rich. I thought my taste better than most, and snorted disdainfully at most of what they were wearing, especially the women.

The blonde, for example, in that frilly dress. I could have pulled it off easily, but she obviously needed more gym time, because whenever she forgot to hold it in, a little bulge showed in her lower belly. The fruity looking guy in the red shirt had ridiculous earrings and seemed sulky. The older couple looked on deaths' doorstep and had a fashion sense which was probably popular half a century earlier.

Oh yes, I felt arrogant, highly superior, a very special person. Or so I told myself on the surface.

And I was lucky with the cards, of all things. Quite a surprise, given how negligently I was playing. I got up to wander, and try my hand at something else, and wound up at a roulette table.

The Gray Man followed me there.

Yes, he was older, but he was handsome and had interesting taste in clothing. And he looked like a hard man, and I don't mean physically.

"You're from Cork?" he asked after I'd spoken to the dealer.

I turned my jaded, heavy lidded eyes on him as if surprised by his presence.

"No," I said. "But I had a nanny who was."

Which was seven more words than I'd intended saying. You could discomfort people easily by simply answering their questions with complete brevity. No, would have been a perfect answer, leaving him with his opening line in tatters and no idea where to go. It's what I'd meant to do.

He stared at me and I felt my eyes caught by his again for some reason.

"American, I think," he said.

He was clearly English, with that posh upper class accent that was instantly recognizable.

I shrugged, feeling no need to confirm or deny the fact.

"I would have noticed you here before," he said.

"I just got here," I replied carelessly.

We were side by side, watching the wheel turn, listening to the dealer call out and take bets, soft music playing from some hidden speakers in the background.

"My name is Gray," he said.

I felt almost like laughing! The man I'd mentally dubbed the Gray man was actually named Gray!?

"That's a very English name," I replied with a faint smile.

A part of me was taking some delight in antagonizing him, but doing it politely. I was not going to volunteer my name as he had no doubt expected me to.

"Do you always dress to match your name?"

"I dress to match my mood. And you?"

"Yes, and I feel young and innocent and carefree," I said airily.

"I am none of those things, and I suspect that you aren't either."

I raised my eyebrows in a sophisticated manner.

"Except for the 'young' part," he said.

"Do you like your girls young, Mister Gray?" I asked a bit snarkily.

"Yes, as a matter of fact. They're less likely to be emotional basket cases."

I snorted.

"And I like the feel of their soft skin against my fingertips, and the sound of their voices when I show them just what pleasure their bodies are capable of feeling."

Blunt, I thought with disapproval. Too blunt.

"You're not a very subtle man, Mister Gray."

"Just Gray," he said. "Subtlety is wasted on the young, who live for the moment."

"And at the moment, I'm gambling," I said lightly.

"Care to take a more dangerous gamble?"

I turned my head towards him, giving him my challenging look.

"And what are the stakes?"

He barely jerked his head and walked away. I frowned, but then followed, our bets having lost. He went to a poker table and I joined him.

"High hand wins," he said, as we accepted our cards.

"And what are the stakes?" I asked.

His lips curled up slightly at the sides. "Your virginity."