The Gift of Girls by Chloë Thurlow Read Free Book Online Page A

there is power in the knowledge that you are desired. Simon Roche didn’t merely want to have sex with me. He wanted to humiliate me, break me, remove any feelings of pride or power. No longer was I the desirable girl beyond reach, I was a thief being disciplined for what I had done.
    ‘Miss Wallace,’ he said in his dark voice and I awoke from my nightmare. This was real.
    My fingers nervously undid the button of my jacket. I folded it as if to be packed in a suitcase and placed it on the desk where I had been told. What next, I thought? My top or my skirt? It didn’t matter but I fooled myself into thinking that in having the choice I had some control. I lowered the zip at the back of my skirt, wriggled slightly and pushed the waistband over my hips. I stepped from the skirt, folded it along the seams and put it on top of the jacket. My lacy top had a row of six buttons and my fingers were all thumbs as I fumbled my way through them. I placed the top on my suit and, standing there in my little knickers and bra, I had never felt more exposed in my life.
    I must have delayed a moment too long because he snapped his fingers and I hastily stretched my arms up my back to unhook my bra. I lowered the straps from my shoulders and, with false modesty, kept my breasts hidden until the last possible moment. I placed my bra on the pile and realised to my horror that my nipples had grown erect; gorged in raging blood, they were painful and pointing at him as if in accusation or alarm.
    It was as if I’d just finished a gymnastics routine, a cartwheel, a handspring, a somersault. My body was clammy. My underarms were dripping. I was panting for breath. I couldn’t control it. There was no air in the room. The shades were drawn and in the diffused light the feeling I’d had the first time I had been in that office came back to me, that sense that Simon Roche had been probing my hidden desires and secrets.
    Did I want to be standing there taking my clothes off for him? Was that my secret desire? I thought I knew myself but standing there half-naked I realised I didn’t know myself at all. A month ago I’d been playing hockey at school and talking about boys with their dirty minds and groping fingers.
    So much had happened and so fast. I had taken a job as a casino waitress where my boobs and my bum were the only assets that mattered and had done so because it was daring, because I knew deep down that Melissa, for all her talk, would never have had the courage. I had slept with an older man –
and enjoyed every moment of it
. I had stolen £3,100 from the Roche-Marshall account and lost it playing online blackjack. Even Sister Benedict wouldn’t have believed it.
    Was this me? Was this the real me? In just four weeks I had gone from convent school to the edge of the abyss. A sigh left me and my shoulders sagged. I looked into Simon Roche’s eyes and he just furrowed his brow and flicked his finger in a downward motion.
    There was no escape. No way to double my bet. No way to put the stolen money back in the account. I hadn’t beaten the system. The system had beaten me. I hooked my thumbs into the thin band of elastic, eased forward to lower the ivory silk over my bottom and, as elegantly as I could, I ran my knickers down my legs and over my shoes. As I was about to place them on the pile of clothes, he held out his hand and I felt utterly disgraced and wretched as I dropped my knickers in his palm. He studied the gusset and I’m sure it was stained and smelly.
    ‘And your shoes, if you please.’
    As I removed my shoes, he took a green and gold box from the plastic bag on his desk. He gave me the bag and told me to put my shoes and clothes inside. I did so and, the moment my clothes had gone, I felt bereft, as if with my clothes my very person had been folded away inside that bag.
    He opened the green and gold box and removed a pair of black high-heel shoes which he stood on the desk.
    He said nothing.
    I stared at the