Slave Trader

by Caroline King

Genres: Erotic & Steamy Romance; Contemporary Romance

Synopsis

Sophie Jenner believes she has her life under control. In business she's a City high-flyer, heading up a new venture funding ecological projects in South America. In her personal life, despite the games played by her domineering boss, she believes she cracks the whip.

But when Sophie travels to South America to investigate a possible fraud all her assumptions are stripped away. In the Peruvian jungle the uptight City executive meets a breed of man she cannot tame. And now Sophie is no longer holding the whip . . .

Release date: January 15, 2015

Publisher: Headline

Print pages: 224

Sample

Sophie Jenner leaned back into the deep tan leather swivel chair and shut her eyes against the glare from the computer screen which had claimed her undivided attention for the past two hours. After a few moments’ respite she opened her eyes again and frowned accusingly at the VDU. There was definitely a problem behind the mass of figures she had been reviewing, of that she was certain. But right now, she was having the devil’s own luck trying to get a handle on what precisely that problem was.

‘Turner!’ she called, shifting her gaze briefly towards the open door of her glass-panelled office. ‘Do you have a minute?’ Within seconds, Sophie’s PA appeared at the door to her office, eyebrows raised in anticipation. ‘I need some detail on the company’s preliminary capital flow into South America,’ Sophie said. ‘I’m interested in money transfers of say, two to three hundred thousand dollars.’

‘Small change!’ protested Turner.

She ignored the interruption. ‘I want to know where the cash call originated, where the money was destined, who authorised the transfer. That sort of stuff.’ She gave an apologetic grimace to ward off any potential complaints.

‘Okay, but give us a clue where to start, Sophie. South America is a big place.’ Turner wrinkled his forehead in a plea for clemency.

Sophie thought for a moment, her eyes returning to the flickering computer. ‘Columbia and Peru,’ she said decisively, as her PA turned on his heel to leave her room. ‘But if you don’t come up with the goods by the end of the week, you can tackle the rest of the sub-continent!’

Her voice followed Turner as he retreated into the general office with a dismissive wave of his hand. Sophie allowed herself a small smile and found her spirits lifting slightly. She knew that the figures she had requested would be on her desk well within any deadline she chose to set. With any luck, Turner might dig up that extra little elusive detail that would allow her to bottom out the South American project funding jigsaw.

Dragging herself away from the computer, Sophie stretched up her arms and arched her back. She had had enough number crunching for one day. There must be a simple explanation for this pattern of transactions and at least she’d amassed some concrete facts and figures for Turner to start chasing in the morning. What she needed right now was some heavy R&R.

After a few moments’ contemplation of her options, Sophie picked up the phone and jabbed four digits into the base set. She listened impatiently to the single ringing tone of the internal telephone system until, with a snort of annoyance, she slammed the handset down. Damn him, never there when she was desperate. Probably out having a good time with one of his girlfriends.

She glared back at the screen which glowed green and red, the lights winking back at her, irritating and unusually impenetrable. She had simply been running regular sample audit checks on money flows around the business; they were all established transfers into recognised eco-friendly operations in the South American sub-continent but as she picked through the numbers something had started to feel wrong.

She couldn’t complete the audit trail for a small number of transfers that were apparently making their way through accounts via normal banking routes. She kept telling herself that the numbers involved were hardly significant; as Turner had said, small change. But even so, as she continued her sampling, a worrying pattern had begun to emerge. Several cash calls from a rainforest conservation project in Peru had been authorised using a management code which she didn’t immediately recognise and narrowing the focus of her searches she had finally come upon one which had been routed, against normal company practice, to a Swiss bank account where the trail had gone cold.

None of it made sense. But given time it would. Sophie jumped up and reached for her kitbag. Exercise was what she needed, something to break the stale sensation and the monotony that came from staring at a computer screen for too long. The gym in the Broadgate Centre, where she enjoyed the benefits of Deschel Chesham’s corporate membership was always on hand to offer various alternative forms of exercise, sometimes even the lewd one which had been uppermost in her mind.

As she stepped out of the glass-fronted corporate office, Sophie’s senses were assaulted both by the stifling heat of a late summer afternoon in central London and by the cacophony of bells from St Paul’s Cathedral. Musing on some of the advantages of working in an air-conditioned and sound-proofed atmosphere, Sophie turned onto the cobbled street and walked quickly down towards Moorgate and the Broadgate Centre above Liverpool Street Station. She made her way up to the third floor and, ignoring the few remaining commuters scurrying about on the platforms far beneath her, passed into the cool green interior of ‘The Gym’. Half an hour on the running machine and the services of her favourite masseur would sort her out.

Revelling in the sensation of his hands on her body, Sophie allowed herself the luxury of a small groan of pleasure.

‘That is exquisite, Rani,’ she murmured, giving herself up finally to the rhythm of his well-oiled strokes along the length of her back. As her muscles relaxed, Sophie willed her mind clear of the tensions of the day, lulled by the repetitious motion of his hands, the faintly pungent aroma from the oils he was slowly rubbing into her skin and the dull beat of music from a distant room.

But try as she would, the thoughts which had been running through her head since leaving the office came crowding back and, as usual, Sophie gave in to their temptation. As she began the, by now, familiar consideration of her problems at work, she barely registered Rani’s hands moving from her back to begin lightly kneading her buttocks; each circular movement becoming deeper, more pronounced and gently easing the rounded cheeks apart. A finger slipping slyly between the cleft in her buttocks shocked Sophie back to the present and she tensed her bottom while wriggling to ease the pressure of lying on her breasts.

‘I thought that would bring you back to your senses,’ he said, with a quiet laugh. ‘Turn over and stop thinking about work or you’ll be sorry.’

‘Yes, sir,’ Sophie murmured as she obediently twisted to lie on her back and resolutely closed her eyes again. She heard him moving around the couch on which she was placed, smelling the fresh wave of aromatic oils as he lubricated his hands afresh. Starting on her shoulders, Rani began his ministration to her body once again and Sophie breathed deeply, knowing there was pleasure and relaxation in his touch if only she would give herself up to it.

With a continuous movement, he extended his massage down her body, passing fleetingly over her breasts to her stomach and returning again to her shoulders. Sophie felt her mind slipping away once more and let out a sigh of contentment.

‘Raise your arms above your head,’ he commanded, and as she complied, Rani focused his attention on her now taut breasts, kneading the mounds of flesh gently but insistently and ending each stroke with a slight pull on both nipples. Sophie felt his stimulation of her breasts translate into an erotic tingle between her thighs.

‘Spread your legs a little,’ Rani said, and she responded to the gentle pressure of his fingers on her inner thighs without demur. As he began to work on the firm flesh of her upper legs and pelvis, Sophie fantasised about the effect of her abandoned posture on any red-blooded male. She imagined how his eyes would be devouring the sight of her breasts, pulled high by her raised arms; how he would want to spread her legs even further apart to open the pink lips hidden beneath her golden bush; how he would massage her secret place with oils before mounting the couch and pushing his own engorged sex into hers . . .

Finishing his massage with an almost vicious tug on each of her big toes, Rani stepped back and surveyed his work. ‘That’s all I can do for you,’ he laughed. ‘I suggest you go and find yourself a straight man to finish the job.’

‘No chance tonight, I’m afraid,’ Sophie laughed back, swinging her legs off the couch and reaching for her robe. ‘But who needs a man, anyway?’

‘Speak for yourself,’ Rani quipped, flicking on the lights of the cubicle and pulling aside the curtain. ‘See you soon.’

Promising herself the luxury of something chilled and sparkling when she got home, Sophie took a quick shower at the gym, reluctantly washing Rani’s perfumed oils from her skin. The taxi home across central London to South Kensington took less time than she anticipated and as darkness began to fall, Sophie finally turned the key in the door of her tiny house in Cranlow Garden Mews and let herself into the cool, silent interior.

Tossing her kitbag into the hall cupboard, Sophie flicked on the living-room low-lights and padded through to the kitchen. A chilled bottle of Janissen-Baradon champagne rested close to smoked Scottish salmon and wholewheat blinis in the fridge and Sophie placed the makings of her supper on the tiled worktop alongside ingredients for a herby green salad.

‘But first, to finish the job,’ Sophie murmured, opening the champagne with a satisfying pop and pouring a glass of the sparkling nectar into a tall-stemmed glass. Taking a sip and savouring the bubbles on her tongue for a second, Sophie walked upstairs, past the bedroom and onto the top floor, picking up the handset from her cellular phone on the way. She flung open the glass doors of her roof terrace and stood at the entrance for a long moment listening to the muted sounds of the city floating up from below. Taking another sip of champagne, Sophie plugged a number into the handset only to be rewarded with an answerphone message which she didn’t allow to run to completion before switching off her phone.

‘So much for the straight man,’ she sighed ruefully, dropping the phone onto a low table and sitting down on a lounger. She drank heavily from the glass and lay back to stare at the night sky for a moment then, giving in to her growing desires, Sophie shrugged off her leggings and ran one hand down her body, pushing an exploratory finger into the waist of her lace panties. Now where had she been when Rani had so rudely finished his massage? Oh yes, she remembered, thinking about what a ‘real’ man would do to her.

Sophie’s fingers pushed further between the lips of her sex as she recalled the face, body and strength of her fantasy lover: he was pushing her legs apart and, this time, stroking her open sex backwards and forwards with one hand while the other maintained a steady rhythm up and down his shaft which was growing in length and thickness at each stroke. Her arms were now tied at the wrist to a fixture at the head of the couch so that even if she wanted to, she would be powerless to stop his erotic stimulation of her body.

Sophie pushed her panties down below her hips and started to rub her clitoris rhythmically with the palm of her hand while dipping her fingers into her sex which was glistening with the juices of her arousal. In her mind, the fantasy man positioned himself between her legs, pushing them even further apart with his thighs as he directed his engorged cock at her hole. With a long look at her swollen sex flesh, he raised his head and pierced her body with one practised stroke of his shaft.

The tremors of Sophie’s orgasm flowed through her body from her clitoris and she moaned with pleasure as she slowed the motion of her hand against her sex. With a sigh of relief, she lay supine for several moments, recovering her breath before opening her eyes and reaching for her champagne. As she did so, Sophie caught a movement from the corner of her eye and turning to scan the buildings which overlooked one side of her terrace, she thought she caught the shadow of a figure against a heavily curtained window, but the light behind was dim and the vision was distant. Raising her glass and taking a swig of cool champagne, Sophie stared directly at the window before pulling on her panties and making for the kitchen to finish preparing supper. She hoped whoever it was had enjoyed the show.

It was ten-thirty. Sophie slipped into bed, pulled out her diary and switched on her notebook computer to have another look at the figures. Now was not the time to have any outstanding queries in any part of the business, certainly not with an official PR launch only three days away and a raft of interviews set up to advertise everything about the fund. Once again she quelled the nervousness that simply thinking about the launch seemed to induce; this was the first time she had ever had to take such an upfront position in a business and it was enough to make her feel sick to her stomach even if it was what she had been working towards.

Maybe it wasn’t the business, she told herself, maybe it was just thinking about the effect her good fortune was having on other people that was making her nervous. After all, her working life was about to have a radical change of direction and an opportunity like this was enough to make a lot of people store up a great deal of jealousy. They didn’t know why she should get the job, and in a place like the City she didn’t need anyone else to tell her that the gossips were out there with their knives already raised, ready to stab her in the back without a second thought if they saw an opportunity.

Looking back on her career to date Sophie could hardly believe how quickly time had gone by. When she originally graduated from college she wanted to work as a trader, however tough or aggressive. What she wanted after three years in the quiet of a provincial red-brick university was to feel the buzz and the excitement of a trading floor in a big City bank. But despite interning in one of the oldest merchant banks in London over the summer after graduation, then sending her CV to everyone with any power in the business, it seemed that no-one was willing to take a chance on a nice girl with a degree in history and a real desire to do a man’s job. She was five years too late, they told her, far too old. She should have started straight out of school, and in any case it wasn’t a job for a woman, certainly not a Brit. The American women were different; they were tougher, they could cope, but she was too fragile and she’d get trampled on in the hard, ‘succeed or you’re out’ environment. Anyway, they said, why did she want to do a job like that? She’d be much better in research or marketing, or maybe on a graduate training programme in a high street bank.

It was crap of course, all of it, but there was no chink in the armour that Sophie could see, so she took the first decent City job she could, working as a research analyst in a huge Japanese bank. It was there that she realised her first mistake had been to focus on developing a relationship with the women in the business. They were the ones who were really difficult to work with and the more powerful and well paid, the less they were interested in having an attractive upstart come into their midst.

Stuck in a cubicle with a PC and a library card she spent three months making coffee and having reports taken out of her hands by her boss, the vicious and bitchy Sally, before she could even complete them, and certainly before she could get her name on them. But set-backs just made Sophie more determined; she stuck at it, she played the game and slowly she tried to get some bargaining chips stacked on her side. She organised temps to make the coffee and made herself available for running errands and taking notes, concentrating intently on the content of any meetings she was able to sit in on; she learnt about business systems and made herself indispensable through her expertise in managing and interrogating electronic information databases; she toughed it out with some of the men and flirted with the rest, but didn’t sleep with any, no matter what everyone in the office thought, and after a year, by the time a chance for a promotion appeared, Sophie had hardened up a great deal. The job was completely out of her league, but Sophie pushed everyone she knew, and talked to anyone who might feasibly support her advancement, for a move into Philip Blakemore’s team.

Pip Blakemore was the golden boy of the bank; he’d started as a dealer in his youth and made a lot of money for himself as well as everyone on the Board. Then he disappeared and went to college, only to come back to storm through Mergers and Acquisitions before making a side-step into fund management. He worked his team half to death, but he was a ‘star’ both as a trader and a fund manager, and his big ideas had made the right people rich. However, though he was successful, handsome and charming, he was also mysterious and could be very aloof. The rumours about his private life were legend and unsubstantiated: he lived in a vast mansion off Regent’s Park; he was a loner, asexual and uninterested in anyone except for himself and money; he was a sexual deviant who cruised the streets looking for girls and boys to toy with; he was secretly married to an exotic Brazilian artist and heiress. The fewer facts anyone knew, the stranger the stories became.

Sophie was rather nervous of meeting the famous Pip Blakemore, and by the time she actually got into an interview with him she was shaking in her boots, but set against the other, more qualified applicants, Pip seemed to find Sophie’s gall rather amusing, and to everyone’s surprise, including her own, he’d taken an interest in her, although he didn’t give her the job. Instead he had her moved from research and into sales and marketing, devising new products for the institutional clients of the bank. He advised her to focus on one area. Perhaps, he said, emerging markets, or more specifically, South American debt would be a good idea. Her time, he told her, would come. Then, a year and a half later he ‘suggested’ that she get into banking operations, controlling the back office of the trading floor, completing deals, making transfers and money approvals, taking responsibility for the completion of deals. She went abroad, first to Frankfurt and then, in a big step, on secondment to the US, in the New York offices working on NYMEX and then Chicago, working with the team on the Chicago Options Exchange. Then, finally, he’d sent for her, offered her a way out of the bank and taken her with him as part of his team when he moved to Deschel Chesham, bringing her into the fund management business. She had been working there ever since, but now things had changed.

Pip was still a big name in the business and his bosses were happy to indulge him and his rather unorthodox ideas, but in truth, Sophie knew that Pip was bored with work and wanted to do something different. Even she was surprised when he started talking about ethical investments and eco-friendly funds, and the Board were stunned, to say the least, although now he had them completely convinced that he was entirely converted to eco-projects. Sophie knew perfectly well that he didn’t give a damn about the environment – he was amusing himself convincing everyone this was a mission – but really saw this as just another means of making a great deal of money. The idea was to create a new fund that would invest in profitable ethical businesses, not completely unheard of in the City, although in this case the business would work with an almost completely flat structure, run by and through local people ‘on the ground’ in South America, Africa o. . .