Master Of Pleasure. PENNY JORDAN

managed to break free of them to run after him, calling out fiercely, ‘Leave them alone! Don’t you dare touch my children.’

      Entering a new decade had added to her beauty rather than taken from it, Gabriel admitted reluctantly as he watched her speed towards him. Her breasts were rising and falling with emotion and exertion beneath the thin covering of her dress when she finally reached him. It caught him off guard to look at her and feel the familiar hunger grip his body. She had always had good breasts—firm-fleshed and erotically real, warm and pliable to the touch, the skin tasting of woman and sunshine and sex, her dark brown nipples always greedily eager for the attention of his fingers and his lips. In his mind’s eye he could still see her, virtually naked on the private deck of his yacht, her head thrown back so that the sea breeze could tousle her hair, her lips curved into a smile of wanton, intensely sensual pleasure as she offered herself up to him.

      Now, as then—although for different reasons—she was standing immediately in front of him, between him and her children in fact, so that it was impossible for him not to look directly at her. Motherhood had given her breasts a softer fullness that suited her, but it didn’t seem to have taken away the narrowness of her waist, nor the sensuality of a body that was made for sexual pleasure. A body he had once known as intimately as he knew his own—perhaps more so. As a lover Sasha had had an incomparable blend of fierce sexual passion and a feminine ability to lose herself and give herself so completely in the act of sex that it had felt as if she was handing every bit of herself over to him for their mutual pleasure. But of course he had been far from the only man to enjoy Sasha’s sexuality, and he certainly hadn’t been the first to pay for it—if not in money, then certainly in kind, with the lifestyle of a rich man’s mistress. She had as good as admitted that to him the night he had picked her up, if not actually out of the gutter, then certainly heading towards it.

      He frowned darkly, angered by the power she still had to occupy his thoughts, even though he assured himself it was no longer with the white-hot overwhelming desire for her that had once burned inside his brain as well as his body. She had got under his skin and left an ache he could still feel ten years later, even if the savage heat of the need that had once threatened to consume him had ultimately burned out. Burned itself out, or been ruthlessly stamped out by him? What did it matter which? He had known from the first time he had taken her to bed that the intensity of his hunger for her was not something he wanted in his life. If he had aided in its destruction then he had acted wisely, out of self preservation. What he was feeling now was simply an echo of a long-dead feeling.

      But not so dead that the embers didn’t smoulder with the heat of his desire for compensation. It had been bad enough that she had walked out on him for Carlo. But the fact that Carlo had fathered two sons on her and taken pride in them had struck painfully at the carefully guarded wound left by the misery of Gabriel’s own childhood.

      For him—a man who had received neither love, compassion nor kindness—to be given the responsibility of protecting the childhood of these children was either an act of great foolhardiness or great trust. It had certainly been an act of moral desperation. Not that Gabriel would ever punish two innocent young lives for the sins of their mother—not after the way he himself had suffered.

      He had received word that Carlo had died a matter of hours after he had seen him. Alone, without Sasha at his side, because she had been shopping.

      Sasha. He didn’t want to think about the past they had shared, but it refused to be thrust away. Inside his head he could see her clearly as she had been the night he had first seen her. Her hair longer than it was now, inexpertly streaked and slightly tangled in the warm evening breeze. She had been wearing a cheap short skirt and a top that had revealed more of her breasts than it concealed, making her look every inch exactly what she was as she stood on the roadside in St Tropez. He wouldn’t even have contemplated stopping if she hadn’t virtually thrown herself in front of his car. Pretty, available, hungry girls like Sasha were ten a penny in St Tropez in the season, going from lover to lover, climbing upwards while they could towards their ultimate trophy of a man foolish enough and rich enough to offer them more than a night’s sex in return for a thick wad of euros. Sasha, he remembered, had been carrying a large straw basket which, she had told him with a small shrug, contained all her belongings.

      ‘I had to leave quickly, so I just brought what I could,’ she had told him disarmingly, when she had by some sleight of hand managed to get herself into the passenger seat of his Ferrari without him actually having invited her to do so.

      That had been in May. From the little she had told him about herself he’d gathered that the man she had left had been part of the detritus swirling around in the wake of Cannes Film Festival—a ‘producer’ looking for young flesh to satisfy his own jaded appetite and those of the debased human beings he made his skinflicks for. But Gabriel hadn’t wanted to waste time listening to her talk when there were so many far more pleasurable uses for those soft full lips of hers. There was a practical streak to Sasha, as there was to all successful courtesans. She had quickly worked out that having to satisfy only one man would be a far more cost-effective way of using her body than risking being passed hand to hand by the producer and his friends.