Temptation Island. Victoria Fox

for a refill. Mink obliged. As she padded back to the couch she could feel Mink’s gaze fixed on her ass.

      Actually, Aurora was fifteen, but she was old for her age. She knew loads of girls who said that, but in her case it was actually true. It wouldn’t be the first time she’d slept with someone older than her dad. Mink wanted her; she could tell it a mile off.

      Settling on the couch, she tucked her knees up under her chin. Mink was getting an eyeful. Around her neck was a silver locket, from which she produced a vial of white powder. She tipped a small mound on to her little finger and expertly sniffed it up each nostril.

      ‘Hey, let me in on summa that.’ Mink swaggered over, glass in hand. He wore a lot of chunky rings with skulls and panthers on them and things like that, and his nails looked grubby. There was paint on his knuckles.

      Aurora obliged and they both sat back. Whoa, that was good. She felt Mink’s hand on her leg, creeping higher.

      ‘I don’t fuck kids your age,’ he pronounced.

      ‘I don’t fuck men your age,’ she countered.

      He regarded her out of the corner of his eye, the way her chest was rising and falling as she breathed, the peaks of her tits coming closer and then receding, tempting him, teasing the growing bulge in his pants. When was the last time that had happened? These days it took more than a nice rack to get him hard. This girl was hot, real hot.

      ‘Guess that makes us as bad as each other.’ Desire curdled his voice.

      Aurora smiled. The light in the room was purplish, and she could see tiny dust motes floating close to the floor. ‘My parents wouldn’t approve,’ she said innocently, gazing up at him through pale lashes. She could see Mink struggle with the turn-on of her virgin-daddy’s-girl protest and the undeniable truth of it.

      Aurora Nash was the daughter of Tom Nash and Sherilyn Rose, mega-selling country rock legends and all-round respectable American couple. Initially they’d had separate careers—Sherilyn the sweetheart of the country and western scene; Tom regarded far more seriously than Billy Ray Cyrus but still attracting the comparison, one that pissed him off no end—but when album sales tailed off in the nineties they had joined forces and become a formidable duo, singing songs about the great and good of America, the land of opportunity, all that stuff Aurora privately thought was horse shit. It sold, though—boy, did it sell. They’d made millions.

      As her parents’ only daughter, Aurora had never wanted for anything. Every whim was indulged, every desire satisfied. The word ‘no’ didn’t feature in her vocabulary. She liked her life, it was fun—and it was fulfilling, even if recently she’d been jumping from project to project without feeling much about any of them. Everything got handed to her on a plate, and it wasn’t like she was complaining about it, it was just that she never, ever had to try. Then again, who wanted to try? Trying was boring. Succeeding was what it was about. In the last year alone Aurora had released her own teen-queen album, collaborated on a fashion range with a music icon, and launched a perfume called, fittingly, ‘All Mine’. And she wasn’t even sixteen yet.

      ‘Who says your old man has to know?’ Mink took her hand, guiding her towards the protuberance jutting tent-like from his pelvis.

      He unzipped his fly and whipped his dick out. It was gigantic.

      Aurora felt like laughing. But Mink was dead serious. ‘You gonna suck my cock like a good little girl?’ he breathed, the words catching at the back of his throat. One hand was absent-mindedly caressing the shaft, the other applying pressure to the back of Aurora’s head. She resisted against it and Mink pushed harder.

      ‘Wait your turn,’ she told him, manoeuvring her body round. She lay flat on her back and parted her legs. Mink’s mouth fell open, which was a good start. ‘Girls go first.’

       3 Stevie

      There was a certain romance to exiting a New York yellow cab. As Stephanie Speller slammed the door and hauled her bag out of the trunk, watching as the vehicle rejoined a blaring stream of downtown traffic, she gazed up at the surrounding skyscrapers and believed, for the first time in a while, she had arrived.

      It was like stepping on to a movie set. Drivers hollered from car windows. Commuters rushed past brandishing steaming coffee, bursts of animated conversation reaching her from every angle in layers of astounding clarity and detail. The aroma of something sweet from busily toiling street vendors, pretzels or doughnuts, masked the sourer odour of trash sweating it out in the summer heat. Stevie had to put her head right back, looking up and up and up till her neck hurt, trying to see the tops of the buildings, and even then—

      Someone slammed into her, the force of impact nearly sending her flying.

      ‘Hey, lady, get outta the street!’

      ‘Sorry,’ she mumbled, blinking behind her glasses. She’d developed the habit a lot of English people have where they say sorry for something when it’s not really their fault.

      She took refuge in a café with an Italian name, all red leather booths and an overhead ceiling fan, tickets being shouted for lattes and Americanos, and bustling, harassed baristas. After putting in her order and grabbing a folded copy of the New York Times, Stevie slid into one of the booths and took her phone out of her bag. She pushed the bridge of her glasses up on her nose, a nervous tendency she indulged in even when she wasn’t wearing them.

      As often they were, her phone proved to be a useful distraction. A guy sitting in the adjacent booth was eyeing her keenly. She was surprised at his unabashed scrutiny: she’d never before considered that looking someone up and down actually meant looking someone up and down. He was wearing a suit—it being a little past seven a.m.—and, judging by the laptop and stack of paperwork in front of him, ought to be focusing on something other than her. He was short, at least his top half was, and bald, with a muscular neck and shoulders. Parts of his body appeared inflated, as if someone had put a bicycle pump up a vital orifice and filled him with air.

      Stevie glanced away. Even if she had found the man attractive, and even if she had become accustomed to picking up strangers in cafés within hours of arriving in a new city, the attention made her uncomfortable. What gave him the right? Was it the suit, the expensive shoes, the bulging wallet? It was the last thing she needed or wanted. It was the reason she’d come here in the first place, why she’d boarded a plane back in London and vowed never to look back.

      Her drink arrived and she thanked the waitress, her English accent piquing the guy’s interest. She focused on her phone, scrolling down the accommodation sites she’d had a brief trawl through before arriving. Any of her friends would have laughed at the idea that sensible Stevie would just turn up somewhere without a place to stay, but the decision had been so immediate that there’d been little opportunity for preparation. And anyway, they didn’t know the context. She’d spent her whole life planning and arranging and playing by the rules, and look where that had got her: to a reflection in the mirror she barely recognised.

      At twenty-seven, towards the elder end of six siblings, Stevie had always been described as the quiet, studious one. With that big a family it was easy to blend into the background and be tagged with a character, as much a means of identification as anything else. But it wasn’t always possible to be how everyone else expected you to be, and, in any case, nobody was that clear-cut: nobody was immune to stepping out of themselves if the circumstances were right. Her behaviour over the past few months would stun them all.

      She was tired after the flight and put more sugar than usual in her coffee. As she did so she made the mistake of briefly meeting her admirer’s eye. She imagined how he saw her. Shy, probably. Nervous. Maybe a bit geeky, certainly she had been at school, when she’d worn braces and been timid with boys and hadn’t grown into her face yet.

      Stevie was petite, with dark, serious features and a precise, angular, pale-skinned beauty that had been described in the past as both ‘classical’ and ‘timeless’. She was never sure how to take this: it made her think of the marble busts at the British