Claimed: A Forced Submission Romance (10 page)

But that being said, she still felt a paradoxical pang of something – remorse or distaste – at the idea of prostitution. Sandy liked what she did, she enjoyed, not only the sex, but the power and financial freedom, and she wasn’t really ashamed of it; yet, occasionally, she still felt an odd conflict raging within her. Even now, she still had difficulty reconciling her actions with her ingrained morals. Notwithstanding, her six month vacation gradually stretched to a year in the highbrow hotels of London, and her shoestring budget blossomed into a modest fortune.

Arriving home after her year away had presented some problems, though nothing insurmountable. Sandy signed on to an escort agency and worked pretty steady until school started up. Although most of her clients were traveling businessmen and conference attendees, she developed a small list of regulars, whom she ‘dated’ through the next few years of university, still taking the odd referral from the agency. During that time she nurtured contacts and slowly worked her way into the ‘escort’ network – the community of call-girls. After graduating with a degree in commerce – and the knowledge to handle her increasingly complex finances – Sandy left the escort agency to work on her own out of a posh downtown hotel, gradually cultivating a serious client list of eighteen to twenty gentlemen who kept her well-heeled. Sandy still took the occasional referral, usually as a favour to a trusted regular, but it was rare enough now to make it novel. Amazingly, going out with someone new had become a little bit of excitement in an otherwise routine career.

Concealing the nature of her business from her family and the few old friends she maintained took a little bit of craft. As much as she hated being deceitful, Sandy couldn’t imagine her parents finding out what she had been doing for the past five years; hence, she had had to come up with an answer to the question of what she did for a living. Rather than being constantly evasive, she worked out a stock answer. “I’m a Value Consultant,” she told everyone. “I work with an association that looks after big money – buying and selling services. Not stocks, as such, but luxuries. It’s really quite a unique position, rather esoteric and hard to describe.” She’d pause, then add with a laugh, “but the money’s pretty good.” Her ambiguity usually fended of any further prying. When she moved to her ritzy, upscale Yaletown apartment, she explained away her ability to purchase it outright as having won a lottery. “And,” she often thought, “in some sort of way, that’s exactly what happened.”

“Ah, yes,” Sandy smiled, shrugging away her reminiscence. Stepping into the opulent bathroom, she leaned over to run herself a tub. “And, I doubt the members of that silly Scottish rugby club,” she chuckled, “have ever imagined the life-altering – world-shifting effect their ribald little
tradition
had on my life – Alex’s young Canadian cousin.”

With, perhaps, one exception, as fate would later have it.