When she finished her shift, she emerged from the club to find the weather was wet and unseasonably cold, and that the girl who usually gave her a lift had gone off to a party without telling her. Shivering while she was trying to call a cab on her mobile, she tensed when a silver Aston Martin Vanquish pulled up in front of her with a throaty growl. Rashad sprang out and studied her in silence across the bonnet and she knew he wouldn’t ask anything of her because he had asked before and she had said no. He was too proud to ask again. Tears made her eyes smart; she still felt so utterly humiliated that she had let herself be pressed into dancing in the cage.

As Rashad walked round the bonnet and reached out to open the passenger door one of his bodyguards skidded up at speed to do it for him and prevent him from lowering himself to such a mundane task.

‘Thanks,’ she said gruffly and got in. At that moment she was not aware of having made a decision. She just couldn’t muster the mental resistance to walk away from him again. She told herself that if she kept things as light as though it were a holiday romance she wouldn’t get hurt.

‘You’ll have to tell me where you live,’ Rashad murmured as calmly as if she had been getting into his car every night for months.

‘Happy birthday,’ she said in a wobbly voice, as the excessively emotional surge of tears was still threatening her composure.

At the traffic lights he reached for her hand and almost crushed it within the fierce hold of his. ‘In my country we stopped putting people in cages when slavery was outlawed a hundred years ago.’

‘I shouldn’t have agreed to do it.’

‘You did not wish to?’

‘Of course not-apart from anything else, I’m not a dancer.’

‘Don’t do it again,’ Rashad told her with innate authority and instantly she wanted to do it again just to demonstrate her independence. She had to bite her lip not to respond with the defiance that she had acquired to hold her own with her stepfather.

And so it began: a relationship that attracted a great deal of unwelcome comment from others. Leonidas Pallis made it clear that he regarded her in much the same light as a call-girl. Sergio Torrente, the sleek, sophisticated Italian who completed the trio of friends, seemed equally disdainful of Tilda’s right to be treated with respect, but was not quite so obvious about revealing the fact. Had she been less green about the strength of male bonding, she might have realised then that with such powerful enemies her relationship with Rashad was utterly doomed to end in tears.

As the hateful Leonidas Pallis put it, ‘Why can’t you keep it simple?’ Tilda heard him ask Rashad this during a night out. ‘Boy meets girl, boy shags girl, boy dumps girl. You don’t romance waitresses!’

As her revolting stepfather put it: ‘Well, you can thank me for getting you the job that’s about to make your fortune. Tell him you like cash better than diamonds.’

Offered the chance to rent a room in a student house for the summer, she grabbed it to escape Scott and quit working at the club. At the same time she started her temporary job in the accounts department at Jerrold Plastics. The weeks that followed were the happiest but also the stormiest of her life, because Rashad laid down the law as if he were her commanding officer and did not adapt well to disagreement. She was challenged to keep his hands off her, but whenever passion threatened to overcome prudence she backed off fast. She was a virgin, well aware that she came from a very fertile line of women, and she was totally terrified of getting pregnant. She honestly believed, too, that keeping serious sex out of the equation would lessen the pain when Rashad returned to Bakhar.

Tilda was yanked out of those unsettling recollections only when the train pulled into the station. While she queued for the bus, she began putting the recent knowledge she had gained into those memories and she winced at the picture that began to emerge. Although she had had no idea of it, there had been a whole hidden dimension to her relationship with Rashad. That financial aspect encompassed, not only the embarrassing level of her family’s indebtedness, but also a seemingly brazen reluctance on her family’s part to pay rent or pay off the loan. Was it any wonder that over time Rashad had become suspicious of her motives and decided that all along she must have been a gold-digger out for all she could get?

Sex…It’s the only thing you have to give that I want. Still outraged by that declaration, Tilda could find no excuse for him on that score. Obviously that was all he had ever wanted from her and the brutal way he had ditched her had spelt out the same message. She was proud of the fact that she had not slept with Rashad five years earlier. But just as swiftly the false courage of offended pride and anger started to wane in the face of reality. When she began walking down the road where she lived her steps got slower and slower as she neared her home. After all, what had she achieved? She had got nowhere with Rashad. He was tough, resolute and ruthless. Emotion never got in the way of his self-discipline. Sadly, the strength, intellect and tenacity that she had once admired also made Rashad a lethally effective opponent.

Tilda was wrenched from her reflections by the startling sight of her former stepfather climbing into his beat-up car outside her home. As the older man had never demonstrated the smallest interest in maintaining contact with Katie, James and Megan, his three children by her mother, Tilda was taken aback. ‘What are you doing here?’ she asked in dismay.

‘Mind your own bloody business!’ Scott Morrison told her, his heavy face flushed with aggression below his thinning blond hair.

Seriously concerned, Tilda watched him shoot his vehicle back out onto the road. Why had he been visiting the house? He had come at a time when her mother would be alone. She went straight into Beth’s workroom. Her mother was sobbing and the room was in turmoil. Curtains were heaped on the floor in a tangle and a chair had been turned over. Perhaps most telling of all, the older woman’s purse lay open on the ironing board with only a few coins spilling out of it.

‘I bumped into Scott outside. Has he been taking money off you again?’ Tilda asked baldly.

Beth broke down and, piece by horrible piece, the whole story came tumbling out. When Scott had found out several years earlier that Rashad was the current owner of the house, he had accused Beth of defrauding him of his share of the property. Ever since then Beth had been living in fear of Scott’s visits and giving way to his threats and demands for money. While she soothed the distraught older woman, Tilda’s anger grew for she finally understood why Beth had found it impossible even to pay rent. From behind the scenes, Scott Morrison had still been bleeding Tilda’s family dry.

‘Scott got what he was entitled to when the divorce settlement went through the court. He has no right to anything more. He’s been telling you lies. I’m going to get the police, Mum-’

‘No, you can’t do that.’ Beth gave her a look of horror. ‘Katie and James would die of shame if their father was arrested-’

‘No, they’d die of shame at what’s been going on here, what you’ve been putting up with on their behalf! Silence protects bullies like Scott. Don’t you worry…I’ll sort him out,’ Tilda swore, furious with herself for not even suspecting what had been going on behind all their backs. The divorce had not gotten rid of Scott after all and working for a living had never been his way.

She was hanging her coat below the stairs when she noticed that the post had arrived. She tensed at the sight of the familiar brown envelope and scooped it up. Yes, just as she had feared it was yet another missive from Rashad’s solicitors. Taking a deep breath, she tore it open. Nervous perspiration broke out on her brow as she realised what the letter was. It was a written notice asking her mother to leave the house within fourteen days. As the rent was in arrears the landlord, it stated, would go to court seeking possession at the end of the month.

Tilda took the letter upstairs. She just could not face giving it to her mother at that moment. From the window she watched her sisters, seventeen-year-old Katie and nine-year-old Megan, walking up the drive in their school uniforms. James was shambling along in their wake, a tall gangling boy of fourteen, who had still to grow into his very large feet and deep bass voice. Her brother, Aubrey, currently in his fourth year of studying medicine, would be home later. Tilda was deeply attached to all of her siblings. They had gone through so much unhappiness when Scott had been making their lives hell but they had stayed close. They were good kids, hard-working and sensible. What would losing their home mean to them? Everything. It would shatter her family, because Beth’s agoraphobia would ensure that the older woman could not cope. When Beth fell apart at the seams, what then? Aubrey would probably drop out of med school and Katie would find it impossible to study for her A-levels.

There was only one way out, only one way of protecting her family from the horror of being put out on the street: Rashad.

Rashad…and sex. It would most probably be a major disappointment to Rashad, whose womanising exploits filled endless pages in the tabloid newspapers, to discover that Tilda did not possess a single special sexy talent to offer in the bedroom. Nothing but ignorance. It would serve him right, Tilda reflected, tight-mouthed. Even so, common sense urged that she would have to ensure that he wrote off all the debts and the house as well before it dawned on him that she really wasn’t worth the sacrifice of that much money. She shuddered, shame enveloping her from head to toe. She would be selling herself like a product in return for cash.