Free Wicked Ambition by Victoria Fox Page B

giving Grace a percentage of her earnings, enough to buy food. Grace preferred doing things with Cookie because she was gentle, and sometimes when Cookie kissed her down there she got a tingle that made her lift her back and forget for a second that there was anyone else in the room .
    ‘Call this number,’ Cookie instructed her the day she turned seventeen. ‘They specialise in girls your age. Get shot of Denny, he’s a bad lot.’
    Grace did as she was told. She spoke to Madam Babydoll on Cookie’s phone, sent her photograph and a week later was packing her scant belongings and catching an overnight bus to Los Angeles. She felt nothing about leaving Denny. She hated him .
    Madam Babydoll ran a different ship. She employed sixteen carefully selected girls and housed each in her mansion in the hills. Grace couldn’t take in the world she had entered. It was dazzling with sunshine and promise. This was where people went to make their dreams come true. Was she leaving her nightmare at last?
    Not quite. Madam Babydoll provided under-eighteen girls to a moderate rank of Hollywood star. Lily Rose, a sugary-pretty Californian with a deep golden tan, explained to Grace how important it was to make a good impression, because you never knew who was going to strike it big one day. Grace couldn’t work out why Lily Rose was here because she had a family in LA and she dressed smart and spoke nice .
    ‘Why are you doing this?’ she asked her once. Lily Rose shrugged. She’d just returned from an encounter with an up-and-coming producer. ‘I could go home if I wanted,’ she mused, ‘but this is way more fun. Some day I’m gonna be an actress, just you watch. The way I see it, it’s an opportunity to get noticed. My clients never forget who I am.’
    The clients were cleaner and richer than Denny’s, but they didn’t treat her with any more respect. She came to learn that actors were the worst. They were preoccupied with seeing themselves, whether it was having her against a mirror or recording an encounter to watch afterwards—Madam Babydoll permitted this only if her girl could verify its deletion—while Grace sucked and licked till they came . They wanted her to worship their bodies, and, while it was preferable to having her own attacked, the younger and more virile could take hours and she often left sore and stiff, forced to wait days before she could work again .
    Others had perversions. The older ones, mostly, who were married or had kids and wanted her to dress as a schoolgirl; or who wanted to dress up themselves and be held. Some brought wives and she’d play with them both. But Madam Babydoll paid out sixty per cent of every cheque, and soon Grace Turquoise had several thousand in the bank—enough to quit, if she’d wanted, but she didn’t know what else she’d do. Over four years she had seen it all. She’d had sex with countless men and women and had learned to view the ordeal as simply her trade, her talent, the thing she had been trained to do. She hadn’t sung a note in years .
    It was a Friday in June when Madam Babydoll told her she had a ‘very special’ client to visit. The girls were envious. Was it someone important, someone famous?
    She was instructed to wear a black coat with nothing underneath except a lace thong. As Grace Turquoise headed to the rendezvous, hair immaculate and lips perfectly glossed, the professional that Denny Malone had groomed and Ivan Garrick before him, she could never have imagined who would be waiting for her, or what he would ask her to do .

10
    R obin’s Beginnings tour was to be her first foray into America. She hadn’t realised the extent of what her team had planned until she sat in on a meeting at Barney’s Kensington office.
    ‘This is the stage set.’ A Perspex model was deposited on the table in front of her, over which the show’s art director peered for her reaction over steel-rimmed glasses.
    ‘Wow.’ It was the only word that sprang to mind.