Free After the Last Dance by Manning Sarra Page A

like it had pincers crushing her skull, and all points in between. Especially in between.
    Fuck me into the mattress.
 
    Leo had taken her at her word. Fucked her long enough for Jane to realise that despite all the foreplay, all the build-up, she wasn’t going to come. It didn’t seem like he was going to come either, not even after she’d faked an orgasm. Two orgasms! Then at last he’d come and Jane had pretended to fall asleep while he crashed around their suite doing God knows what.
    He was asleep now. Jane sat up very slowly, very carefully, biting her lip because simply sitting up made her clasp her hands to her head to make it stop pounding.
    Leo was sprawled next to her, paunchy and pale in his boxer shorts, mouth hanging open, which would explain why he was making that horrendous noise, like a waterlogged machine gun firing rounds. He hadn’t looked like that last night. Or maybe her pique and all that champagne had clouded her judgement.
    Jane stood up on wobbly legs, grabbed her phone out of her bag and crept towards the bathroom. She avoided the mirror, sat down on the edge of the tub and stretched out her left hand. The diamonds on her ring glittered, but she no longer took pleasure in them.
    When the engagement was as new and shiny as the ring and she’d realised that she’d pulled it off, that her disco days were over, Jane would recite the ring’s credentials like poetry. It
was
poetry. Art deco, Asscher-cut 6.10-carat diamond, flanked by two baguette diamonds and fourteen round-cut diamonds with a combined weight of 4.44 carats in a claw setting on a platinum shank. Ker-fucking-ching, darling.
    It was her reward for all the time she’d spent searching for that pot of gold at the end of the rainbow. All the different men she’d tried on for size. The three years spent reeling Andrew in, very slowly, very subtly, so that he always thought he was the one doing all the reeling.
    Three years since those awful two days locked in a Moscow hotel room by a Russian oil trader who’d done terrible… there was never any point in dwelling on the past. She’d known then that the party was over; she needed to settle down by the time she was twenty-seven because twenty-seven was the thin but deadly line that separated a good-time girl from a good time had by all.
    Plus, being locked in that hotel room with that psychopath… no, still not going there. Suffice to say, Jane was tired. So very tired of hotel bars in foreign cities, scanning the room for a man who wouldn’t flinch when she asked for a glass of Louis Roederer Cristal Rosé 2000 so he had to buy the whole bottle. Holding him off, making him wait for another date, playing it out for as long as she could. Besides, the girls coming up behind her were much, much younger and hungrier and the Eastern European girls had no respect for the way the game should be played.
    Jane was done with Russian oligarchs. Done with Eurotrash. Done with the spoilt sons of oil and steel magnates. She needed someone who was up and coming but who hadn’t quite up and come and she really needed a change of scene. Then, at a dinner party in Aspen, she’d been seated next to a venture capitalist who specialised in tech start-ups. She’d picked his brains, done some research, drawn up a shortlist and packed her bags for San Francisco.
    She’d bumped into Andrew during one of the breakout sessions at a TED talk on artificial intelligence. He’d helped her with some iPad-related problem, blushing all the while and falling over his words. Then they’d just happened to keep bumping into each other all over town. No such thing as coincidence – not when Andrew kept tweeting his schedule.
    Andrew was green enough and new enough that though he had millions in seed capital, he didn’t have a huge team of people, of hangers-on yet. Just a room full of boys who looked a lot like him working on code and a