Read Online Girl Trade - full length erotic adventure novel (Xcite Erotic Romance Novels) by Chloe Thurlow - Free Book Online

cold chill ran up my back bone.
    We made several trips to unload the provisions from the dinghy into the shed. The beachcomber lit oil lamps and filled plates with rations of vegetables and rice. I was taken aback, although I shouldn’t have been, and embarrassed, too, when I was sent out, two plates at a time, to feed the people on the sand. I gave food to the women first and they watched my every move, the dance of my blonde curls, the sway of my breasts as I bent to give them the plates, my green eyes full of desperation and shame.
    ‘Do you speak English?’ I whispered. ‘ Parlez vous Francais ?’
    I spoke, a woman to women, but it wasn’t that they didn’t understand, it was as if they didn’t hear me at all. They took the food, but behaved as if I were a ghost, invisible, some demon that might damage their unborn children. I went back into the shed and returned again with more plates. I spoke to the men, but the only response I got was a shake of the head, and mostly nothing at all. One young boy ran his palm over my thigh, but the man at his side pulled his hand away and, as he glanced nervously at the man in white, I knew my fear of the sheikh was justified.
    When I was making my way back into the shed for the sixth or seventh time, the woman with the child, a boy of about two, hissed and beckoned me in a soft melodic voice. From out of her straw basket she produced a folded sarong which she held in her outstretched hands. She was trying to give it to me. My heart beat faster. This small act of kindness was more than I could bare. Perhaps this woman knew what it was like to be a slave.
    ‘I can’t,’ I said.
    The woman stood and opened the sarong. In the remains of the daylight, I could make out the blue pattern on a white background, the same colours as the porcelain plate from which I had eaten my own rations before the boat arrived. I wanted to see this accident of fate, these matching colours, as another link in a chain, that more than coincidence, destiny was at work and my being there in the middle of nowhere had some purpose, that I would be delivered from this ordeal and be a better person after the experience. I would leave PR and join a voluntary group in Africa, dig wells, feed the hungry. I would do something.
    Our eyes met and she smiled. The woman wrapped the material around me, covering my breasts, tucking it expertly so that it didn’t open. The hem of the sarong reached my knees and, dressed in this unexpected gift, I stopped feeling like an object, an outsider. I didn’t belong. I didn’t want to belong. But I didn’t not belong either. The tears that trickled over my cheeks moistened the dry surface of my heart and filled me with new hope.
    ‘Thank you,’ I said.
    I continued going back and forth with plates until all the people had been fed. Enough food remained for the man in white and his three sailors, and I was impressed that the beachcomber had worked out exactly how much he was going to need, that there was no waste, that these people had learned to use everything, to throw away nothing. I stacked the dishes. I thought the beachcomber was going to instruct me to wash them, but he had something else in mind when he grabbed one of the oil lamps and crossed the shed to the display of found objects laid out on the long shelf.
    He rooted around for a few minutes and, when he called me, he held in his palm a St Christopher on a tarnished chain. He hooked it around my neck and stood back, expressionless, studying me in the necklace and sarong as if we were a couple about to go out to a party. This man was a bully quick to take advantage of any opportunity; he’d sold me for a fuck for 50 euros, yet he had stopped his companion from beating me when the man in black was still warming up.
    It was all so confusing, so hard to interpret, so foreign. The beachcomber inhabited a world of harsh realities and constant uncertainty. He survived on whatever the sea brought to shore. He was