Lita whirled on him, anger flashing in her dark eyes. "I don't need a man, and I don't need you," she spat.

"Okay, okay," Miles said, backing off. "But if you change your mind-”

“Get out," said Lita.

He shrugged and left. Lita wondered what it was about him that she didn't like. God knows she was interested enough in men-maybe too interested. She seemed to think about sex all the time. It was like a disease with her, this constant nagging lust. She thought it was a very strange way for a virgin to feel.

Lita found her maid's costume laid out for her on the bed, and she started to change into it. There was a full-length mirror on the closet door, and as she undressed, she watched herself, wondering if she was very attractive to men. After eight years in a convent school, with no men around but an eighty-year-old janitor, she really wasn't sure. Judging from Miles' reaction, however, she must have something men liked.

Lita was twenty-two years old. Her father had been Mexican, her mother Anglo, and she'd grown up in a Latin ghetto of Los Angeles, much to her mother's distress. When Lita was fourteen she started running with a neighborhood gang and got involved with a punk named Luis. That was the last straw for Lita's mother-she packed her daughter off to a convent and left her there for eight years.

"No one's going to call my daughter a dirty Mex," Lita's mother had said. "You're going to be a lady if it kills you.”

Now, standing naked before the mirror, Lita smiled grimly. Her parents were dead, and she was free, and she was damned if she was going to be a lady. She wanted to live, to live excitingly, and she doubted that ladies lived that way. Above all, she wanted to resume her sex life where it had been broken off so many years ago. She had a lot of lost time to make up for.

Examining her ripe young body, Lita thought wistfully of those few summer nights with Luis, the hot dizzying caresses, the long sweaty kisses that melted her belly. She would have fucked Luis for sure if her mother hadn't sent her away. She was dying to know what it was like. Well, now she could do any damned thing she pleased. The moment she'd heard of her mother's death, she'd left the convent, taking the first job she could find, as a maid for Foster Barton. It was time to start living.