© 2004

Della’s Story

IT WAS a great dress. No argument. Silver and slinky, low-cut in the front and high-slit at the side. It had some magic quality that made my hips and bust look bigger and my waist look smaller, and it fitted so closely that you just knew I was wearing nothing underneath. And I mean nothing. That dress was cool, sexy, provocative, sensational.

At any other time I’d have loved it. But not now. Not now I knew why that slimeball Hugh Vanner had been so eager to get it on me. It was because he wanted one, or more, of his equally slimy ‘business associates’ to get it off me.

And since it was a moot question whether they were more disgusting or he was-no way!

At this point a woman with her head screwed on would have got out-fast. But that’s not easy when you’re on a yacht. Even if it is moored in the harbour at Monte Carlo.

I’d been hired in London as a waitress, and I suppose it was naïve of me to think that ‘waitress’ meant waitress. But I was in a tight hole financially.

Usually I demonstrated goods in department stores, but one job had just finished and another had just fallen through. I couldn’t afford to go even a week without work, and the money being offered for this trip was good. So I crossed my fingers and hoped.

Fatal mistake.

Never cross your fingers. It makes it so hard to fight the creeps off.

I joined the yacht at Southampton. It was called The Silverado, and it wasn’t what most people would mean by yacht, with sails and things. This was a rich man’s version, over two hundred feet long, with thirteen staterooms, a bar, a swimming pool, a dining room that could seat twenty, and not a sail in sight. That kind of yacht.