Detained by Ainslie Paton

request. His expression made her ready to believe he thought her taste in food, cheap crumpled clothing and grubby battered luggage was the essence of privilege and good breeding.
    She wandered around the suite barefoot on thick, creamy carpet. You could wander, that was the right word for it. It had a dining room that would seat eight easily. In another room a baby grand piano stood ready to play. There was a dressing room. In the expansive wardrobe her paltry clothing was already arrayed on four padded coat hangers. The butler had even hung t-shirts, placed her work shoes in a special rack. Somewhere in this room he’d stowed her wheelie bag. There were so many cupboards and storage spaces she might never find it.
    The bed was frighteningly big for one person, bigger than a king—a whole royal family of a bed. The bathroom was black marble. The huge bath sunken in front of the floor to ceiling windows faced the Huangpu River. She could see the Pearl Tower and the lights of the economic zone of Pudong.
    She opened the doors to the balcony, grinning into the heat of the midnight sky at the sheer luxury, the absolute inappropriateness and the fait acompli of it all. She shouldn’t be in this room, but she had no way of finding the man from Tara to issue a protest. If he thought he could buy her he was in for a surprise.
    So for tonight she’d play princess. Tomorrow she’d have them shift her to an ordinary room and swap his credit for hers. This might get tricky when it came to claiming her expenses, though Mark was unlikely to care if they were less than budgeted for. There’d be one night’s less accommodation to pay for.
    When she stretched out in the jasmine scented bath she recognised the tune in her head was Green Day. The song she’d once thought in a dark mood of sarcasm to be her deflowerer Ben Tucker’s theme song. Now it seemed to be a signature tune for her Shangri-La experience.
    She sang the chorus aloud, the bathroom acoustics making her singing voice sound vaguely Celine Dion. Right at this unpredictable moment she was having the time of her life.
    An hour later, wearing the hotel’s cream silk robe, she considered the bed and the eight pillows across its headboard. It was entirely too beautifully made. It seemed criminal to muck it up. It was hard to know whether to choose an end or shoot for the middle and sleep starfish just because there was all this space. It was hard to know if she would sleep in any case. Despite the bath, she was too keyed up. The suite was one thing, but the man? The man was another.
    Somehow he’d known when they’d be released. He’d woken her fifteen minutes before the official arrived, with enough time to straighten herself up and splash water on her face. He’d obviously been working while she slept, a laptop, its screen glowing, open on the table.
    He’d held out a hand to help her to her feet and smiled at her like she was Christmas morning. He’d had the devil in his eyes when he asked if she’d slept well, making it sound like an invitation to further debauchery, and he’d laughed richly when she’d blushed from the sudden awkwardness of the scene.
    The young immigration official who came to stamp their passports and release them copped a tongue lashing from him, making him colour and duck his head. There’d been lots of pointing at the ceiling so she figured it had something to do with the air-conditioning.
    When they’d cleared the airport, his car and driver were magically waiting. He’d insisted she take it. He handed her into the back seat, and she thought he was going to go old world gallant and take her hand to his lips, but he half climbed in, pushed her into the soft, yielding leather and kissed her hard on the lips while the driver watched in the rear-view mirror.
    She’d grabbed his shirt. “What’s your name?”
    He laughed. “More fun without names.” He pulled away, giving incomprehensible instructions to the driver, the only word of