Trafficked: The Terrifying True Story of a British Girl Forced into the Sex Trade by Sophie Hayes Page B

possibility that not all men were like my father and to trust Kas, too.
    It was a decision that was to change everything, forever.

Chapter 5
    We drove straight from the airport to a beautiful lake, where we sat together outside a café, soaking up the heat of the late-summer sunshine. Kas was exactly the same as he’d been in Spain – just as relaxed and easy to talk to – and I felt immediately comfortable in his company.
    We went back to the lake that evening, and as the air was cool once the sun had gone down, we sat inside a restaurant, where we talked and laughed together and the waiter smiled at me and called me ‘ La bella signorina ’. Everything seemed perfect.
    After the meal, we went to a café to meet two of Kas’s friends, who were so nice to me I began to wonder what he’d told them about our relationship. At the café, we ate ice cream and drank brandy and when Kas and I were leaving, the two men stood up, kissed me on both cheeks like benevolent uncles and said ‘ Arrivederci, Soffee ’.
    That night, in Kas’s apartment in an ancient, yellow-brick house a couple of miles from the centre of town, we made love for the first time, and afterwards Kas held me in his arms and I felt safe. I didn’t know whether I was falling in love with him; I certainly didn’t feel the way I used to do when I was with Erion, when a light seemed to shine from somewhere deep inside me, but maybe I’d been wrong and that hadn’t been love, whereas the feeling of security I had with Kas was.
    For the rest of the weekend, we wandered around the city together, sat outside cafés drinking coffee or glasses of wine and ate our meals in restaurants that were full of the sound of laughter and where everyone seemed to talk at the same time. On the Saturday evening, we went to an elegant nightclub in the centre of town, which was decorated with lavish crystal chandeliers and carved-marble fountains and was quite unlike any nightclub I’d ever been to before. Home, with all its worries, seemed a million miles away.
    We spent Sunday by the lake and when we returned to Kas’s flat in the early evening, I had an almost physical sense of contentment. Kas’s arm was resting lightly on my shoulders as he put his key in the lock of the front door, and I reached up to kiss his cheek before walking across the little hallway and into the bathroom.
    When I came out again a few minutes later, Kas was in the kitchen. He had his back to the open doorway, but heturned as I stepped through it and looked at me with an expression I didn’t recognise and couldn’t read. Although he didn’t seem to be angry, there was a coldness in his eyes that made the skin on my scalp tingle and my heart began to race.
    â€˜Is everything all right?’ I asked him. ‘Kas? Is something wrong?’ But instead of smiling and reassuring me, as I’d hoped he would do, he nodded his head towards the little wooden table under the window and said, in a voice that filled me with dread, ‘We need to talk.’
    I pulled out a chair and sat down, expecting him to sit beside me, but he remained standing, with his back resting against the work surface, as he said, ‘There is a reason you are here.’ I looked up at him and smiled, but when he didn’t smile back at me, I felt my stomach contract sharply.
    â€˜There is a reason,’ he said again, ‘and I am going to tell you what it is. First though, I have to ask you: do you love me?’
    â€˜I think I do,’ I told him, trying to ignore the horrible sense of foreboding that had settled over me like a dark shadow. ‘I don’t know how people know when they love someone, but you’ve been there for me for so long that …’
    He interrupted me, raising a hand impatiently and saying, ‘Well, if you love someone, you have to make sacrifices for them. We all have to make sacrifices for the