30DaystoSyn

Charlotte
Boyett-Compo

The ad reads:
Young
woman (American only) willing to engage in domination roleplay. No BDSM.
Salary: $1,000,000 upon completion of contract. Length of employment: 30
consecutive nights.

Drowning in debt,
Melina Wynth is going under for the third time. With a dead-end job and a
disabled brother dependent on her, the ad in the paper could be the lifeline to
keep her from sinking. Reeling in her courage, she casts her line.

Synjyn McGregor is
a shark—a very wealthy shark from Down Under—and his bite could prove to be her
undoing. But Lina is determined she isn’t going to allow him to get away. The
length of employment might read thirty nights, but she suspects he is fishing
for something more.

Synjyn needs a
woman who will love him—mentally and physically—as never before. A woman whose
touch will not only put the billionaire in his place but keep him there…begging
for more. He will quickly realize Lina is made for Syn.

A Romantica®
contemporary erotic
romance
from Ellora’s Cave

Dedication

To my Tommy.

I know you will be there when I take my
final breath.

The last word on my lips will be your name.

Melina Wynth flipped through the newspaper
pages until she came to the Help Wanted section. She desperately needed a
second job but so far she’d found nothing and she’d been searching for a month.
Fast food restaurants? Sure but they paid next to nothing in wages. Mega-retail
stores? The same. She didn’t want to consider the little boutique shops in the
strip malls because the salaries would be even lower and she’d be expected to
wear better clothes than what she had in her closet. If she couldn’t find
something today, she’d pick one of the mega-retail stores and make do.

Sighing, she reached for her coffee and
took a sip. She frowned. The generic coffee was cold and the knock-off creamer
coated the lining of her mouth like an oil spill. She set the mug on the table,
picked up her ballpoint pen and put the tip on the first Help Wanted ad.

“Nope,” she said, making a large red X
across the ad.

She went to the next ad. “Ditto.” Once more
she crossed off an ad.

After a dozen or more crisscrossed lines
had laid waste to the newspaper page, she tossed the pen to the table and
scooted her chair back. Grabbing her coffee mug, she went to the sink to pour the
cold coffee down the drain. She turned on the water, rinsed the mug then turned
it upside down in the plastic dish drainer. She stood with her hands gripping
the edge where countertop and sink met and hung her head, staring at the mesh
strainer covering the sink drain.

Her thoughts jerked her back to the day
before.

“Due to your poor credit rating, we will
need the full co-pay amount upfront, Miss Wynth,” the lady at Cedar Oaks had
said in an arrogant tone. “I am sure you understand Cedar Oaks is not a charity
institution.”

“How am I supposed to come up with $3000
in less than a month to hold his place here?” she’d asked.

“That’s not our problem, Miss Wynth,”
the woman in charge of the institution’s financial assistance sniffed. Looking
down her long, thin nose a smirk had passed over the woman’s almost nonexistent
lips. “Since you do have a substantially low credit rating, I’m sure a bank
loan is out of the question.” She leaned over her desk, eyes glittering
hatefully. “Perhaps you have something you could sell?”

Melina had left Cedar Oaks with hot tears
scalding her cheeks. Not only had the woman repeatedly insulted her, she had
driven home Lina’s dire circumstances: A poorly paying job, a house for which
she was two months behind in rent, an overdue utility bill—among others—and a
piece-of-crap car that was minutes away from being repossessed or giving up the
ghost, and no resources to speak of.

There was no one to whom she could turn for
help. No relatives at all save her younger brother. No friends from whom she
could borrow money and—as the odious woman at Cedar Oaks had pointed out—no
bank would loan her a red cent.

Since her parents’ deaths two years
earlier, she and her brother Drew had been on their own. During that time
Drew—who had been in the same car wreck with Lina and their parents—had spent
the last two years of his life paralyzed from the waist down and unable to
remember who she was. The charity-run hospital in which he was a patient was
losing its funding and Drew would be discharged to a state-run facility in two
months.

The thought of Drew languishing in a place
where orderlies ignored their patients and nurses were indifferent to their
suffering, made Lina’s heart ache. She’d sell a kidney if it would help keep
Drew in a decent facility.

And it might eventually come to that, she
thought. If not a kidney, she could sell her eggs to an ASRM-affiliated egg
donor program or IVF clinic. She’d read where she could make as much as five
thousand dollars for her first donation, and up to ten thousand for subsequent
donations. She was already selling her blood plasma every month just to put
food—such as it was—on the table. She occasionally babysat on weeknights and on
the weekends she tended bar for her friend Rachel’s father Ed Morrison. Neither
paid much but the gigs gave her gas money.

She could sell her hair but the long dark
tresses that hung to her waist were her pride and joy. She’d never colored or
bleached or permed the thick mass and never had any intention of doing so. It
was her crowning glory as her mother had once said so she kept it silky and
shiny. Yet if she needed to part with it to help Drew, she would although she’d
make no more than a thousand dollars for it.

Or she could become the gestational carrier
of someone else’s baby…

She shook her head as she slipped inside
the heat and musty smell of her fifteen-year-old car. When she had a baby, it
would be her own and she’d never give it up. The twenty thousand she could make
from being a surrogate mother was tempting but she knew she couldn’t do it.

She’d curled her fingers around the top of
the steering wheel, lowered her forehead to her hands and given in to the
racking sobs that pushed at her throat.

Her grandmother’s words ran through her
mind.
“It’s always darkest before the dawn.”

She saw no way it could get any darker. She
was living off freeze-dried noodles and cans of store-brand tomato soup. Bread
came from the day-old store. Vegetables and fruits from the overripe section of
the supermarket were precious commodities to be savored with the occasional jug
of one-percent milk and a splurge on out-of-date cheese. Tap water had become
her beverage of choice and even that might not be an option any day now.

Hopeless.

Helpless.

Alone.

Scared.

At the end of her rope.

She used every spare bit of change she had
to pay for things Drew needed. Though he had no idea who she was, she needed to
do right by her little brother. He was, after all, her responsibility and in
more ways than one.

Her parents had died instantly in the fiery
crash on I-10. Their mortal coil was over.

Despite a broken arm, she had managed to
pull her unconscious brother from the burning wreck. Drew was bleeding
profusely from a nasty gash on his left temple. In the watery wash of the rain
that was pounding the pavement around her, she had watched his blood soaking
into her blouse as she held his head in her lap. When told her brother might
have brain damage, she had confessed to her parish priest that she wished the
two of them had perished along with their parents.

“That is a sinful thing to say, Lina,”
Father Bill had told her with a disapproving frown. “Life is precious. You
should be grateful to God for giving you a second chance.”

A second chance, she thought as she raised
her tear-stained face from the steering wheel. She stared blindly across the
pristine parking lot of the Cedar Oaks Rehabilitation Center and wanted to
scream. There would be no second chance for Drew and she was fairly sure there
would not be one for her, either.

The ringing of the phone made her sigh.
That was another thing that would be cut off at the end of the month. She had
twenty-nine days of service left before the three-month-old bill did her in.
With no answering machine—and most certainly no voice mail—the ringing
continued. With shoulders drooping, she turned and walked to the old-fashioned
wall phone hanging beside the back door—expecting another officious, sarcastic
bill collector on the other end.

“Hello?” she said timidly.

“Did you get the paper this morning?” The
excited voice belonged to Lina’s best friend Rachel.

“Yes, I did as instructed. That’s five
packets of noodles I won’t be buying this week,” Lina replied to the girl she’d
known since kindergarten. “So far I’ve found—”

“Did you see the ad?” Rachel demanded.

Lina put her free hand up to pinch the
bridge of her nose between her thumb and index finger. She was getting another
migraine and her friend’s loud voice wasn’t helping. “Which ad, Rach?”

“
The
ad!” her friend all but
shouted. “The one offering a mil for a thirty-day job!”

“A mil?” Lina repeated. “As in a million
dollars?”

“That’s the one!” Rachel said with a
giggle. “Did you see it?”

Lina released a long sigh. “No, sweetie, I
haven’t and I’m sure I wouldn’t qualify for any job that pays—”

“You’ve still got your cherry, you’ve got
long brown hair and green eyes, and you’re no heavier than a buck ten so you
qualify!” There was another prolonged giggle. “And you fit the age requirement
of twenty-two to twenty-eight.”

“Rachel, what are you talking about?” Lina
asked.

“Read the damn ad then call me back! Page
nine,” she said. “Small ad. Very discreet. Call me back!” Rachel hung up.

Annoyed, her headache worsening, Lina knew
if she didn’t search out the ad, read it then return Rachel’s call, her friend
would keep hounding her until she did. She went to the table where the
newspaper was spread out. She had been looking at the jobs on page seven. She
flipped the sheet and the ad practically jumped out at her.

“Discreet my ass. It might as well have a
blinking neon sign around it,” she scoffed. She read the first sentence in the
ad, stopped, read it again then slowly took a seat.

Wanted: Young woman (American only) willing
to engage in domination role play. No BDSM. Salary: $1,000,000 upon completion
of contract. Length of employment: 30 consecutive nights. Qualifications: must
be between the ages of 22-28, beautiful with long naturally brown hair and
green eyes (no glasses or contact lenses); cannot weigh more than 110 pounds;
no tattoos or body piercing (earlobes
only
okay) no scars or physical
imperfections; must be both physically and mentally fit (extensive examinations
by accredited physician and psychologist to ascertain physical and mental
health will be conducted);
Must
be a college-educated virgin. Only women
who meet all criteria need apply. Send photo and email to [email protected].

She read the ad three times then sat back
in her chair, staring at the bordered box, her lips parted in disbelief.

“You have got to be kidding,” she
whispered.

Once more the phone rang. It had to be
Rachel, she thought. The woman was the least patient person she’d ever known.
She pushed up from the table and plucked the receiver from the wall.

“Did you read it?” Rachel demanded with
excitement. “Do you believe someone would put an ad like that in the
newspaper?”

“It has to be a joke,” Lina said.
“Someone’s idea of a cruel prank. I’d be willing to bet it’s a grad student
doing a paper. Most likely someone from Tech.”

“What if it isn’t?” Rachel asked. “What if
it’s for real? One million dollars, Lina! One million dollars for thirty days
of work. That’s over thirty-thousand bucks a fucking night! One night is more
than you make in a year!”

“It’s a joke, Rachel,” Lina said with
exasperation. “No one in their right mind is going to pay that kind of money
for a month of whatever.”

“What if he’s richer than King Midas?”
Rachel argued. “What if he’s like that hero in that book everybody’s talking
about? What if—”

“What if he’s a serial killer?” Lina
queried and heard her friend snort.

“Serial killers don’t advertise in the
newspaper, stupid,” Rachel told her.

“Hello? Helmuth Schmidt?”

“The West German chancellor?” Rachel
questioned. “Who the hell did he kill?”

“No, no, no, no,
no
! That’s Helmut
Schmidt.”

“Isn’t that who you just said?”

“Helmuth! There’s an h on the end of the
killer’s name. AKA the American Bluebeard? Remember him from psych class?” Lina
reminded. “He placed ads in the lonely hearts columns and was suspected of
killing over thirty women.”

“Did he offer to pay them a cool mil to
fuck him?” Rachel pressed. “I don’t think so!”

Lina shook her head, making the budding
migraine worse. “It’s a practical joke, Rach, or a grad student’s
beer-and-weed-induced, not-so-bright idea for a paper.”

“What if it’s not?” Rachel pressed. “What
if it’s on the up and up and there’s a gorgeous, rich hunka-hunka burning love
out there who’s looking for a playmate?”

“How many gorgeous, rich hunka-hunka
burning love men do you know who would need to advertise for a playmate? Don’t
you think women would be falling into the lap of a man like that?”

“Maybe he’s so busy he doesn’t have time to
go looking,” Rachel snapped.

“What if he’s in his eighties, toothless,
hairless, and has an STD?” Lina countered.

“What if you were the lucky submissive
who—”

“The what?”

“Submissive!” Rachel said with annoyance.
“In a Dom/sub relationship, the sub is the receiving partner of the dominant.
She—or it could be a he—is a sexual slave to the Dom and must do everything the
Dom says.”

“Lovely,” Lina mumbled. “A large helping of
humiliation and degradation with a bowl of bondage on the side. Just what every
woman wants fed in a relationship.”

“It said no BDSM,” Rachel told her.

“I don’t know what that is,” Lina said and
when Rachel would have explained, she cut her off. “Rach, look, I’ve got one of
my headaches coming on. I’ve got to find a job this week or I’m going to lose
my house. At the very least my lights will be cut off, I’ll have no water, no
phone, and Drew will be kicked to the curb and put in some state-run horror of
a hospital.”

“Think about this,” Rachel said. “What if
this is a real opportunity? What if you could make a million dollars to let
some old fart bust your cherry? What good is it doing you anyway? You aren’t
using it.”

“Rachel—”

“You don’t even own a vibrator.”

“Yes, I do,” Lina said, blushing.

“One you can poke yourself with?” Rachel
asked. When Lina didn’t answer, her friend laughed. “I didn’t think so! It’s
probably just a clit flick. You might tap your—”