"I gulped: I was helpless - the naked prisoner of a total stranger."
In a horrible moment of exposure and humiliation, headstrong math genius Gwendoline is swept into a thrilling erotic romance with a perverse British millionaire - a steamy, kinky, BDSM passion that ends with Gwendoline's spectacular total downfall.
When her stunning French-British girlfriend, Kate, leaves to study in Paris, 20-year-old Gwendoline, a math genius doing her Ph.D. at MIT, is heart-stricken - a void engulfs her heart.
That night, running alone on an isolated canal-side path, Gwendoline meets, in the most humiliating circumstances imaginable, and just as a thunderstorm moves in, James, a tough, perverse, handsome 42-year-old British millionaire.
"Is this man complicated enough for you?" asks Claudia, Gwendoline's ultra-sophisticated grandmother.
James is, Gwendoline soon discovers, a collector of stylish erotic and bondage paintings, BDSM drawings, lesbian lore, and classic books such as The Story of O , The Delta of Venus, and the works of the Marquis de Sade and Leopold von Sacher-Masoch.
Gwendoline bites the bullet, accepts the challenge. She plunges into perverse games in Rome and Paris, and on the sultry beaches and islands of the Mediterranean. And she discovers new lesbian and fetish delights - with stunning French film star, Martine Aubin.
Then, she loses it all - except Martine.
Gwendoline is in New York, about to present a stunningly brilliant mathematical paper to the assembled elite mathematicians of the world. It will, if all goes well, make her famous.
Twenty minutes before she goes on stage, photos appear on the net - Gwendoline, naked, indulging in various sexual hijinks and misdemeanors.
Instant worldwide infamy! Will this be Gwendoline's downfall - or her triumph?
This is a wild vivid Technicolor rollercoaster ride as Gwendoline, in Paris and Rome, and on Mediterranean beaches, explores the dangerous depths and deliciously luminous heights of torturous desire.