A manager at the Kings Head in Llandovery is facing jail after he was convicted of having sexual intercourse with a schoolgirl.

Nathan Pearce, aged 25, was found guilty of three offences of sexual activity with a child. He was cleared of a further two, identical charges.

He was also convicted of possessing 13 indecent images of children.

Pearce, who lives at the four star hotel, will be sentenced on April 10.

The 15-year-old girl told the jury that Pearce invited her to his room and they had sexual intercourse with her consent.

But she had been under age "by six or seven weeks."

Pearce agreed he had met the girl, but told the court there had never been sexual contact between them.

A jury at Swansea crown court heard how rumours began spreading around the town that Pearce was in a relationship with a schoolgirl.

First the girl's mother heard the rumours, and then her grandmother. And when they quizzed her she told them the rumours were true.

She told the jury that Pearce had invited her to his room at the Kings Head and had sexual intercourse with her consent.

She said that after having sex for the first time he put £100 into her pocket even though she hadn't wanted any money from him.

They swapped messages via Facebook and exchanged telephone text messages, she added. During one he said he could disable the CCTV cameras at the hotel.

In others, he urged her to send him pictures of her naked.

"He wanted me to do a striptease but I refused," she added.

Pearce said he thought the girl was 16 or 17. He accepted he knew she was a schoolgirl but thought she was in a sixth form or a college.

He agreed she had been in his room at the hotel but said all they did was sit on a bed and watch television.

The court heard that the images, found on a storage device within a computer, appeared to be from "a professional shoot" of a girl aged between nine and 11. A further 21 images were judged to be "borderline."

The judge, Mr Recorder Ifan Wyn Lloyd Jones, said he would postpone sentence to allow time for a probation officer to prepare a report into Pearce's background.

But he warned Pearce that he should not read into that any sort of promise that he would not go into prison.