Power Games

Intrigued as much by her contrasting emotions as by the cause of them, Bram found himself wanting to know more about her—much more. He wanted to protect her, and at the same time he also had a very male and far less altruistic desire to unwrap her poor punished body from its cruel constrictions and watch as the anger and coldness were banished from her eyes by warmth and laughter.

Somewhere? Where? His arms…his bed…his…

Whoa…hold on, he warned himself firmly. Didn’t he have enough complications already in his life without adding any more? And besides, hadn’t she already made it plain that there was no way she was going to reciprocate the kind of thoughts he was having?

‘Your file,’ he heard her say coldly, her voice sharp with irritation.

Why was he looking at her like that, watching her like that? Taylor wondered angrily. As though…as though… Hurriedly she looked away from him, feeling both angry and defensive. She didn’t like people, men, watching her so closely. It made her feel nervous…angry…edgy, sending alarm bells clanging through her nervous system. What was it about that kind of look in a man’s eyes—sexually curious, sexually interested, sexually predatory—that once seen, you never forgot, never failed to recognise? It infuriated her that he was looking at her like that. She had done nothing to encourage his interest after all, far from it.

‘Will you have dinner with me?’

The quiet question shocked her, fear and anger leaping through her body like two choke-chained guard dogs taught to respond to threat.

Bram had known what her answer would be even before he asked the question and as he measured her hostility and rejection he wondered if he had totally taken leave of his senses. There were women, plenty of them, who would have moved heaven and earth to be invited out by him, but this woman would never be one of them.

‘No.’

There was nothing restrained or polite about her sharp refusal. The small word was explosive with anger and resentment and spiked with her fear. She threw it at him as though it were a hand grenade, a weapon she wanted to use to destroy him completely. It was too late now to tell her that from the moment he had walked into her office, his behaviour had been so completely out of character that even he had been surprised by it. He doubted she would believe him and knew that she would not want to believe him—him or any man who dared to overstep the boundaries she had set around herself.

Bram had come across women who were genuine man-haters, but they had been nothing like this woman. Their feelings had sprung from cold dispassionate contempt. Hers had been formed in far hotter and more painful fires. He wondered if she knew how vulnerable she seemed and how much that vulnerability made him ache for her—in every sense, the emotional and the physical.

He was just about to say he was sorry and attempt to soothe her when her office door opened and another woman came in, apologising for interrupting, after a quick and femininely appreciative glance in Bram’s direction. Watching the dismissive way Taylor turned her back on him to attend to the other woman’s query, Bram mentally shrugged as he headed towards the door. And then stopped, some impulse he hadn’t known he possessed making him pause and murmur softly to her before he left. ‘I’ll be in touch. I haven’t given up.’

The white-faced look of concentrated panic she threw at him made him wince. Not for himself but for her. It obviously hadn’t been the right thing to say, and what was worse, he had actually known that before he opened his mouth. What the hell was the matter with him? He wasn’t normally so gauche, far from it; but then the truth was that normally when it came to women, he had had more practice using his powers of tact and subtlety to fend them off, not draw them on.

‘Wow,’ Taylor’s companion commented after Bram had gone. ‘Now that’s what I call a sexy man and a half. Who was he?’

‘Brampton Soames, the head of Soames Computac.’

‘What!’ The other woman’s eyes widened even further. ‘All that and money, too. I’d have thought he’d be much older. Hasn’t he got an adult son?’

‘I really don’t know,’ Taylor responded dismissively in a voice which warned that Bram Soames, his sex appeal and his adult son were subjects in which she had absolutely no interest whatsoever. Which wasn’t completely true. She had an interest all right, but it wasn’t the same one as her colleague, who was now bemoaning the fact that she hadn’t arrived just that little bit earlier before Bram had been about to leave.

Taylor’s interest had nothing to do with his sexy good looks, his charismatic personality or his reputed millionaire status; her interest centred solely on the fact that he was a man and that as such she wanted nothing whatever to do with him.

‘What is it with her?’ she had once overheard one of her younger female colleagues demanding, unaware that she was actually within earshot. ‘She acts and dresses like some old-fashioned spinster from a pre-war film. I know she’s got virgin written all over her, but if she just made a bit of an effort, dressed herself up a bit more, changed her hairstyle, she could probably still get herself a man.’

Get herself a man. Taylor had had to bite down hard on the inside of her mouth to prevent herself from screaming out aloud that a man was the last thing she wanted, the very last thing.

‘She’s obviously got some kind of hang-up about sex,’ the girl had continued blithely.

A hang-up about sex. Taylor’s body had shaken with silent mirthless laughter. Her colleague was still enthusing about Brampton Soames. Taylor looked pointedly at her watch. It had been a present from her parents, a reward for passing her A levels.

She had been terrified during that final year at school that she would disappoint them, that she wouldn’t achieve the high grades they expected of her, that she would let them down. Her elder sister had left Bristol University with first class honours and had then gone on to achieve the highest marks in her year in her postgraduate course.

Caroline had wanted to become a surgeon but their father had dissuaded her. ‘It would have been different were she a boy,’ he had explained dispassionately, ‘but as a woman she’ll be better off with a career which allows her to combine it more easily with a family.’

Their father wasn’t the kind of man who wanted his daughters to be token men; he wanted their scholastic achievements to reflect his own brilliance. As one of the country’s leading research biologists, he was well aware of the importance of inherited gene patterns for preserving excellence, but he was a very male man as well. His critical approval of her as she grew up had always been important to Taylor. A frowning look at her across the breakfast table in her early teenage years, the small comment that he didn’t care for her new hairstyle, or that she seemed to be putting on a little weight could cast a dark shadow over the whole day, while her father’s approving smile could leave her basking in warmth and sunshine.

Her mother had equally high standards. She’d trained as a pathologist but had only worked part-time after the birth of her daughters. Like Taylor’s father, her family too had a long history in medicine, combined with a very solid upper middle class county background. Both girls had been sent to private schools where the emphasis was equally divided between academic success and social grooming.

Without anything specific ever having been said Taylor knew her parents had very high expectations of her. Caroline had once been well on her way to fulfilling those expectations. When she returned from her year off in Australia, visiting distant relations who owned and ran a huge outback sheep station, she had been going to study law—a choice of career thoroughly approved of by their father. Quite naturally, since it had been, in effect, his choice.

As she reflected on the traumas of that long-ago summer, Taylor felt her throat close up on the hot acid burn of emotion.

Damn Brampton Soames. This was his fault, making her feel like this, making her remember….

She didn’t see her sister any more. Her parents had disowned Caroline after she had broken all the rules and married a trainee manager she had met and fallen in love with on the Australian sheep station. Taylor could still remember her parents’ shock, their outrage and disgust at what she had done. They had cut her out of their lives and warned Taylor that she must do the same, and she had complied with their demands. Taylor had become doubly anxious not to fail them—in any way.

She planned to leave her office slightly early this evening; there was a library book to collect and she had some shopping to do. She didn’t like being out when it was dark if she could avoid it. Winter evenings were an exception, of course, and she had had to develop various coping strategies to deal with them—like unobtrusively falling into step beside another woman in the street, not travelling by public transport unless it was absolutely necessary. Instead she used a small private-hire taxi firm which specialised in supplying only female drivers.

It was an expensive luxury, but one she was prepared to make other sacrifices to afford. Still, she was always glad when the dark nights started to lighten. The dark always made her feel uncomfortable, wary…afraid. She always slept with all the lights on in her flat, including the lamp in her bedroom, if you could call it sleeping. She had trained herself to wake at the slightest noise—her body stiff and alert as her anxious glance probed her room, her ears strained for sound.

She doubted that Bram Soames slept like that. No, he would sleep deeply and confidently, his big powerful body spread across the bed. And if he had a woman there beside him, no doubt he would keep her chained possessively to his side with that way some men had of throwing an imprisoning arm or leg over their partner.

Bram Soames. She hadn’t given much thought to what kind of man he might be when Sir Anthony had mentioned his visit and asked her to give him the file. All she knew about him was that he had agreed to work on a computer program to help people with speech difficulties to communicate. An ambitious project and very praiseworthy—if he could do it. If not? Well, no doubt it would gain him and his company a good deal of free publicity, she’d decided sourly. No, she hadn’t given much thought to what kind of man he might be, but she knew now that he was the complete antithesis of all that she might have imagined had she done so.

That strong physical sexual presence that had invaded her office, making her feel nervous and afraid; that unashamed uninhibited sexual arousal of his body which he had made no attempt to conceal. Over the years she had come across men far more predatory sexually, but somehow they had not unnerved her in the way that he had. Perhaps because they hadn’t seemed to invite her to share the amusement, his bemusement, almost, at his own reaction to her—as though it had caught him off guard as much as it had her.

But that was impossible, of course. A man of his age…of his experience. Well, he was wasting his time with her.

‘I haven’t given up,’ he had warned her.

Her body shook suddenly, her teeth chattering. Shock, that was all it was, shock. Odd that such a stupid unimportant thing should do that to her when…

‘I’m sorry,’ Taylor told her colleague, who she realised was watching her curiously. ‘I have to go. Can we sort this out in the morning?’

The first thing Jay did once he had checked into the Pierre, his hotel in New York, was to ring his secretary in London.

‘Is my father around?’ he asked, once he had discovered there were no important messages waiting for him.

‘I don’t think so,’ she told him. ‘But I’ll check for you.’

Irritably Jay stared out of his bedroom at the view of Manhattan beneath him. He had flown Concorde, using the time to go over his strategy for negotiating with the Japanese, and had decided that it still might be easier to pressure his father to change his mind and agree to the deal. Having mentally rehearsed his arguments and how he would block his father’s attempts to counter them, he was not very pleased to be told Bram had left the building and that no one seemed to know where he had gone.

Jay cursed as he replaced the receiver. He was tempted to take the risk of lying to the Japanese, hoping that he could persuade his father to change his mind…. No, that was too much of a risk, Jay acknowledged.

He hadn’t told his father that he planned to be away for two full weeks. Jay had friends, contacts he had made at Harvard whom he planned to see while he was in New York. Many of them now held extremely influential positions, and if his father could be fooled into believing that Jay was contemplating crossing the Atlantic and joining forces with one of them, driven to do so by his own father’s lack of faith in him… Jay smiled cynically to himself, reached for his Filofax and checked through the list of appointments.

There was no way he was ready to give up on the Japanese deal, and if he had to use some subtle manipulation to force his father to give way, then so be it. He would.

Yes, in many ways his stay in New York could turn out to be a highly profitable one, not least because… A faintly cruel smile curled his mouth as he reached into his luggage and removed a small package.

There was nothing particularly remarkable about the very ordinary unmarked video it contained—unless, of course, you happened to know what was on the video.

His father had reminded him about Plum’s birthday. He started to laugh. He only hoped that Plum would appreciate, enjoy, get as much pleasure from receiving her gift as he was going to get from giving it to her. He suspected that she certainly wouldn’t appreciate just how much effort he had put into getting it for her.

Ten minutes later as he stepped outside the hotel and gave the driver an address in SoHo, he glanced frowningly at his watch. He had a dinner engagement later on with an ex-girlfriend who was now based in the city, but with any luck his appointment shouldn’t take too long. His destination was one of the large loft-conversion apartments which had once been the home of the city’s artists. The woman who owned the loft and worked from it was an artist, too, in her own way. Jay had found out about her through a friend of a friend who had heard about the kind of work she did.