Power Play

“I spoke to Vogue after I left you today,” Pepper told him. “One of their assistant editors is here tonight, apparently—Rosemary Bennett—do you know her?”

“Yes, I do. In fact I’ve seen her somewhere.” John turned round and searched among the tables. “Over there—look, Pepper. The woman in the Giorgio Armani—the white satin. Do you want me to introduce you?”

“No…not here, I’ll go and see her at Vogue later in the week.” Pepper looked away from the table, and her body froze as she saw the man making his way through the tables. For one moment she thought he was heading for her, and her face lost all its colour, her body tense with shock.

“Pepper, what’s wrong?”

Somehow she managed to drag her attention away.

“Are you feeling all right?”

John’s forehead was creased in an anxious frown, his eyes dark with concern. God, what was the matter with her? She had everything under control, but just one unexpected glimpse of Miles French had thrown her so completely off guard that she was still fighting the shock.

This afternoon must have been more of a strain than she had realised. Miles French hadn’t reacted like the others. He had been far more cool, far more in control of himself, and he had also recognised her. That was something she hadn’t expected him to do. She had changed so much from the girl she had been that she had thought there was nothing of that girl left.

Miles French had shown her otherwise, and she had found the experience disquieting.

On the other side of the room Rosemary Bennett reached out and scored her long nails delicately over Miles’s wrist.

“You’re looking very pensive, darling, is something wrong?”

Miles gave her a perfunctory smile.

“Not specifically.”

There was something different about him tonight, Rosemary recognised; something distancing. She was far too experienced and knowledgeable about men not to recognise the signs. Miles was bored.

It was time to end their affair. She didn’t really want to lose him. As a lover, physically she doubted that she had ever met his equal, but emotionally there was always a part of him that he withheld, that remained aloof and unobtainable. Rosemary veiled her eyes and studied him. Miles was not the sort of man who could live without a woman for very long, which probably meant that he had already chosen her successor.

She wondered without rancour who the woman was. Whoever she was, she hoped she had the good sense not to fall in love with him. Miles turned his head and looked at her.

“I thought tonight we might leave early.”

Trust Miles to deliver the coup de grace with style! she thought wryly, and wondered if he intended to tell her before or after he had taken her to bed. Knowing Miles, it would probably be beforehand, then he would make love to her as a way of saying goodbye.

Once she had seen Miles, Pepper couldn’t relax. Sensing her tension but at a loss to understand the reason for it, Geoffrey asked her if she would like to leave once they had finished their supper.

She got up gratefully, making her excuses to John and Louise. “I’m afraid I have a rather bad headache,” she lied, letting Geoffrey take her arm and lead her away.

“You stay here. I’ll get your coat for you,” he instructed once they were in the foyer.

Pepper sat down on one of the small gilt chairs and stared abstractedly into space. Another couple walked into the room, the woman’s voice cool and faintly metallic, the man’s deeper, almost laconic and somehow familiar.

She tensed and looked at them.

“Pepper, what an unexpected pleasure!”

She saw Miles coming towards her and was conscious of a tight aching tension constricting her throat. She struggled to stand up, catching the heel of her shoe in the hem of her skirt, overbalancing slightly. Miles reached out to steady her, and she flinched beneath the unexpected warm pressure of his hands on her bare arms.

Five feet away Rosemary saw the way Miles was looking at the other woman and knew that she had seen the lady who was going to take her place in his bed. She smiled bitterly to herself. At least he had taste. Pepper Minesse was no pretty fluffy doll.

They had gone by the time Geoffrey returned with her coat, but as he helped her into it Pepper was still struggling to obliterate the small scene from her senses.

4

Pepper didn’t sleep well that night. The old nightmare haunted and pursued her. It always came at times like this when she was under stress. Long-suppressed memories surfaced and twisted through her mind, and she lay back against the tangle of satin sheets, her hand over her heart feeling it steady, as she forced herself to block out the too-intrusive memory of smothering darkness, of hands and voices, whispers pitched just too low for her to hear. In her nightmare she struggled to catch what they were saying, but in reality she had heard; had known what was happening to her.

Rape. The taste of the word on her tongue was sour and foetid. Her mouth twisted bitterly. It was a full mouth, wicked and sensual; men always looked at it, imagining its red moistness against their skin.

She was too hyped up to even try to go back to sleep. If she did she knew what would happen. She would be back in that shadowy room in Oxford with the door guarded by the men who had taken her there, while…

Her body shook, sweat glistening on her soft silken skin. Once more she felt the smothering sensation of fear engulfing her and fought against it, pushing away the terrifying memories of unseen hands touching her body, voices whispering softly just outside the stretch of her ears.

She reached out abruptly and switched on the lamp beside her bed, deliberately controlling her breathing as she willed herself to regain control. She was both hot and shivering, pursued by demons that owed nothing to any human life form. The May night was warm, but inside she felt deathly cold.

“You can have whatever you want from life,” Philip had once told her, “but there’s always a price to be paid for it.”

Pepper had paid her price, and now it was time that others paid theirs.

She got up and padded downstairs, ferreting about in the kitchen cupboard until she found the tin of drinking chocolate. It had been there since Mary’s last visit two years ago, for Christmas shopping. Mary and Philip had never felt totally at home in her London house. Its cool designer exclusivity overwhelmed them.

Happiness and contentment had always been the meter by which they had measured their own lives, and she knew that both of them in their different ways worried about her. Although they didn’t know it, they had good reason to be worried. Pepper grimaced faintly to herself, as she made a milky drink and carried it back to her bedroom, curling up against her cream satin sheets and pillows, her dark red hair spilling out over the antique trimmings. Without makeup, with her hair curling extravagantly round her face, she looked about seventeen, like a little girl who had strayed into her elder sister’s room. But she wasn’t seventeen…

At seventeen…

She sighed and compressed her body against the intrusive memories, but it was too late, already they were flooding back, drowning her in pain and fear. She let herself relax and admit them.

Perhaps after all it was only right that tonight she should remember, she thought tiredly, with the acceptance of her mother’s face, for the vagaries and implacability of fate.

Very well then, if she must remember, let her at least remember it all. She would go back to the beginning…to the very beginning.

In January of 1960 the gypsy tribe to which Pepper’s mother belonged was camped in Scotland on a tract of land belonging to the laird of the clan MacGregor. It had been a bad winter, with thick snow and howling east winds straight off the Russian seas. Sir Ian MacGregor was a kindly man brought up in a tradition that made him, as chief of his clan, as responsible for their welfare as he was for that of his own immediate family.

The MacGregors had never been a particularly wealthy clan; they owned lands, yes, but the land was fit for nothing but running sheep and renting out as grouse moors to rich Americans. When his factor told him that the gypsies had arrived and were camping in their usual valley his first thought was relief that they had arrived safely. The gypsies had been camping in that valley for more than two hundred years, but this year the heavy snowfalls had delayed them. His second thought was concern for their survival in the bitter cold, so he sent his factor into the valley with bales of straw for the ponies and some meat from the deer that he and his ghillie had shot just before Christmas.

Duncan Randall was not just the MacGregor’s factor, he was also his nephew and heir, a tall, rather withdrawn eighteen-year-old, with black hair and a narrow bony face. Duncan was a dreamer and an idealist. He loved his uncle and the land, and in his soul he carried the poetry of his Celtic heritage.

An overnight fall of snow had blocked the pass through the valley so that the gypsies were completely enclosed. Dark faces and wary eyes monitored his progress in the Land Rover as he drove towards their encampment. Smudges of smoke from their fires hung on the horizon, small groups of wiry, silent children huddled round their warmth.

It had been a bad year for the tribe. Their leader had died in the autumn, leaving the tribe like a rudderless ship. He had been sixty-eight years old and it was to Naomi, his widow, that the rest of the tribe now turned.

There had been only one child of the marriage—a girl. Layla was fifteen and according to the custom of their tribe she must now be married to the man they had chosen as their new leader.

Rafe, her husband-to-be, was thirty years old, the younger son of a leader of another Lee tribe. To Layla at fifteen he seemed both old and faintly alarming. Her father had spoiled her, because she was the child of his old age, even though her mother had warned him against it, and she was a wild, almost fey creature, as changeable as April skies. Naomi worried for her, knowing that hers would never be an easy way through life.

Naomi had pleaded with Rafe to wait until Layla was sixteen before marrying her. Her birthday fell in the spring, and Rafe had reluctantly agreed, but all the tribe could see how he watched the girl with jealous, brooding eyes.

Layla had always been contrary and awkward; Naomi despaired of her. Rafe was a man any other girl would have been proud to call husband, but when he looked at her, Layla tossed her hair and averted her eyes, giving her smiles instead to the boys she had grown up with.