Power Games

Bram could hear the tension in her voice and hoped that she wasn’t equally able to hear the reluctance in his. There was, he reminded himself firmly, absolutely no reason whatsoever why he should not work with her. No logical reason at all.

So, why then, this gut feeling that he would be far safer to retreat?

The silence from Taylor’s end of the line was slightly unnerving. If it hadn’t been for the slightly erratic sound of her breathing he might almost have thought she’d hung up on him.

Firmly pushing his personal thoughts to the back of his mind, he said calmly, ‘I think before we can get down to any serious work we need to have a preliminary discussion. I was wondering if you were free tomorrow afternoon?’

In her office Taylor flipped over the page of her diary. It was completely blank.

‘No, I’m sorry… I already have an appointment then.’ Did her voice sound as betrayingly unconvincing to him as it did to her? She almost hoped he would guess that she was lying and decide to ask Sir Anthony to suggest someone else to help him, and she held her breath as she waited for his response.

‘I see…. Well, in that case, I wonder…I’m eager to get started on this project as soon as possible. At the moment I’ve got some free time, but…’

He paused while Taylor reflected coolly that if he had hoped to impress or bully her by playing the big powerful, dominant, successful businessman he was going to be disappointed.

‘I wouldn’t normally ask you to work outside office hours, but is there any chance that we could meet tomorrow evening, say about six-thirty?’

Six-thirty—after the rest of the office staff had gone home and only the cleaners were around. Taylor cursed herself inwardly for the trap her fib had built around her.

‘I…in the office? I think the building is locked up at six,’ she told him quickly. ‘I don’t think…’

‘We could have our discussion here,’ Bram told her after a moment’s silence. ‘I could send a car for you and—’

‘No. No…there’s no need. I…’

The total panic he could hear in her voice made Bram frown. She had struck him as such a contained, almost over-controlled person, on the surface at least, that he was unprepared for the intensity of emotion he could hear in her voice.

‘I…I’ll cancel my afternoon appointment,’ Taylor told him shakily. ‘I…what time did you have in mind?’

‘Two-thirty?’ Bram suggested diplomatically.

‘Yes…very well then…’ Taylor agreed. Her throat felt raw with tension, the muscles aching, the sound of her voice unfamiliarly husky.

Her body was drenched in cold sweat and she was starting to shiver. It took her four attempts before she managed to put the receiver down correctly.

If just talking to Bram Soames could affect her like this, then what was she going to be like when she was working with him? It was pointless, useless telling herself that a man with his sexual magnetism, his strong blend of power and charisma—a very obviously heterosexual man who had apparently chosen to remain unattached—was hardly likely to express even the remotest interest in her. The knee-jerk sexual male response she had witnessed in his body at their first meeting did not count. The fact that a man like Bram Soames could and no doubt did have his pick of eager women who made a career out of pursuing men like him, was not the point. The point was that he was a man.

As she focused numbly on the small oblong of obscured daylight from her barred window, she acknowledged that in many ways the window was like her life, what to another woman would be restrictive was to her protective. She needed that protection.

She knew there had been whispered speculation among her colleagues about her sexual orientation. The very fact that she shunned male company so determinedly was bound to give rise to it. But Taylor had no sexual or emotional desire for her own sex. A small, bitter smile twisted her mouth. Unbelievable as those who knew her or thought they knew her might find it, there had been a time when she, too, had dreamed of falling in love, getting married, having children; when sexually she had been open and curious.

And if she was honest with herself, there were still times when, deep down, she felt those needs, nights when she lay awake not just tormented by her fears but filled with bitter anger as well.

It was twenty years now. Twenty years, and there had not been a single day during that time when she had not been conscious of the past, when she had not been fearful of its being recreated, when she had not abandoned the habit of stopping, checking… watching…waiting.

Twenty years. Almost a life sentence, she acknowledged bitterly, but her life was not over yet. She was thirty-nine, that was all.

She could live to be twice that age; both her paternal and her maternal grandparents had. Her parents… She swallowed painfully. Neither of her parents had lived to see fifty. Their deaths haunted her still. They always would.

‘You must not blame yourself. You are not to blame,’ she had been told.

Her head was beginning to ache, the tight knot into which she had pulled her hair dragging on her scalp. It was a luxury at night to let it down and release her neck muscles from the strain of supporting the heavy weight.

Perhaps she ought to wear her hair short. The last time she had done so had been on her sixteenth birthday. The trip to her mother’s hairdresser had been a present paid for by her father, a ritual on the path to adulthood.

She could remember how nervously she had watched her reflection in the mirror as the stylist lopped off her heavy, childish braids. The pretty urchin cut had emphasised the delicate bones of her face, made her eyes seem enormous. Her mother had frowned and commented that the style was rather too adult for her, but Taylor had seen in her father’s eyes male approval for her transformation. She wasn’t a child any more, she was a woman.

She had kept her hair short for several years after that, and just before she had gone to university she had allowed the stylist to experiment with blonde highlights woven into the strands of hair that framed her face.

Her mother had denounced the effect as far too sophisticated and her father hadn’t even noticed the change. Both had been preoccupied then over her sister, who had written from Australia breaking the news of her impend-ing marriage.

‘We don’t want a big fuss, just a quiet ceremony for the two of us…’ she had written to Taylor. ‘And besides, I know our parents don’t approve of what I’m doing.’

That had been a gross understatement of their parents’ views. It had shocked Taylor to hear her parents say that they wanted nothing to do with her sister until she came to her senses and returned home-alone.

Somewhere at the back of her mind she had always been aware that their love came attached to a price tag, but seeing the actual evidence of that suspicion left her feeling very vulnerable, which was why-Her telephone rang again, and she reached out to answer it, glad to escape the painful introspection of her thoughts.

The cab driver gave Taylor a brief smile as she stopped outside the small block of apartments where Taylor lived.

She was a fairly new driver for the firm; most of their regular clients were considerably older than Taylor, who she thought looked about her own age, and, as far as she could see, perfectly healthy.

When she asked curiously in the office about her, no one had been able to tell her anything other than the fact that Taylor had been a regular customer for some years.

The block of apartments was set in neat, well-kept gardens, screened from the main road by trees and shrubs. Initially, when she had gone to view the property Taylor had been put off by this aspect; anything designed to screen the property from the road could also provide a screen for someone trying illicitly to enter the apartments. But in the end she had forced herself to overcome her unease and accept that she was unlikely to find anything better.

The apartment did, after all, fulfil all her other criteria. The large detached Victorian house had been carefully converted into six good-sized apartments, all designed to meet the needs of retired couples. The conversions had been advertised as possessing all the latest security features, locking windows and intercoms.

Taylor had also liked the fact that all the other occupants were people who believed in keeping themselves to themselves; quiet retired professional couples or singles who exchanged polite pleasantries if and when they met before retreating thankfully into their own private domains.

Her own apartment was slightly cheaper than the others and slightly larger, since it was in what had originally been the attic.

It had two bedrooms, each with its own bathroom, a large, pleasant sitting room, a small dining room, an even smaller study, which just about housed her desk and bookshelves, and a neat galley kitchen.

Since no one other than herself was ever allowed inside, there was no one to comment about the apartment’s lack of homely touches. There were no small pots of herbs on the sunny kitchen windowsill, no leafy green plants in the sitting room, no family mementoes—materially worthless, but sentimentally irreplaceable—marring the elegant perfection of the sitting room, decorated and furnished in a cream colour. Even Taylor’s bedroom with its cool eau-de-Nil colour scheme had an almost anonymous feel to it, as though its owner was afraid to leave any personal stamp on the room in case it betrayed her in some way.

Automatically Taylor paused before entering the lift, turning to glance over her shoulder.

The hallway was empty. She stepped quickly into the lift and pressed the button.

Once again, when the lift stopped and the doors opened, she paused to check before stepping out of it, walking quickly across the dove-grey carpeting into the foyer of her apartment.

It took time to unlock the special double lock to her apartment door. Taylor stood sideways as she did so, which made the task more difficult but gave her a clear view both of the lift and of the stairs.

Once inside her apartment she relocked the doors. And then, as she always did, she walked slowly and almost nervously through every room, checking the empty spaces and the locked windows.

Only when this had been done did she allow herself to relax enough to go into her bedroom and close the thick curtains which screened out the light so effectively she had to turn on a lamp before she removed her suit jacket and started to unpin her hair.

As she opened the drawer in her dressing table where she kept her pin box she paused, hesitated and then, so quickly that it was almost as though she was afraid of what she was doing, she reached into the back of the drawer and removed a heavy silver photograph frame. Holding her breath, she turned it over and stared almost greedily at the photograph inside.