Power Games

A girl’s face smiled back at her. She had an open, warm smile; her whole expression one of intelligence and confidence.

Her eyes were blue-grey, her hair a riot of thick, dark red curls. The photograph was only a head and shoulders shot, but it conveyed the impression of someone who would be lithe and quick, a positive dynamo of movement and life. For a teenager, she possessed remarkable composure and self-assurance. It radiated out of her…as did her obvious joy in life, her happiness.

As Taylor returned the photograph to the drawer she could feel a burning sensation stinging the back of her eyes. Her throat ached. Fiercely she blinked away her tears. Her emotion was inappropriate and selfish, and it would mean nothing to the girl in the photograph. Why should it?

Chapter 6

‘The Gibbons file is on your desk. Mike Gibbons should be ringing you later this afternoon. His secretary promised she would try to contact him. Oh, and Franklins have been on several times asking for Jay. When they heard he was in New York, they asked if they could speak to you instead.’

‘Marcia stop fussing. I’ll manage. You get yourself off to the hospital. Richard will take you. The car’s waiting downstairs for you.’ Bram shook his head as his secretary attempted to interrupt him, and said firmly, ‘No arguments. He’ll get you there faster than any taxi.’

Although his voice had been calmly reassuring when he spoke to her, Bram was frowning as his secretary hurried out of his office. She had received a call half an hour earlier to say that her husband had been taken to hospital with a suspected heart attack. Quite naturally, she was now in a frantic state. She and her husband were in their forties, their two children at university. Marcia had worked for Bram for almost ten years, knew all his small foibles and, like the very best PAs, made sure that his office routine ran smoothly. She was panicking now, not just about her husband but, in a lesser way, about Bram as well.

Marcia was more than just his secretary; she was in effect his office manager. She knew all their major customers by name, unlike the junior secretary who would have to stand in for her. It was a pity that Louise, Jay’s secretary, was on holiday, Bram reflected as he mentally reviewed his diary for the next few days. He would have to cancel or rearrange as many of his outside appointments as he could in order to be on call in his office.

His frown deepened as he realised that one of the appointments that would have to be rearranged was the one he had with Taylor Fielding. Taylor Fielding. What, he wondered, had caused the fear he had heard in her voice when he spoke to her? Surely to God not him. She hadn’t struck him as the kind of woman who would be awed or intimidated by another human being’s worldly position or material possessions. Far from it. If anything, when they had met he had got the impression that she disapproved of him. Her attitude towards him had certainly veered towards the dismissive rather than the adulatory. He drummed his fingertips thoughtfully on the top of his desk. He was half-tempted to cancel his appointment with her. And do what? Ask Anthony to assign someone else to work with him? Abandon the project altogether? No, he could not take either of those evasive courses of action. Unfortunately, and perhaps at his own instigation, he and Taylor Fielding were fated to be on a collision course.

Grimly, Bram walked through to the outer office and asked the woman who had taken over from Marcia to ring through to the charity’s headquarters for him.

Taylor was in her office talking with Sir Anthony when the call came through. In such a small enclosed space it was impossible for her boss not to overhear their conversation, even though he had diplomatically walked over to the small window when he had recognised Bram Soames’s voice.

Taylor’s heart sank as she heard Bram explain that it was impossible for him to leave his office.

‘I apologise for having to change things at such short notice, but I was wondering if it is possible after all for you to come to me later this afternoon. I could send a car for you.’

Taylor closed her eyes. How could she refuse to go when Sir Anthony was there? He was bound to hear what she was saying and ultimately query her decision.

Sickly, Taylor nodded her head, and then, realising the idiocy of what she was doing, managed to utter a tortured agreement to the alteration in their original arrangement.

‘There was really no need to send a car for me. I am perfectly capable of walking half a mile or so, you know. Or was it supposed to be less an inducement and more a potential threat?’ Taylor demanded aggressively as Bram showed her into his office.

Bram had had an exasperating afternoon. The woman sent to take Marcia’s place was new to the company and inclined to treat him with a mixture of awe and feminine appraisal, which instead of finding flattering he found extremely irritating. So irritating, in fact, that he reacted with uncharacteristic heat to Taylor’s aggression.

‘I hardly think that providing you with transport can logically be considered a threat,’ he returned as he pulled out a chair for her and waved her into it.

‘That all depends on what viewpoint you look at it from,’ Taylor told him angrily. ‘Sending your driver to collect me could be seen almost as a form of coercion, of kidnap….’

‘Kidnap?’ Bram stared at her, his frown changing to an amused smile. ‘In broad daylight, on a busy London street?’

‘It has been known to happen,’ Taylor informed him, her face flushing as her eyes darkened with resentment at his amusement and the shadow of memories she still had to fight to suppress.

‘I see. Well, please enlighten me then. Having kidnapped you and had you brought here against your will, what is it exactly I’m supposed to do with you? As you can see, this office is hardly the place one would choose for a passionate seduction and—’

Taylor stood, her eyes flashing, her normal control exploded by the force of her fury. How dare he make fun of her like this! He knew quite well that she had not been talking about sex.

‘I will not be manipulated by you,’ she told him stormily. ‘I will not be forced into pandering to your ego or, just because it doesn’t suit your opinion of yourself, for you to be the one to come to me, you—’

Bram stared at her. He pushed his hand wearily into his hair.

‘Look. You’ve got this all wrong,’ he told her quietly. ‘I changed the venue of our appointment simply because my secretary has had a personal emergency—her husband has been admitted to hospital. Naturally she wanted to be with him, which meant that it would have been difficult for me to leave the office.’

Now it was Taylor’s turn to stare at him, the angry colour staining her fair skin slowly burning into a deeper flush of embarrassment.

It had disturbed her to be told that Bram Soames had sent a car to collect her; it had reminded her of… Defensively she switched her thoughts away from the past and back to the present, gnawing worriedly at her bottom lip as she acknowledged that she seemed to have made an error of judgement.

‘Look, why don’t we start again,’ Bram suggested firmly. ‘I promise you that I had no ulterior motive whatsoever in sending Richard to drive you. I simply thought it would save time—yours as well as mine. It never occurred to me that you’d think I was trying to coerce or bully you, and I apologise for that oversight.’

But not for his sexist remarks following her outburst against his actions, Taylor noted silently.

She looked calmer now, Bram observed, watching Taylor as she digested his comments, calmer and very alert. He suspected that her outburst had shocked her in much the same way that his own sexually verbal response to it had shocked him.

The strain of the latest tussle of wills with Jay coupled with the intensity of his desire to succeed in his mission to write this special program must be affecting him more than he realised.

‘Working together isn’t going to be easy—for either of us,’ he told Taylor quietly, abandoning his initial urge to cravenly ignore the hostility they seemed to generate towards each other in favour of a more responsible approach to the problem.

‘But I think I’m right in saying that ultimately we both want the same thing, which is a successful outcome to this project.’

‘If there can be one,’ Taylor agreed grimly.

‘You don’t believe there can?’

‘It’s been tried before without success.’

‘Which doesn’t mean that we can’t succeed.’

Against her better judgment Taylor found herself unexpectedly warming to that unanticipated ‘we.’ But then he was obviously the kind of man who was good at generating team spirit, at making others feel they were important, she warned herself.

‘Still, it’s a view you aren’t alone in taking,’ Bram continued. ‘My son, for one, certainly shares it.’ He gave her a wry look. ‘I shall just have to do my best to prove you both wrong, shan’t I. Can I get you a drink, by the way, tea…coffee…? It will have to be from the machine, I’m afraid.’

Taylor stared at him. Sir Anthony, for all his paternalism, would certainly never have suggested fetching a more junior member of his staff a drink from the office dispensing machines; nor indeed, Taylor suspected, would he have drunk one himself. Although she searched his face thoroughly, there was no trace of self-consciousness or mockery in Bram’s expression as he waited for her response.

Perhaps she had been wrong about him, Taylor acknowledged hesitantly…guilty of overreacting, of al-lowing her own prejudice to overshadow logic and reality.

‘I…coffee, please,’ she requested.

Taylor moved self-consciously in her chair, pressing a quelling hand to her rumbling stomach, as it gurgled protest at its lack of food.

It was almost seven o’clock but the time had passed so quickly she was astonished that it was so late.

Once she had managed to distance herself from her own fears and preconceptions, she had discovered that Bram was unexpectedly well informed about the problems he was likely to face in writing his program. Even more surprisingly, he was genuinely concerned for the plight of the people he was trying to help.

‘I’m sorry. I didn’t intend to keep you so long,’ he was apologising now, as her stomach protested even more volubly. ‘I hadn’t realised it was getting so late. There’s a very good Italian restaurant just round the corner where I frequently eat when I’m working late. Look, why don’t you join me for dinner there, and please don’t tell me that you’re not hungry.’

Taylor grimaced, suppressing the small spurt of panic that his suggestion reactivated. She really had nothing to fear from this man, she told herself. He was not remotely interested in her as a woman;

he was merely being polite. If she started to protest, to object, she was bound to arouse his suspicions and make herself look a complete idiot into the bargain. That comment he had made to her earlier when she had complained about him sending a car for her still rankled slightly.

It would be much easier—much safer—to fight down her instinctive reaction to his suggestion and accept.