Power Games

She faltered in midstep, overwhelmed by a sudden compulsion to tell him that she had changed her mind, that she didn’t want dinner after all…that she couldn’t spend any more time with him. But it was already too late; he was already pointing out the restaurant entrance to her, and her own logic was telling her that she had made enough of a fool of herself already.

Chapter 7

‘I’m sorry. I must be boring you.’ Bram smiled across the table at Taylor. ‘I do tend to get a bit carried away about this project.’

‘It’s a very challenging project to take on,’ Taylor agreed as she forked up another delicious mouthful of carbonara.

She wasn’t quite sure what she had expected from the restaurant. A certain degree of up-market exclusivity, a sense of being a little out of place? But she had been totally wrong on both counts. The restaurant was comfortable rather than elegant, and very obviously family owned and run. The glorious taste of the food had instantly transported her back to the last holiday she, her parents and her sister had shared before everything had started to go wrong.

Tuscany had been relatively undiscovered then, and her teenager’s developing mind and senses had eagerly absorbed the new experiences the holiday had brought.

She could still remember the hot dry scent of the countryside; her delight in its medieval towns, in history brought sharply into focus. The reality of it was so clear that she’d had only to close her eyes to imagine she was back in the days of the Borgias when Italy had been at the height of its political and financial powers.

And then there had been the food.

Hastily she brought herself back to the present, watching Bram’s expression as he responded to her comment.

‘Yes, I know. Jay feels we should be concentrating on expansion and not—’ Bram broke off. ‘He and I are going through a difficult patch at the moment. Our relationship has never been an easy one, which is more my fault than his.’

As he looked directly at her, Taylor tried to mask her curiosity, but it was too late; he had seen it.

‘I was fourteen when Jay was conceived,’ he told her. ‘It was the result of…well, let’s just say it wasn’t exactly planned or wanted by either his mother or myself. And as far as I’m concerned, no child should have to grow up knowing that he wasn’t wanted.’

‘Fourteen!’ Taylor protested, trying and failing to master her shock.

‘Yes. I agree. Not an ideal age to become a father,’ Bram conceded. ‘Not for me and certainly not for Jay….’

‘Fourteen,’ Taylor repeated, her food forgotten as she tried to remember herself at that age, tried to imagine how she might have felt at the thought of becoming a mother.

‘You must have been…’

‘What?’ Bram asked her grimly, without allowing her to finish. ‘Oversexed? A coercive bully?’ He shook his head. ‘No, I wasn’t either. It wasn’t like that. The whole thing was quite literally an accident, in every sense of the word…. Jay’s mother was the daughter of our neighbours. We’d grown up together, so to speak. She was older than I was, sixteen to my fourteen. She’d been dating someone, another boy. I didn’t know him, but they’d had a quarrel and she turned to me for…for a shoulder to cry on and…consolation. Only things got slightly out of hand. Neither of us ever intended—it was the first time for me and I remember feeling afterwards rather bewildered and let down, wondering what all the fuss was about.

‘I was at an all-boys school, and of course there’d been the usual bragging and young male bravado. The most I’d ever experienced before was a rather clumsy attempt to kiss a girl at a party, but Tara—’ he paused, looking away from Taylor abruptly ‘—her parents were very strict. Too strict, according to mine, and of course in the time-honoured way of young girls she’d rebelled against them. Her boyfriend, the one she’d quarrelled with, was someone her parents didn’t approve of. They’d already forbidden her to go on seeing him, but I doubt they had any idea just how far the relationship had gone.

‘I must admit to being slightly shocked when Tara told me. There was no one else for her to confide in, I suppose. Like me she was at boarding school without any close girlfriends locally to talk to.’

‘When she saw how shocked I was she teased me about it. Asked me if I’d done it yet…forced me to confess that I hadn’t. She’d always enjoyed teasing me. I can remember how embarrassed I felt, especially when she started boasting to me about her boyfriend’s physical attributes.

‘I suppose that was what did it really. The need to prove myself, as it were. I doubt, originally, that she’d intended it to go any further than a piece of playful teasing. She could see how my body had reacted to what she was saying, and when she reached for my zip, I doubt she’d got anything more in mind than making fun of me for my excitement.

‘However, as I said, one thing led to another, and without either of us really intending it to happen, we became lovers….’

Bram’s mouth twisted slightly. ‘Lovers. In reality that was the last thing we were. In reality Jay’s conception was a pathetic, clumsy, mismanaged thing that even now I’m surprised it actually resulted in a child…. I really didn’t have much of a clue of what to do, and Tara, for all her boasting, wasn’t all that much more experienced.

‘I went back to school shortly afterwards. When my parents turned up unexpectedly to visit five months later, the last thing I was expecting to hear was that Tara was pregnant with my child.

‘I think that up until then they had been unwilling to believe it, but one look at my face must have betrayed my guilt.

‘Of course, there was no question of us marrying, nor indeed of there being a termination. It was much too late for that.

‘My parents offered to adopt the baby, but her parents refused. However, the only way her father would allow her to keep her child was if she promised never to see me again, and if I promised never to attempt to see my child. They said that I’d done enough, caused enough misery to their daughter and to them—’

‘They blamed you?’ Taylor interjected, unable to hold back the question or conceal her disbelief.

‘I was to blame,’ Bram told her. ‘Jay was…is my son…. I didn’t know then that my agreement would lead Jay to believe that I had refused to acknowledge him, or that his grandparents were going to use the circumstances of his birth to make him feel—’ Bram shook his head ‘—I’m sorry, I must be boring you.’

‘No. No, you aren’t,’ Taylor told him honestly. It was something totally outside her previous experience, to have a man be so totally open with her. Her father had always somehow distanced himself from both her and her sister, and the only other man she had really been close to… She closed her eyes, trying hard to resist the memories lurking in the shadows of her mind, waiting to stalk and terrify her as once…

‘Sir Anthony told me that you had brought your son up alone, but I hadn’t realised. You must be very close to each other.’

As she saw the way his expression changed, Taylor knew she had hit a nerve. Unexpectedly, instead of feeling triumph that she had found some vulnerability in a man who, in all other respects, had seemed to her to be totally invulnerable, what she actually felt was an unfamiliar sense of sympathy.

‘In some ways, yes,’ Bram agreed. ‘In others…’ He paused and looked across the table. It was unlike him to talk so openly about himself on such a very short acquaintance.

He had never been someone who felt it necessary to conceal certain aspects of his personality or his life, withholding information to boost his own sense of power or control, but neither was he given to instant intimacy or confidence sharing.

‘Jay was six years old when he came to live with me. He had been brought up to believe that I didn’t want him, that I had rejected him. He was very, very insecure. He refused to believe that I did love him, that I wasn’t lying to him when I told him that he had no need to fear that I would abandon him. Subconsciously, I suspect, he blamed me for the unhappiness of his early years—with good reason. As a child he was very possessive about me…about our relationship.’

Again he stopped speaking. He rarely discussed his real feelings about Jay’s possessiveness towards him.

Possessive. Taylor shuddered openly as she silently repeated the word.

‘What’s wrong?’ Bram asked her, as she pushed her food away from her, her face suddenly pale and strained. ‘Don’t you like it? I can—’

‘No. No…I’m just not hungry any more,’ Taylor told him huskily. ‘That…that must have been very hard to deal with… your son being…possessive about you.’

Taylor knew she was walking on dangerous ground, but she seemed drawn compulsively to it, like a child knowingly taking the risk of walking on ice in spite of warnings that it was too thin, thrilling to the sense of danger the action brought, even while terrified by it.

‘It hasn’t always been easy,’ Bram allowed, but he was still frowning as he looked at her plate of half-eaten food. Taylor sensed that he was regretting having confided in her, and that he was deliberately trying to focus both his own and her attention in other directions.

Silently she gave in. After all, she knew well enough what it felt like not to want to talk…to explain…to feel threatened by another person’s curiosity and interest.

‘What about you?’ Bram asked her. ‘Your family—’

‘I don’t have one,’ Taylor told him quickly. ‘They’re all…my parents were killed in…in an accident when… some years ago….’

‘When you were at university,’ Bram hazarded, remembering what Anthony had told him about her leaving university.

The look of shock and fear on her face was so intense that it made Bram wonder what on earth he had said to cause it.

‘How…how did you know about that?’ she demanded hoarsely. ‘About my leaving university. How did you know when…when the accident happened.’

‘I didn’t,’ Bram told her, giving her a puzzled look. ‘I just guessed that it could have happened then, because Anthony mentioned that you left before getting your degree.’

‘I take it you were an only child. Their deaths must have been very painful for you.’ Her frozen intentness, her wary hostility marked such a dramatic change from her earlier manner when they had been discussing Jay that it caught Bram totally off guard. Why had his mentioning the fact that she had left university early caused such a dramatic reaction? Not surely simply because she felt embarrassed about not completing her degree.

While Bram tried to puzzle out what was wrong, Taylor had started to reach for her handbag. ‘I…I have to go,’ she told him when he looked at her. ‘I…’