Power Play

Her daily maid had already left. In the fridge was a blender full of the fresh ingredients of her favourite health food drink. Pepper took it out and switched it on. Her figure was the sort that could all too easily take on weight, so she was scrupulous about what she ate and drank. And she did exercise—discreetly.

She thought about the letters while she sipped her drink. Four men about whom she knew more than they knew about themselves. Years of painstaking detail built up layer upon layer until she could almost crawl inside their skulls.

She glanced at her watch. It had a plain gold wafer-thin bracelet and came from the Royal jewellers. She always avoided the obvious. Let others wear their Cartier Santos or their Rolex Oysters; Pepper didn’t need that sort of security. This watch had been specially designed for her and owed nothing to fashion’s whims. She would still be wearing it in twenty years’ time and it would still look good.

Her clothes for the evening were already laid out for her; she had left a note for her maid this morning, telling her what she would wear. She gave the same careful attention and thought to her clothes as she did to everything else, but once she had put them on she put them out of her mind.

Tonight she was wearing a Valentino outfit. Unlike many of the other top designers, Valentino acknowledged that not all women were six foot tall. The suit Pepper was wearing tonight was black—a black velvet skirt cut short and tight, and a black velvet long-sleeved top with a long knitted welt that reached from just under the full curve of her breasts to the top of her hips. The knitted welt was designed to hug her body like a second skin. On anyone with a less than perfect figure it would have been a disaster.

She showered first, luxuriating in the warm spray of the water, stretching under it like a jungle cat. This was the other side of her nature; the one that no one else saw—the sensual, sensitive side. The heat of the water brought out the evocative smell of her perfume. It was the only one she ever wore and it clung to her skin with subtle emphasis.

Pepper stepped out of the shower and patted her skin dry before carefully smoothing in body lotion. At twenty-eight her body must already be ageing, according to the laws of science, but she knew without having to look in the mirror that her flesh was luminously firm and that her body held an allure that few men could resist.

Her mouth tightened over the thought and she tensed abruptly. The male sex and its desire for her was not something about which she cared to think. She had been careful over the years to build up an image of herself as a highly sexual woman. It was an image that was so carefully constructed that as yet no one even thought to challenge it. And no one ever would.

A tiny silvery mark low down on her body caught her eye and she frowned, touching it uneasily with one fingertip. The Valentino clung far too tightly to her to allow for any underwear other than a pair of special stockings that hugged the tops of her legs. She had discovered them in New York long before they had been available in British shops.

While she waited for the body lotion to sink into her skin Pepper padded comfortably about her room. Here, alone in her own home with the doors locked and the windows closed, she felt secure enough to do so, but that security had been a long time in coming, and she was intelligent enough to know that no woman who professed to be as sexually experienced as she chose to appear could afford to seem ill at ease with her own body.

Men were like predators, and they had a predator’s instinct for female weakness. Pepper controlled the shiver that threatened her, tensing until only the tiny hairs on her skin showed any reaction, standing up sharply as though subjected to an ice-cold blast of air. Ignoring her betraying reaction, she put on her makeup with the ease of long habit, re-coiling her hair into a fresh chignon. Round her neck she wore a fine gold chain suspending a single flawless diamond. It nestled in the hollow of her throat, flashing fire against her smooth golden skin. Pepper rarely exposed her body to the sun; holidays were not something that held any appeal for her and a sunbed was far less hazardous to her skin. Her face she never allowed to tan.

At a quarter to seven she let herself out of the house and stepped into her car. The hood was back up. She inserted a tape into the machine in the dashboard and switched it on. As she drove to her destination she listened to the sound of her own voice relating every piece of information they had on file about Carl Viner. It was part of her credo to know everything there was to know about her clients. By the time she handed over her car to the doorman at the Grosvenor, she had virtually memorised the tennis star’s biography.

Over her suit she was wearing a short evening cape of black velvet lined with white mink, spotted in black like ermine. It was pure theatre—a necessary part of the façade she presented to the world, and although Pepper didn’t show it she was humorously aware of the looks people gave her as she walked indolently through the foyer.

One of the staff behind the reception desk recognised her, and within seconds she was being escorted to the suite where the private party was being held.

The party was being hosted and paid for by the manufacturers of the tennis shoes that the young star Carl Viner had agreed to endorse. Pepper had negotiated a six-figure advance payment plus royalties for the deal. She took ten per cent.

Jeff Stowell, the star’s agent, was hovering just inside the door. He grabbed hold of her arm.

“Where the hell have you been?” he demanded.

“Why? It’s exactly seven o’clock, Jeff,” she told him coolly, detaching herself from him and allowing the waiter standing behind her to take her cape. She could see that Jeff was sweating slightly, and she wondered why he was so nervous. He was an ebullient man with a tendency to bully those beneath him. He treated his clients like children, exhorting and coaxing the very best out of them.

“Look, there’s someone here tonight who wants to meet you—Ted Steiner, the yachtsman. He’s with Mark McCormack, but he’s looking for a change.” Jeff saw her frown. “What’s the matter? I thought you’d be pleased…”

“I could well be,” Pepper agreed coolly. “Once I know why he’s thinking of leaving McCormack. It’s only six months since he won the Whitbread Challenge Trophy and signed with him. If he’s into drugs and he’s looking to me to supply them he can forget it.”

She saw the dull flush of colour crawl up under the agent’s skin and knew that her information had been correct.

“Moral scruples,” he bluffed.

Pepper shook her head. “No. Financial ones—apart from the obvious potential hassle with the police and the Press, a sports star who’s hooked on drugs doesn’t stay the best in the world for very long, and when he loses that status he loses his earning power, and without that he’s no use to me.”

She stepped past him while Jeff was still pondering on her words and looked round for Carl Viner.

He was fairly easy to find. He liked women and they liked him. Half a dozen or more of them were crowded round him now, tanned long-legged beauties, all blonde, but the moment he saw Pepper walking towards him they lost his attention. He had a well-deserved playboy image and for that reason some of the other agencies were wary of him, but he was shrewd enough to know what would happen if he played too hard, and it was Pepper’s private conviction that he was a definite contender for next year’s Wimbledon title.

Unlike all the other men present, who were wearing formal lounge or dinner suits, he was dressed in tennis whites. His shorts were brief enough to be potentially indecent. His hair was blond and sun-streaked, and fell over his forehead in unruly curls. He was twenty-one and had been playing tennis since he was twelve. He looked like a mischievous six-foot child, all appealing blue eyes and smooth muscles. But in reality he had a mind like a steel trap.

“Pepper!”

He rolled her name round his mouth, caressing it as though he was caressing her skin. As a lover he would be the type of man who liked to kiss and suck. Pepper knew even before his eyes moved in that direction that his tastes ran to women whose breasts were high and full.

One of the blondes clinging to his side pouted, teetering between sulky acceptance of Pepper’s presence and aggressive resentment. Pepper ignored her and looked down at his feet. He was tall and muscular and took a size eleven tennis shoe. The grin he gave her when she lifted her eyes to his face contained pure lust.

“If you want to see if the adage is true, I’m more than happy to oblige.”

The gaggle of blondes erupted into sycophantic giggles. Pepper eyed him coolly.

“You already have,” she told him drily, “but as it happens I was just checking to make sure you’re wearing the sponsor’s shoes.”

Carl Viner’s face reddened like a spoilt child’s. She leaned forward and patted him on the cheek, digging her nails gently into his smooth flesh. “Real women always prefer the subtle to the obvious. Until you’ve learned that you’d better stick to playing with your pretty dolls.”

The sponsors were a relatively new company in the sports footwear field and they had wanted a racy, sophisticated image for their product. Pepper had read about them in the financial press, and it had been she who had approached them. Their financial director had thought that that gave him an edge over her, but she had soon disabused him of that. She already had several tennis shoe manufacturers clamouring with offers of sponsorship. She had never had any intention of allowing her client to accept an offer from anyone but the company she had chosen—they had the soundest financial backing; and they had also designed a shoe whose efficiency and style would soon outstrip the others, but they had allowed Pepper’s self-confidence and coolness to undermine their own faith in themselves, and Alan Hart, their Financial Director, had been forced to back down and accept her terms.

He was here tonight.

There had been a time when he had thought he could get Pepper into bed, and his ego still smarted from her rejection of him.

For a woman who wasn’t very tall, she moved extremely well. Someone had once described the way she walked as a sensual combination of leopardess’s feline, muscled prowl and a snake’s hypnotic sway. It wasn’t a walk she deliberately cultivated; it was the result of generations of proudly independent women.

Alan Hart watched her as she moved gracefully from group to group, and he also watched the effect she had on people around her. Men were dazzled by her, and she used her sexuality like a surgeon with a sharp knife.

“I wonder what she’s like in bed.”

He turned his head and said without smiling to the man standing beside him,

“She’s a tease.”

The other man laughed.

“Are you speaking from personal experience?”

He ignored the question, his eyes following Pepper’s indolent walk.

How had she done it? How had she built up her multi-million-pound empire from less than nothing? For a man to have achieved so much by the time he was thirty would be awe-inspiring enough. For a woman…and one who by her own admission had barely received the most basic sort of formal education, never mind gone to university…

Alan freely acknowledged his own sense of almost savage resentment. Women like Pepper Minesse challenged men too much. His own wife was quite content with her role as his mental and financial inferior. He had given her two children and all the material benefits any woman could possibly want. He was regularly unfaithful to her and thought no more about it than he did about changing his shirt. If he gave it any thought at all he assumed that even if his wife was aware of his infidelities she would never leave him. She would lose too much; she couldn’t support herself, and he had been careful to make sure that she never had more than pin-money to spend. He didn’t know it, but for the last three years his wife had been having an affair with one of his closest friends. He didn’t know it, but Pepper did.

She left after she had got what she had come for—a tentative offer of sponsorship for one of her other clients; a boy from the back streets of Liverpool who was one day going to win a gold medal for his speed on the running track.

The preliminary skirmishes were over; now the hard bargaining would begin. It was a game in which Pepper was a skilled player.

In a London sorting office, electronic machinery relentlessly checked and despatched the unending sacks of mail, and four letters slid into their appropriate slots.

It had begun. On the chessboard of life the pieces were being moved into position.