Power Games

He got the cabbie to drop him off on the corner and then walked down the street, pausing to examine the small discreet brass plate outside the address he wanted. It proclaimed that the building was owned by Aphrodite Films Ltd. The woman Jay had come to see was Aphrodite Films and Aphrodite Films was…

Well, what was Aphrodite Films? First and foremost it was in a class of its own, fulfilling and satisfying a market which it had created, a market which had nothing to do with Hollywood and also nothing to do with the shadowy pornographic cousins on the other side of the industry; or so Bonnie Howlett always soothingly reassured her clients.

Clients came to her because they could be assured of two things. The first was that they would get what they wanted and the second was that Bonnie guaranteed absolutely, completely and for ever, that their business with her was confidential. As she always told them, with the fees she charged, she could make far more money from what she was doing with the guarantee of complete confidentiality she gave them, than she could from blackmailing them.

And Bonnie’s clients believed her. They believed her, they trusted her, and they told their friends about her. And in all the years she had been giving those guarantees, Bonnie had never broken one. No one other than herself and the client ever saw the finished product, of which there was always only one copy. What the client then chose to do with that copy was her business and hers alone.

Bonnie had had women come to her who confessed they would rather kill themselves than have anyone else know what they were doing, and others who admitted just as openly that what they were planning was to be a special surprise for a boyfriend or lover.

Bonnie had long ago ceased to be shocked or surprised by the desires and needs of human nature. Sometimes she did feel sadness and pity, but she kept these emotions strictly to herself. It was not, after all, her job to feel emotion for her clients, simply to see that they got what they wanted.

Now as she let Jay into her office, she looked at him warily. It was very unusual for her to be approached by a male client, and if he hadn’t been so insistent that what he wanted was simply to have a small tape tidied up a little, to look more professional, she would probably have refused to see him altogether. Her business was to supply women, her own sex, with the kind of visual sexual stimulation they wanted, specific visual stimulation, in which normally they themselves featured, generally in their own individual fantasy.

If necessary, she could and did provide these women with the partner or partners of their choice—partners who came with a strictly monitored clean bill of health. Mostly young out-of-work actors who were only too glad of the confidentiality clauses she insisted on them signing, and the fact that no one else would ever see what they had done. Working on the pornographic side of the industry was still a big no-no on the legit side of the business—it did not do to get found out. No one who worked for Bonnie ever got found out and she paid well. Or rather her clients did. A woman wanted to have herself videotaped enjoying the sexual attention of two different men? No problem, Bonnie could arrange it.

That she might also want these same men dressed up in the clothes of the eighteenth century, with one of them posing as a highwayman, seducing her inside the coach he had stopped on some quiet rural stretch of road, was also no problem. Bonnie knew just the right location…just the right coach…just the right place to get the dress.

Now as she watched Jay, Bonnie was mentally assessing him. She already knew that the video he had handed her would not contain any frames of him. He was far too guarded, too wary, too suspicious to involve himself in anything which might be used to harm him. And too controlled. Much too controlled for a man so obviously sexually attractive, and she suspected, totally heterosexual.

‘What exactly is it you want me to do with this?’ she asked Jay as she took the tape from him.

‘Professionalise it,’ he told her promptly.

‘Professionalise.’ Her eyebrows rose, the bastardised word having sounded odd delivered in his cool very crisp British voice. ‘I’ll have to look at it first,’ she warned him.

‘How long will that take?’ he asked, flicking back his cuff to glance at his watch. A plain utilitarian Rolex, which she noticed looked as though he had owned it for a long time. He was, she recognised, very arrogant, self-assured…perhaps too much so.

She didn’t allow herself to smile as she told him calmly, ‘Normally two weeks, but at the moment I’m very busy, so it could be three if things go well. I’ll have to check it out first.’

‘I don’t have three weeks. I’m only in New York for a fortnight.’ He stopped and gave her a penetrating look.

Arrogant, yes, but perhaps not totally without some instinct for other people’s reactions, Bonnie acknowledged.

‘It’s a birthday present,’ he told her, changing tack. ‘My father’s…a very close friend…’

His father’s what? Bonnie wondered thoughtfully.

‘How long before you can let me know?’

‘You can ring me in three days’ time to find out if I can actually do anything with it.’

He wasn’t pleased, Bonnie recognised, and he would have tried to pressure her to give him precedence, had she not intimated that he had no option but to accept what he was being told.

Jay was already regretting the impulse that had led him to telephone Nadia from London, asking her out to dinner. They had originally met at university and had become lovers after an aggressive and lengthy pursuit on his part, not as she had once accused him, because he had particularly wanted her, but because everyone else did. Their romance had already been over then, ended by Nadia, who had told him calmly that in bed he was too good, and out of it, nowhere near good enough.

Jay hadn’t been unduly concerned about the ending of their relationship, Nadia’s razor-sharp brain, coupled with her healthy feminine intuition, had begun to make him irritably wary. She asked too many questions, and drew too many conclusions. She had a top-flight job now with a New York firm of brokers, and it had crossed Jay’s mind when he originally got in touch with her that she might be able to provide an angle on the people he was negotiating with. But now his father’s firm rejection of his plans had soured his mood. And the mocking amusement in Bonnie Howlett’s eyes as she told him how long he would have to wait to get his video hadn’t improved it. He wasn’t quite sure yet how he intended to give Plum her ‘present,’ publicly or privately. Privately would probably be best—not that he had the slightest compunction about staging a public viewing of it. After all, if she was stupid enough to make the damn thing in the first place, and then leave it where it could so easily be found…

It irritated the hell out of him the way his father constantly made excuses for her. And, of course, he knew why. Christ, his father even let her get away with claiming that she loved him and that she thought Bram was just about the sexiest, most gorgeous man that ever was.

‘It’s a lovely thought, but truthfully, little one, I’m far too old for you,’ Bram had told her the first time she propositioned him.

Jay knew this because Plum had told him about it herself, crying that her heart was broken because his father had rejected her.

‘And I know I could make it good for him,’ she had told Jay earnestly. She might love his father, but that certainly didn’t stop her from being sexually promiscuous on a scale that caused those who knew about her reputation to view her with either approval or contempt depending upon their outlook. What irked Jay most of all was that despite it all, she still somehow managed to preserve an almost dewy-eyed look of innocent freshness and to hang on to her place in his father’s affections—a place higher up the scale than his own? Right now, though, he needed to decide what to do about dinner with Nadia. The last thing he needed was that incisively sharp brain of hers latching on to his mood and then questioning it. He’d move his dinner date with her to another evening, he decided, when he would be in a better frame of mind to handle her.

In Jay’s experience, the best and easiest way to silence a woman’s questions was to take her to bed. But the thrill of sexual conquest wasn’t one that motivated him any more. In his teens and at university, yes, he had gone through a phase of equating manhood with sexual conquest.

‘You like being in control too much,’ Nadia had accused him just before she ended their relationship. ‘In fact, you don’t just like it, you need it. Well, I’m tired of being “given” my orgasm, like a child given a sweet, and if you must know, I’d get a lot more pleasure from going to bed with a man who genuinely wanted me. The only pleasure you get from having sex with me is that of knowing you’re in control. Well, not any more.’

Since then he’d never repeated the mistake of allowing any woman to get to know him as well as Nadia had done—in bed or out of it.

Chapter 3

In London Bram was going out for the evening—not à deux with an ex-lover, but rather more formally at the invitation of the Foreign Secretary, who was hosting a small reception.

Bram knew, or was acquainted with, many of the other guests. There had been a suggestion the previous year that he might be nominated for an honour in the New Year’s Honours list until he had very firmly let it be known that, gratified though he was, he did not wish to be considered. He did not believe that, in the present economic climate, the amassing of a large personal fortune merited such a nomination—no matter how honestly earned or through how much hard work and even taking into consideration the concurrent input into the exchequer via the Inland Revenue.

‘You give as much to charity, and probably more, than most of the others being nominated, and you can be sure they won’t be turning their honours down,’ Jay had pointed out cynically.

‘I give a small percentage of my income, but I do nothing,’ had been Bram’s response.

Worldly ambition, wealth had never really motivated him. He had simply been in the right place at the right time and with the right kind of skills. His business success had, to his mind, been founded on chance and luck. The small empire which had developed from it, the people he employed who were dependent upon it, they were his responsibility and he took that responsibility seriously, as he had tried to explain to Jay. He suspected that Jay had not understood his desire to protect their employees and preferred, instead, to believe that his father was deliberately thwarting him.

It had perhaps been unwise, Bram acknowledged, to remind Jay of Plum’s forthcoming birthday. Jay was so hostile towards her. Because he couldn’t see the similarities between the childhood traumas which had led to the adult emotional problems of them both, or because he could?

Did Jay recognise that the roots of Plum’s promiscuity, her intense need for male love and approval, lay just as surely in her childhood as the roots of Jay’s need for total control over everything and everyone did in his?

He must do. He was far too intelligent not to recognise this, Bram decided. Was there any modern parent who did not grieve for all the ways in which they had failed their child? Helena might mask her feelings of guilt by distancing herself from Plum and claiming in public that she was too much her father’s child, but no doubt there were times when she, like him, wondered in despair how it was possible to love a child so much and yet still fail them so badly.

When Jay returned from New York he would have to talk to him again about his reasons for turning down his expansion plans.

It had never been Bram’s desire to become so successful. In the early days all he had wanted to do was to earn a decent living. Not even to his closest friends could he confide how much life had begun to pall, how heavy he sometimes found the burden of his success. It seemed so ungrateful not to take more pleasure in what he had achieved.

And what was he doing to Jay by condemning him to the role of heir in waiting? Jay’s business acumen was far sharper than his own. He was more than qualified to take control of the business, and under his guardianship its profits would undoubtedly grow. But what about its people—would they, too, thrive under Jay’s management?

Jay—had there been a week, a day, an hour even, in the years that he had taken full responsibility for his son that Jay had not dominated his thoughts and in many ways his actions as well?

But it was not Jay he was thinking of later in the evening as he joined the other guests at the Foreign Secretary’s reception.

It was Taylor.

And not just because Sir Anthony and his wife were among the guests.

It was the kind of occasion at which the British excelled, Bram reflected as he refused a champagne cocktail and studied the other guests. It might not have the stiff formality which hallmarked similar occasions at the embassies in Paris, nor the expensive trappings and attention to detail which glittered through even the lowliest Washington dinner party; but the slightly shabby elegance of the rooms, the relaxed mood of the guests, that indefinable and inimitable air of ease and permanence, of tradition, which is so very British, overlay the whole proceedings like the fine patina on a piece of richly polished antique furniture. The signs of age and familiarity of usage deceived only ignorant eyes.

‘Bram, how are you?’

Bram turned, smiling warmly as he heard the familiar voice of another guest.