Power Games

That had been just one of the quarrels which had ultimately led to the collapse of their relationship. In personality they were poles apart. Nadia was the great-granddaughter of Russian immigrants who had fled to London at the time of the revolution; her nature was passionate and volatile, and when she believed in something, she believed in it utterly and completely—and expected those close to her to believe in it as well.

When Jay had refused to do so she had denounced him as being too cold, too clinical, too good at using logic to deny real feelings.

But Nadia had had a logic of her own, a logic which had ultimately led to her ending their relationship. She’d told Jay that, although sexually he was a very good lover, the cost of maintaining their relationship was an investment she was not prepared to make. ‘Think of our relationship as a bank,’ she had told him fiercely. ‘I am the one who does all the emotional paying in, Jay. You are the one who is always drawing out, who makes no contribution emotionally.

‘I have too much respect for myself, too many things I want to do with my life, to burden myself with that kind of debt. I am not like your father, endlessly prepared to fund your emotional poverty. I have a need to make withdrawals of my own…to require my own support. Fucking you is heaven, but loving you would be hell.’

No, he mused, theirs had not been the kind of relationship which would allow them now to sit down comfortably together and reminisce over their shared past.

Not that Nadia had ever been the type to waste time reminiscing about the past. She lived in the present and worked for the future. Even while at London University she had been very clear-minded about what she wanted, where she was going….

‘I am a citizen of the world,’ she had been fond of saying. ‘The fate which has denied me the right to a country of my own has also freed me to live without any hampering emotional attachments to any particular country. My great-grandparents might have settled here in Britain, but they were always treated as outsiders. I owe no more loyalty to Britain than I do to anywhere else.’

‘But it’s Britain, the British people, who have given you your security, your education…your freedom.’ Jay had challenged her.

‘No,’ Nadia had countered fiercely. ‘These are things I have taken for myself…worked for myself…. I do not owe anyone anything.’

She had never made any secret of her ambitions, and now, by all accounts, she was well on the way to fulfilling them.

Half an hour later as Jay stood under the shower letting the spray hammer his flesh, he found himself thinking about her again.

She had been his first really serious lover, challenging and mocking him in the days before she finally allowed him to catch her, and continuing to do so even afterwards.

He had never discovered just how or with whom she had learned the sexual expertise which had made her such a skilled lover. Now, with hindsight, he suspected it had been with an older man—or men. She had certainly been confident enough to tell him quite clearly and firmly when he didn’t please or satisfy her as she wanted.

She had been the first woman, the only woman, when he thought about it, who had made it clear that she considered the act of cunnilingus one that she not only had every right to expect from him as a regular part of their lovemaking, but also one by which she judged the manner of a man.

‘Only a man who is ignorant of the true pleasure of sex thinks that all he has to do to give a woman satisfaction is to penetrate her,’ Nadia had declared scornfully after listening to a fellow male undergraduate boasting about the number of times he had “fucked” his partner in one twenty-four-hour period.

‘For a woman, penetration is nothing. It is the way a man savours and relishes the scent and taste of her, the way he lingers over every tiny lick and suck. There is nothing…nothing more erotic than having a man beg to be allowed to go down on you. Nothing.’

Jay had learned since that she had been both right and wrong. There were women to whom cunnilingus was everything, the only orgasmic pleasure, and there were also women who did not feel sexually satisfied unless they had been physically penetrated—and there were women who filled the distance between the two by desiring and enjoying an infinite variety of intimacies.

In his experience sex was not so much a mutual pleasure as a mutual trade-off; it wasn’t just the New Age seriousness of the dawning of the nineties, trailing its ghoulish warnings about promiscuity and AIDS, which was making sex something that people felt more inclined to hang back from rather than rush into. It was a general feeling of cynicism about the motivations behind the act, a disinclination to believe that it was done, ultimately, for anything more than personally selfish motives.

‘Time was when a guy who stayed at home and gave himself a hand job was considered a maladjusted weirdo…pathetic,’ Jay had overheard one man telling another in the changing rooms at his gym. ‘Now a guy’s only got to say in public that he prefers to take responsibility for his own sexual release and he’s got every woman in the place convinced he’s Mr Sensitive New Man.’

He, personally, might not have taken things that far, Jay admitted, but his sex drive had certainly diminished over the past few years.

Beauty without brains had never appealed to him, even when he was younger, but now… When had he first begun to feel that there was something empty about his relationships, something lacking?

He moved uncomfortably across the room, irritated by his thoughts. He had Nadia to blame for this emotional introspection.

Nadia paused in the act of smoothing the fine black wool crêpe of her dress over her thirty-three-inch hips, frowning as she moved a little closer to the mirror to study her reflection critically.

There came a point when a woman was approaching her thirtieth birthday where being enviably slim could suddenly change to being unenviably thin—scraggy, in fact, with brittle chicken-stick bones and skin that, without the healthy satin gleam of youth, could appear far less appealing to male eyes than the plumper flesh of more rounded women. Treading the fine line between slender suppleness and that ageing, desiccated thinness was an art. So far she had more than mastered it. The warm silken flesh of her bare arms contrasted perfectly with the fabric and colour of her dress. Her legs, clad in the sheerest of sheer stockings, were exactly the same colour as her discreetly tanned arms—just enough to give a healthy glow rather than a winter pallor, but never, ever enough to mimic the overtanned look of an older generation, who had learned too late of the damaging effects of the sun, which they had embraced with such passionate adoration.

Her dress was simple but elegant, and it fitted perfectly, emphasising the narrowness of her waist and the slenderness of her hips, the delicate swell of her breasts—and if a man was discerning enough, and Jay would be—the fact that beneath it her breasts were bare, small enough and firm enough to allow them to be so.

All that would change if she married Alaric.

He would want children and soon and, of course, there would be pressure on her to conform to the stereotype of WASP wife and motherhood.

If she married him. Was there really any doubt? He would be the perfect husband for her in every way. She couldn’t put off her decision much longer. Her frown deepened.

Had Jay appeared in the Big Apple at just the right moment?

It was often said that a woman never forgot her first lover, and while Jay had not been that, he had certainly been the first man to touch her emotions, the first man she had loved.

It was six years since they had last met…since they had parted. What would Jay see tonight when he looked at her? A desirable woman? An older version of the ex-lover he had walked away from without any apparent regrets? A successful career woman who had made a name for herself in one of the toughest career arenas in the world? Life was tough enough on Wall Street when you were a man; when you were a woman…

It was seven-thirty, time for her to leave. She picked up her wrap.

Nadia saw Jay before he saw her. She had purposefully arrived at the restaurant early and gone straight to the table he’d booked.

She could see him now, pausing to survey the occupants of the dimly lit room, standing a good six inches above the maître d’ and drawing every pair of female eyes in the place to him, Nadia observed wryly.

And no wonder. While to her his features had been instantly recognisable—they were, after all, carved on her memory, her senses for all time—her femininity marvelled at the subtlety with which nature had transformed a young man—a very good-looking young man—into an adult male, a predator, a hunter at the full height of his power. His young male frame with its long rangy bones had become subtly more muscular, harder, sexier, all the soft flesh of youth stripped away, replaced by a much harder and far more masculine covering that revealed the true magnificence of his bone structure.

Given the chance, the entire female population of the restaurant would have gladly given voice to a long, verbal orgasm just watching him, Nadia reflected cynically, and didn’t he just know it.

He had seen her now, the green eyes meeting hers briefly before disengaging as he strode purposefully towards her.

‘Nadia…’

Even his voice had become more masculine, deeper, more positive, sending a small electric frisson of sensual awareness zigzagging down her spine.

Very impressive, Nadia acknowledged, as he sat down opposite her. But she was determined not to let him know what she was thinking, to make sure that she was the one who kept control of the situation.

‘Drink?’ she asked him, adding gently, ‘I hear things didn’t go too well with the Japanese….’

Jay’s eyebrows rose, his eyes calm, slightly surprised. ‘Oh?’ He gave a small dismissive shrug. ‘I thought they went rather well, but then I suppose it all depends on your point of view.’

‘You weren’t able to give them any real commitment,’ Nadia told him.

‘I didn’t want to give them any firm commitment,’ Jay corrected her. ‘Their offer is only one of several options we’re considering at the moment.’

‘We?’ Nadia pounced. ‘Ah…of course…your father. His is the final decision, isn’t it?’

‘Why exactly did you want to have dinner with me, Nadia? Not to talk business, surely.’

She had rattled him, even though he was fighting hard not to show it, Nadia exulted. She wondered what he would say if he knew that she also had dealings with his Japanese contacts, and that for the first time in her professional life she had broken one of her golden rules. She had kept back from her clients a piece of important information by not telling them that no matter what Jay might say to them, it was his father and not he whose decision would be final. What she was even more reluctant to dwell on was why she had kept that information to herself.

‘No…not just to talk business,’ she agreed with a smile. ‘We’re old friends,’ she went on. ‘It’s a long time since we last met….’

‘Old friends?’ Jay queried. ‘You and I were never friends, Nadia. Lovers…yes…friends, no.

‘I understand you’re getting married.’