About the Author

PENNY JORDAN is one of Harlequin Mills & Boon’s most popular authors. Sadly Penny died from cancer on 31st December 2011, aged 65. She leaves an outstanding legacy, having sold over 100 million books around the world. She wrote a total of 187 novels for Harlequin Mills & Boon, including the phenomenally successful A PERFECT FAMILY, TO LOVE, HONOUR AND BETRAY, THE PERFECT SINNER and POWER PLAY, which hit the Sunday Times and New York Times bestseller lists. Loved for her distinctive voice, her success was in part because she continually broke boundaries and evolved her writing to keep up with readers’ changing tastes. Publishers Weekly said about Jordan: ‘Women everywhere will find pieces of themselves in Jordan’s characters’, and this perhaps explains her enduring appeal.

Although Penny was born in Preston, Lancashire, and spent her childhood there, she moved to Cheshire as a teenager and continued to live there for the rest of her life. Following the death of her husband she moved to the small traditional Cheshire market town on which she based her much-loved Crighton books.

Penny was a member and supporter of the Romantic Novelists’ Association and the Romance Writers of America – two organisations dedicated to providing support for both published and yet-to-be published authors. Her significant contribution to women’s fiction was recognised in 2011, when the Romantic Novelists’ Association presented Penny with a Lifetime Achievement Award.

More titles by PENNY JORDAN

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TO LOVE, HONOUR AND BETRAY

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NOW OR NEVER

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For a full list of Penny Jordan’s titles go to www.millsandboon.com

Power Games
Penny Jordan

www.millsandboon.co.uk

Prologue

The room was badly lit and uninviting. It smelled of stale disinfectant and there was a thin film of dust over the tops of the metal filing cabinets. The frosted-glass window overlooked the hospital car park, cars and their drivers dim, obscure shapes moving ceaselessly to and fro.

The girl seated in the chair watched them dully, while the older woman across the desk from her exchanged looks over her head with the man standing awkwardly in the doorway.

The room was small. It had originally been a storeroom. Beyond the open door they could hear the normal everyday sounds of the hospital, the muted voices of the nurses, the whir of trolley and bed wheels, the high-pitched cries of the newborn and the murmurs of their mothers….

The girl spoke, her voice low and filled with exhaustion, betraying, like her drawn white face and the fragility of her too thin body, the strain she had been under.

‘And you’re sure that no one will ever know…that no one—’ She paused, catching her trembling bottom lip between her teeth. She was young, acknowledged the woman, barely nineteen, and in many ways she looked younger—in others she looked immeasurably older.

‘—that no one will ever be able to find out.’

‘No one,’ the woman assured her quietly.

A nurse carrying a baby walked past the half-open door. The girl winced as she watched her.

‘Where…where do I have to sign?’ she asked, her voice cracking slightly.

The woman showed her, instructing as she was bound to do, ‘You are quite sure that you know what this involves, aren’t you? That once this document is signed there can be no going back…that it won’t be possible for you to change your mind….’ She looked towards the man standing by the door, who nodded his head slightly.

‘Yes. Yes, I do know that,’ the girl confirmed. Her words rustled as dryly as the dying autumn leaves outside.

Her hand was shaking as she leaned over the table and started to sign her name.

The older woman felt for her, but there was nothing she could do.

‘It will be for the best,’ she told the girl gently, when she had finished her signature and lifted her head to stare blindly towards the window.

‘You will see. You will be able to make a new life for yourself, start afresh…. Forget…’

‘Forget?’ Again the girl’s voice betrayed emotion. ‘I can never forget,’ she whispered passionately. ‘Never… Never. I don’t deserve to forget.’

‘It’s over now,’ the woman told her firmly.

‘Over?’

The girl focused on her. ‘How can it ever be over? It can’t. For me it can never be over…never!’

Chapter 1

‘Have you read my report on the approach we’ve had from the Japanese?’

Bram Soames looked away from his office window, which fronted on to the private enclosed garden of a London square, and turned towards his son.

Outwardly father and son were very similar in appearance, both tall and broad-shouldered, with athletes’ tough, well-muscled physiques, thick brown-black hair, ice-green eyes and subtly aristocratic profiles inherited—so Bram’s paternal grandmother had always maintained—from a pre-Victorian liaison between his great-great-grandmother and the peer to whom her father owed his living.

It had been, according to his grandmother, the classic tale of the innocent vicar’s daughter seduced by the notoriously rakish earl.

Privately Bram was inclined to suspect the features could just as easily have been inherited from some poor relation, but because it was an intrinsic part of his nature to allow others their vulnerabilities and vanities, he had never publicly questioned his grandmother’s version of the story.

It was also a family tradition that the eldest son always received one of his notorious progenitor’s names; in Bram’s case he had been triply gifted—or cursed—in being christened Brampton Vernon Piers.

In Jay’s case, of course, things had been decidedly different, but then…

Outsiders always imagined they must be brothers rather than father and son and typically Bram was tolerant of their assumption, while Jay was invariably irritated by it and often actively hostile towards the person voicing it.

After all, with only fifteen years between them it was only natural that people should make that mistake.

Now, as Jay waited for his response, Bram acknowledged that his son wasn’t going to like what he had to say.

‘I’m sorry, Jay,’ he said steadily, ‘but it just isn’t on. We’re a small specialist company and to go in for the kind of expansion this scheme involves—’ He paused. ‘We simply don’t have the resources to man that kind of project. I’m a technician and this business is run from that standpoint. This Japanese scheme would potentially involve us in handing over to lawyers and accountants.

‘Potentially it could take this business right to the forefront of modern computer technology,’ Jay broke in angrily. ‘Right now we’re a small British-based outfit in the third league. With this Japanese backing—’

‘We’re a market leader, Jay,’ his father stated with quiet firmness. ‘If we weren’t, the Japanese wouldn’t be approaching us.’

‘But we need to expand!’ Jay exploded. ‘To get into the American market. That’s where the future lies—the mass market. The specialist stuff we do is all very well, but the real market isn’t there. Just look at—’

Bram interrupted, ‘There is a definite market for our products. We’ve built our name and our reputation on what we’re good at.’

‘On what you’re good at,’ Jay retorted furiously. ‘And that’s exactly what this is all about, isn’t it? Oh, you’re happy enough to give me my own office and my own title, even a directorship, but when it comes to giving me any real power, any real support.’ The green eyes hardened with a bitter contempt that Bram’s could never have reflected, causing the older man’s heart to ache with a familiar mixture of exasperation and sadness.

Power, control, recognition—they mattered so much to Jay, and they always had done. The turbulent child whose deliberate and wilful manipulation of Bram’s guilt and pain had caused Bram’s friends to suggest it might be wiser, for his own sake, to distance himself from the possessive demands of his child, had turned into an equally turbulent and dissatisfied adult.

But to suggest to Jay that his intense need for power and control had its roots in the traumatic days of his childhood was like tempting a wild bird of prey with fresh-killed meat.

Jay would swoop on the suggestion with all of his considerable power and force, take it and worry at it and savage it with an avid blood-thirst and single-mindedness that left delicate stomached onlookers nauseated and Bram himself feeling compassion and guilt.

But in this instance he could not, as he had so often done with the much younger Jay, give in. Not to keep the peace, but in the hope that in doing so he would be giving Jay the reassurance he knew his son so desperately craved and equally desperately refused to acknowledge.

‘No, Jay. I’m sorry,’ Bram repeated firmly, ignoring his son’s aggressive and untruthful assertion that his role in the business was that of a cipher only—a job Bram had created simply to keep his son in a demeaning and subservient position.

In fact, if the truth were known, in some ways Bram wished that Jay had chosen a different kind of career rather than joined him in the business.

He was wryly aware that, along with all the physical characteristics, Jay had also inherited the skills that had made him one of the most innovative and skilled computer-program writers of his generation.

But typically Jay had wanted more. Taking his MBA at Harvard had, Bram knew, been a form of one-upmanship on him.

While Bram still felt the most important role he had was to create the programs on which the company’s success was founded, Jay believed that the future lay in expansion and mass marketing.

‘You’re sorry,’ Jay snapped bitterly. ‘I’ve put weeks of work into this project. I’m due to fly to New York tonight to meet with the Japanese and the Americans. How the hell do you think it’s going to make me look when I have to turn round and tell them we’re not interested?’

Now they were getting down to the nub of the matter. It was his pride that Jay was most concerned with, his potential loss of face. Not that Bram hadn’t already guessed that.

‘I shouldn’t worry too much,’ he told his son now with the quiet steadiness that had always deceived the unperceptive into mistaking his apparent lack of aggression for weakness. ‘If I’m any judge, you’ll probably find they’ll assume you’re trying on a bit of brinkmanship. The Japanese, in particular, are very skilled in that particular field.’

Jay frowned. His father was probably right, he acknowledged, and he certainly wasn’t ready to give up his plans for the future of the business, no matter what his father said.

The mood of savage resentment which had swept over him when he realised his father was not going to accept his plans eased, softened by the thought that he could still find a way of changing his father’s mind, of proving that he was right.

As a child he had been aware of the vulnerability of his position in his father’s life, hostile and aggressively suspicious of anyone else’s influence over his father, and those feelings had carried into his adult life. At twenty-seven he was old enough, mature enough to be far more skilful at concealing those feelings and the cause of them, from himself as well as from others, than he had been as a child; just as he was equally adept at denying that his powerful need to gain ascendancy and control over his father sprang from those same deep-rooted feelings of fear.

It was obviously farcical to try to claim to himself or anyone else that his father, at forty-two, might be losing his grip on the company and that he, Jay, had for his father’s own sake, somehow to wrest control from him.

But the computer industry was notorious for its appetite for young supple minds, its hunger for progress and innovation. The future of their business lay with the young, not, as his father insisted, with the traditional markets.

Nor with this latest scheme in which his father had got involved creating programs for improving the quality of life of those who were, in various ways, mentally or physi-cally disabled—’mentally or physically challenged,’ as his father had mildly corrected him during Jay’s recent furious tirade against the potential expense involved if his father went ahead with such a venture.

‘No, I realise there won’t be any profit in it in the immediate future,’ his father had agreed. ‘But shouldn’t we offer to help those who would otherwise live life on the sidelines? And if we are successful there could be considerable profits involved—through patents alone.’

‘And that’s why you’re doing it, is it, Father?’ Jay had challenged him sardonically, ‘Because you’re looking ahead to future profits?

‘Balls,’ he had contradicted flatly. ‘You’re doing it because you’re a soft touch and everyone knows it. Don’t try telling me that Anthony Palliser approached you because he wanted to offer you an opportunity to make money. No, he approached you because he knew no one else in the business would even look at a deal that virtually involves giving away programs we don’t even know if we can write yet. Programs which will have to be individually tailored for each person who uses them.’

‘Programs which will give people who would otherwise not be able to do so, the ability to communicate,’ Bram had told him. ‘Think what that means, Jay.’

‘I am. It’s a complete waste of time and money,’ Jay had insisted.

‘My time and my money,’ Bram had reminded him gently.

His father’s time, his father’s money. They ran through Jay’s life in a twisted skein that rubbed continuously against his soul, chafing and scarring it.

One of his earliest memories of life with his father had been of a woman’s voice, cool and remote, saying impatiently, ‘Bram, for goodness’ sake, think. The last thing you’ve got time for now is the responsibility of a child. We’re on the brink of getting our first real break, of finally making some money, and God knows we need it.’

He had hated that woman then and he still hated her now. A feeling which he knew, for all her cool distance and remoteness, Helena fully returned.

‘What time is your flight to New York?’ he heard his father asking now.

‘Six-thirty this evening.’ He added suspiciously, ‘why?’

‘No reason,’ Bram responded. ‘It’s just that I’ve got a meeting with Anthony at four-thirty—he’s looked out some research material he thought I’d like to study—and I thought you might like to join us.’

‘What for?’ Jay challenged him sourly. ‘Like you said, it’s your time you’re putting on the line—and your money.’

‘Jay—’ Bram started to protest, but the younger man was already turning to leave the office. Despite Jay’s six-foot-two height and the powerful male strength barely cloaked by the conventional dark business suit, Bram was achingly reminded of a much younger but equally surly Jay turning his back on him and stalking off in stubbornness, his shoulders stiff with anger, the power of his emotions making his then much smaller body virtually vibrate with their intensity.

‘He’s manipulating you and you’re letting him get away with it.’ Helena had warned him in exasperation. And of course she had been right—in a sense—but how did you tell a small, furiously angry and bitterly resentful child who still sometimes, two years after their deaths, cried out in the night for his mother and grandparents—a child who you knew used his aggression and manipulation to mask his terrified fear that you, too, might desert him—how did you convince such a child that he had absolutely nothing to fear? How could you deliberately strip away from him the comfort blanket of his stubborn pride by revealing to him that you knew, far from hating you as he claimed, just how much he actually craved your love? How did you tell him that the arms he stubbornly resisted and rejected were, in reality, only too ready to close around him and hold him protectively, safe from the rest of the world and all its hurts?

It had made Bram ache with a throat-closing pity to watch as Jay fiercely rejected any attempt on his father’s part to be physically close with him. To Bram, a very tactile man who had no problems in expressing the emotional side of his nature, Jay’s rejection of the kisses and cuddles he so obviously craved made Bram want to weep.

‘You don’t have anything to feel guilty about,’ Helena had protested when he had tried to explain.

‘Oh, but I do,’ Bram had corrected her softly. ‘After all, I fathered him.’

‘You were fourteen,’ Helena had reminded him. ‘A boy…a child still, yourself.’

‘Yes,’ Bram had agreed steadily. ‘But while that might be an excuse, Helena, it is Jay who pays the price for my immaturity. No child of fourteen can be a parent…a father, in any real sense of the word. In being responsible for Jay’s conception, I have robbed him of his right to a real parent, of being born into a relationship where he was wanted and loved, of having a father who could protect him…give him the security he needs.’

‘You have given him security,’ Helena had insisted. ‘You’ve given him a home, abandoned your own life, your own plans, your own friends because of him. He should be grateful to you instead of…of trying to completely destroy your life.’

‘Helena, no child should ever feel he needs to be grateful to a parent for being loved and wanted. No human being should ever have to grow up under that weight of emotional hunger. I know Jay can be difficult….’

‘Difficult! He’s impossible, Bram. He’s ruining your life. You should put him in a home—have him fostered—for his sake as well as your own….’

What Bram could still see in his adult son and what other people could not see was the fear of a child who believes that he has to earn his parent’s love. What he, as a father, could never forgive himself for was causing that fear.

He had hoped that as Jay matured he would come to recognise for himself what motivated him and see that his fear was needless, that the angry possessive grasp he insisted on keeping over both their lives deprived them both; that allowing other people into their lives could only enrich them both. But this had simply not happened.

And just as Jay had so jealously guarded his relationship with his father and been fiercely antagonistic to anyone else coming into their lives, so now he guarded his own privacy. Bram knew from the brief scraps of gossip that percolated through the office grapevine that Jay was a highly sexed man whom women found dangerously attractive, until they realised that sex was all he wanted from them, and all they were going to get from him.

Inadvertently listening in on a conversation at a dinner party between one of his son’s ex-lovers and her friend, he had heard her say dryly, ‘Physically, Jay is just about the best lover I’ve ever had. He knows all the right moves, all the right buttons to press, but after a while you start to realise that this is all he is doing. It’s as though he’s written a program for sexual success—it’s cold and clinical. I pity the woman he eventually marries. He’s the type who’ll go for some fresh, virginal, up-market aristocratic girl, long on pedigree and short on savvy. He’ll seduce her, marry her, pack her off to a house in the country as soon as he’s got her pregnant and then go back to the real business of his life.’

‘Which is?’ her friend had asked, eyebrows raised. ‘Or need I ask?’

‘Oh, it’s not sex,’ she had been told. ‘No, Jay’s real purpose in life, his real consuming passion, is his relationship with his father…making sure that nothing and no one comes between them.’

‘Because he’s afraid of losing the business, you mean,’ the friend had suggested.

‘I’m not sure. I remember once, though, when he was supposed to be taking me out to dinner and I happened to mention that Bram was going to spend the weekend with my cousin. She was just newly divorced then, and she and Bram have always been good friends. Jay cancelled the dinner date without any proper apology and my cousin rang me a few days later, very aggrieved, to complain that less than a couple of hours after Bram had arrived, Jay turned up, insisting he needed to see his father on some vital company business, and he stayed on almost all weekend.’

‘Well, I suppose if Bram did marry again Jay could lose out to any children of that marriage, and let’s face it, Bram might not have the same kind of stud reputation as Jay, but there’s no doubt about it, he is a very, very sexy man….’

‘Very,’ the other woman had agreed.

Bram hadn’t waited to listen to any more. Hearing himself described as a very sexy man had made him feel more wryly amused than flattered.

His sexual relationships had, over the years, been few and far between, and conducted with the kind of cloak-and-dagger secrecy which some men might have found sexually exciting but which he had simply found inhibiting and depressing.

Inevitably the woman involved would grow impatient and resentful of the way their relationship had to be kept hidden from Jay, and when Bram had ignored his own misgivings and brought their relationship out into the open, Jay had inevitably sabotaged it with such single-minded vindictiveness and passion that Bram had not been surprised when his lover had retreated.

‘I love you, Bram,’ one of them had told him emotionally. ‘You’re everything I’ve ever wanted in a man—and more. Being with you permanently would be heaven on earth. Having Jay in that life would be sheer purgatory.’

‘Why can’t you send him away somewhere…boarding school…or Borstal?’ another had gritted at him furiously. But while he sympathised with her, Bram had shaken his head.

He had already damaged Jay enough. Punishing him wasn’t the answer. Instead, Bram had tried to show him that he had nothing to fear; that nothing he could do would destroy Bram’s love for him; that loving someone else would not diminish his love for Jay. But in the end Bram had been forced to acknowledge that Jay was never going to believe him; that in many ways he didn’t want to believe him, because he didn’t want to relinquish the hold he thought he had over his father.

Perhaps it would have been different if Bram had met someone he had felt intensely passionate about, but he never had. His own emotional and physical desires were something he had learned to put on hold while Jay was young. When, he wondered now, had the necessity become a habit it was easier to keep than to give up?

He wasn’t a cynical man, but he couldn’t help but be aware that often the women who actively sought him out were not necessarily doing so because they wanted him as a man. The fact that he was a millionaire several times over was no secret, thanks to the financial and popular press.

He had originally set up the business while he was still at Cambridge, ignoring the warnings of his friends that he would be better advised to follow their example and get himself a regular job and, even more important, a regular salary with one of the many computer firms head-hunting the pick of the crop of the university’s graduates.

Bram hadn’t been able to wait to be head-hunted. He needed to earn money immediately to support himself and Jay. Instead he had opted for freelance work, which brought in a smaller income perhaps, but allowed him to be at home.

It was Helena, a friend from his university days, who had first suggested he set up his own company. She had always had a shrewd head for business.

Unlike Plum—or Plum’s father.

Helena had christened her daughter Victoria, but Flyte MacDonald, her first husband—the big powerful redheaded, vehemently left-wing Scotsman she had fallen in love with and married all within the space of a month and totally against her parents’ wishes—had immediately nicknamed their baby Plum, and the name had stuck.

Flyte had been and still was a sculptor, an unknown one then, but a highly acclaimed one now. Bram thought that Plum’s name rather suited her. There was undoubtedly something ripe and sweet about her, luscious, a sweet juicy allure which went with her hedonistically sensual nature.

Helena had divorced Flyte when Plum was three years old and had later married her second husband, James, with whom she had had two more children. Neither of whom was anything like Plum.

Shortly after her sixteenth birthday, Plum had announced that she was leaving school and going to live with her father.

Normally controlled and calm in everything she did and said, Helena had been white-faced with anger and disbelief when she had related their quarrel to Bram.

‘Flyte’s to blame for all this, of course. He’s the one who’s encouraging her to ruin her life like this. James is furious.

‘She’s always been rebellious…difficult….’ She had frowned and looked away, unable to look directly at him as she admitted, ‘There have been problems…at school…boys, that kind of thing, but James persuaded them to let her stay on…. And this is how she repays us.

‘Can you imagine what people are going to say…to think, when they learn that she’s moved in with her father? Everyone knows the kind of life Flyte leads…his reputation is notorious. He—’

‘He is her father, Helena,’ Bram had said, trying to placate her.

Privately he suspected that Plum would soon get tired of living with her father. Flyte’s work as a sculptor might be highly acclaimed, but there was no denying the fact that his lifestyle was as brash and unconventional as the man himself.

He lived in a small mews house on the fringes of Chelsea, which he had bought years before when property prices and the area itself reflected the bohemian lifestyle of its inhabitants.

Now things had changed and so had the neighbourhood, conventional middle-class couples replacing the original inhabitants. But Flyte had not changed along with them—much to the chagrin of his neighbours, who did not enjoy the fallout from the frequent and noisy quarrels Flyte enjoyed with the succession of equally uninhibited lovers and models who passed through his life.

The Porsche-owning city broker who lived next door had complained that his impressionable children could be affected by Flyte’s lifestyle. Also, he added, he did not enjoy the constant interruptions from the sculptor’s visitors, who weren’t sure which house was his.

The neighbour was not pleased by Flyte’s response. As an apology, or so he said, Flyte had given him a statue—of a pair of naked lovers enjoying a form of physical intimacy which duplicated the number of the broker’s house. The faces of the lovers in the statue had an uncanny resemblance to those of the broker and his wife.

‘You could put it in your front garden,’ Flyte had explained innocently. ‘That way there won’t be any danger of anyone mistaking my house for yours.’

Somehow or other the incident had been picked up by the papers, much to the fury of the broker. Matters were not helped, from the broker’s point of view at least, by his comment, quoted in the press, that he had never participated in such an activity with his wife, never mind modelled for the sculpture.

As Bram had prophesied, Plum did not stay long with her father, who, to his credit, had refused to allow her to leave school.

She was now back living with Helena and James, ‘when she bothered to come home, that is,’ Helena had complained bitterly to Bram, several weeks earlier.

‘I know that things are different now from when we were young, but—’ she had bitten her lip ‘—James says if she can’t behave properly and decently then she will have to live somewhere else. He’s concerned about the effect her behaviour will have on our other two,’ Helena had explained. ‘He believes that if they think we’re condoning what she’s doing, they might… What else can we do, Bram? I just can’t get through to her. She’s always been so difficult…so very much more Flyte’s child than mine. I really feel as though I don’t have anything in common with her. She’s so emotional, so…so uncontrolled.’

So sexual, she might have said, Bram recognised, but she didn’t.

Plum herself, however, appeared impervious to her mother’s icy disgust at her high sexual profile, her sexual exploits and the widespread reputation she had gained.

Bram was inclined to feel sorry for Plum more than anything else, despite the fact that—

The shrill ring of a telephone in a neighbouring office cut across his private thoughts. He glanced at his watch. He would have to leave soon if he was going to keep his appointment with Anthony on time.

He had known Anthony, or rather Sir Anthony now, since their university days and they had remained in contact, even though their career paths had widely diverged; his into his own business and Anthony’s through work as a student with the voluntary overseas service into the post he now held as the head of a large charity.

‘I’ve got a proposal to put to you and a challenge,’ Anthony had told him several months earlier, and when he had explained what he wanted, Bram had laughed and agreed.

‘You’re right, it is a challenge.’

‘And one you don’t want?’ Anthony had asked him.

‘Leave it with me,’ Bram had responded. ‘Let me think about it….’

Now Bram hurried into the corridor having suddenly remembered something. ‘Jay,’ he called out as he entered his son’s office.

‘Yes.’

Ignoring Jay’s curt hostility, Bram reminded him, ‘You haven’t forgotten about Plum’s eighteenth-birthday party, have you? You’ll need to get her a present.’

Bram winced inwardly as he saw the look in Jay’s eyes. His son had never particularly liked Plum.

‘What have you got in mind? The way I see it, it’s either a chastity belt or a copy of the Kama Sutra, although I suspect that the latter would be superfluous since, according to gossip, she’s already run through every position in it and invented a few more of her own into the bargain. And as for the former—’ he gave his father a wintry, slightly malicious smile ‘—it would be rather a case of shutting the stable door after the horse has bolted, wouldn’t it?

‘Still, it’s good to know that even the supposedly infallible Helena isn’t quite the perfect mother she would like us to think.’

Bram listened to his son in silence. If anything, Jay disliked Helena even more than he did her daughter.

‘Plum’s a child still, Jay,’ Bram said eventually in defence of his godchild. ‘She’s…’

‘She’s a slut,’ Jay supplied brutally.

As he walked past his son’s office half an hour later on his way out of the building, Bram noticed that the door was open and the office empty, Jay’s desk cleared.

Jay wouldn’t let his proposal of expanding the company end where it had today, Bram knew. But on this issue he intended to stand firm, not as Jay had so bitterly accused him, because he wanted to humiliate him and withhold authority and control from him, but because he genuinely believed that the kind of expansion Jay had in mind was too big a risk.

The receptionist, seeing him appear in the front reception area, gave him a startled look and asked him if he wanted her to page his chauffeur.

Bram smiled at her and shook his head. It was a pleasant, sunny afternoon and he didn’t consider himself too decrepit to walk the mile or so across the city to the charity’s head offices.

When he stepped outside and tasted the dust-ridden, polluted air of the capital, he acknowledged that it was at times like this that he most missed the wide-open spaces of Cambridge’s flat fenlands.

The decision to move his business to London had been forced upon him by a variety of circumstances—the need to be based somewhere central to his growing band of worldwide customers; the need to provide Jay with a more stimulating environment than that of a remote, run-down fenland cottage, as well as with the right kind of schooling—but privately he had never stopped missing the silent stillness of the fens.

It was typical of Anthony that he had managed to persuade the owners of the magnificent Georgian building which housed the charity’s headquarters to lease it at a peppercorn rent.

‘It never pays to be too humble,’ he had told Bram when Bram had once commented on the magnificence of the building, which included a mirror-hung ballroom where the cream of society gladly paid a small fortune to rub shoulders with one another and, with any luck, get their photographs on the pages of Tatler in the process.

Bram still wasn’t sure if he was going to be able to provide the help Anthony wanted. He would like to, though, he would like to very much, he acknowledged as he recalled the video Anthony had shown him of a young man, previously almost totally unable to communicate, who through the medium of a specially adapted computer was now actually able to speak.

If he could write programs which would help others in a similar way, it would—what? Offset his burden of guilt at having achieved so much in a material sense while having done so little when it came to his son?

No, but it would give him an immense sense of satisfaction. Communication was a vital part of life, and to be able to help to give others that gift…

Once during his early days in Cambridge he had been exploring the city and had wandered into what he had assumed to be an empty church, just as its choir had started to sing. The sound of their voices raised in an anthem that would probably now be considered too old-fashioned and robust, had briefly moved him to tears.

Unable to sing himself, he had been deeply moved to come so unexpectedly across such a joyously and full-blooded paean of praise.

It saddened him that Jay, who had a very good voice, refused to enjoy his gift. His own gift, if it could be called that, was far more mundane, but if through it he could help others to make their own special sound of joy…

His mouth curled into a faintly self-deprecatory smile. How Jay would have mocked him if he could have read his thoughts.

The young receptionist, who had watched Bram walk into the building, suddenly discovered what it was that made some older men so swooningly sexy. The thought of those heavy-lidded eyes looking deeply into hers, that gorgeously sexy mouth kissing hers, made a delicious shiver of sensual pleasure run through her body.

She bet he’d be terrific in bed as well. Older men were; they took their time, knew what to do, and this one, even though he looked well into his late thirties, also looked as though under that dull city suit he had the kind of lean hard body she had always secretly yearned after. Her boyfriend lifted weights and couldn’t understand that she found his overdeveloped muscles more of a turn-off than a turn-on.

‘Brampton Soames,’ Bram announced himself to the girl, giving her a smile which he would have been surprised to know made her curl her toes in her shoes beneath her desk.

This was Brampton Soames, the multimillionaire. Her face flushed slightly as, with a startled look, she told him, ‘Sir Anthony has had to go out.’

‘Thank you, Jane, I’ll deal with Mr Soames…’

Disappointed, the receptionist watched as Sir Anthony’s secretary walked firmly over to their visitor, drawing him away from her desk and towards the lift.

‘I’m sorry, Mr Soames,’ she was apologising to him, ‘I intended to be here when you arrived. Unfortunately though, I got delayed…a phone call.’

‘That’s all right,’ Bram told her. ‘I understand that Sir Anthony has had to go out.’

‘Yes. A meeting with our patron. He left his apologies.’

‘I was only calling to collect some papers,’ Bram told her. ‘Perhaps…’

‘Yes, he has arranged for the head of our Research and Records Department to provide you with the information you requested. He did suggest that if you had time you might find it worthwhile to have a talk with her. She’s been with the charity for almost twenty years as an archivist, and Sir Anthony thought she would be far more able to supply the kind of information you would need than he could.’

‘I’m sure she can,’ Bram agreed.

‘I’ll take you up to her office,’ the secretary told him. ‘Her name is Taylor Fielding.’

‘Taylor… Is she an American?’ Bram enquired curiously.

‘I don’t think so. Her accent certainly isn’t American, but perhaps she has American connections. She’s a very private person. Although I’ve worked here for nearly eight years myself, I know very little about her.’

Bram didn’t pursue the subject. It was part of his nature to be interested in other people, curious about them, but never in any kind of intrusive way. He was sensitive enough, though, to pick up on the reticence in the secretary’s voice and to wonder at the cause of it. Women working together were normally far more open and forthcoming with one another than men. While it would cause no particular comment for two men to work together for eight years without revealing any personal details of themselves, for two women to do so…

Unless, of course, there was some kind of antipathy between them, but the secretary’s tone hadn’t suggested so.

Which meant that Taylor Fielding, whatever else she might or might not be, was obviously an extremely private person. With an English accent and an American name. Interesting.

As the secretary guided him through the maze of corridors and stairs in the part of the building not yet modernised, he allowed his imagination the luxury of free flow.

Taylor Fielding. Perhaps she would be a little, neat, timid brown mouse of a person, a female version of Beatrix Potter’s industrious Tailor of Gloucester. The workings of his own imagination made his mouth curl in warm amusement with that same smile that the receptionist downstairs was still day-dreaming over.

And that was how Taylor first saw him when she opened her door to Sir Anthony’s secretary’s knock.

Chapter 2

She was nothing like Beatrix Potter’s tailor, nothing at all, Bram acknowledged as he stared in amused appreciation at the woman coming towards him. She was tall, tall with a body so gently and erotically voluptuous that the sight of it forced into the straight jacket and prim high-necked white blouse she wore with a dowdy navy pleated skirt, left him torn between laughter and tears.

Laughter at the total incongruity of such a magnificent body so inappropriately clothed. She should have been wearing something French or Italian in a soft subtle natural shade to highlight her delicate colouring, not that appallingly harsh combination of navy and white which all but doused and drowned it. And tears because his intuition, that streak of intense awareness of other people’s feelings, relayed to him her own loathing and terror of a body so lushly feminine that just to look at her made him want to reach out and stroke her—not out of lust but out of reverence. This woman was no American, not with that pale skin untouched by the sun, and those light, almost luminous blue-grey eyes and dark red hair, hair that was criminally confined in a bun.

The knowledge that totally unexpectedly he had become physically aroused by her, added to the fact that from the look of freezing anger she was giving him, she was also aware of it, made him grimace to himself and call his body firmly to order.

The recognition that the sight of her had given him what in his early teenage days had been universally graphically described by his peers as a ‘hard-on’, coupled with the knowledge that he couldn’t even remember the last time he had experienced such an uncontrollable, intensely physical, response to any woman, left him caught between irritation at his body’s immaturity and a rueful awareness of exactly what Miss Taylor Fielding would no doubt be thinking of him.

He knew she was a Miss because he had seen the name printed on her door.

‘Taylor, this is Mr Soames,’ the secretary announced.

‘Bram.’ Bram introduced himself, stretching out his hand. The look of icy hauteur he received in return was deliberately contrived, a just punishment no doubt for his body’s flagrant breaking of the rules, but the way her body flinched away from him wasn’t. That reaction was far more basic and instinctive.

‘I’ve extracted the information from the records that Sir Anthony asked me to obtain for you,’ she was saying to him as the secretary left. ‘Here it is….’

At any other time Bram would merely have been gently amused and perhaps a little saddened for her at the way she pushed the file towards him, removing her hand from it as though she feared he might somehow make an attempt to touch her. But for some reason on this occasion, and with this woman, her reaction hurt him personally, not for her sake, for his own.

‘I understand that you’ve worked for the charity for almost twenty years.’ Was he imagining the sharp flicker of fear beneath the ice that wintered her eyes? He didn’t think so. So what then was she so afraid of, so afraid that her fear generated an anger with herself that he could almost feel? Him? His question? Both?

Intrigued as much by her contrasting emotions as by the cause of them, Bram found himself wanting to know more about her—much more. He wanted to protect her, and at the same time he also had a very male and far less altruistic desire to unwrap her poor punished body from its cruel constrictions and watch as the anger and coldness were banished from her eyes by warmth and laughter.

Somewhere? Where? His arms…his bed…his…

Whoa…hold on, he warned himself firmly. Didn’t he have enough complications already in his life without adding any more? And besides, hadn’t she already made it plain that there was no way she was going to reciprocate the kind of thoughts he was having?

‘Your file,’ he heard her say coldly, her voice sharp with irritation.

Why was he looking at her like that, watching her like that? Taylor wondered angrily. As though…as though… Hurriedly she looked away from him, feeling both angry and defensive. She didn’t like people, men, watching her so closely. It made her feel nervous…angry…edgy, sending alarm bells clanging through her nervous system. What was it about that kind of look in a man’s eyes—sexually curious, sexually interested, sexually predatory—that once seen, you never forgot, never failed to recognise? It infuriated her that he was looking at her like that. She had done nothing to encourage his interest after all, far from it.

‘Will you have dinner with me?’

The quiet question shocked her, fear and anger leaping through her body like two choke-chained guard dogs taught to respond to threat.

Bram had known what her answer would be even before he asked the question and as he measured her hostility and rejection he wondered if he had totally taken leave of his senses. There were women, plenty of them, who would have moved heaven and earth to be invited out by him, but this woman would never be one of them.

‘No.’

There was nothing restrained or polite about her sharp refusal. The small word was explosive with anger and resentment and spiked with her fear. She threw it at him as though it were a hand grenade, a weapon she wanted to use to destroy him completely. It was too late now to tell her that from the moment he had walked into her office, his behaviour had been so completely out of character that even he had been surprised by it. He doubted she would believe him and knew that she would not want to believe him—him or any man who dared to overstep the boundaries she had set around herself.

Bram had come across women who were genuine man-haters, but they had been nothing like this woman. Their feelings had sprung from cold dispassionate contempt. Hers had been formed in far hotter and more painful fires. He wondered if she knew how vulnerable she seemed and how much that vulnerability made him ache for her—in every sense, the emotional and the physical.

He was just about to say he was sorry and attempt to soothe her when her office door opened and another woman came in, apologising for interrupting, after a quick and femininely appreciative glance in Bram’s direction. Watching the dismissive way Taylor turned her back on him to attend to the other woman’s query, Bram mentally shrugged as he headed towards the door. And then stopped, some impulse he hadn’t known he possessed making him pause and murmur softly to her before he left. ‘I’ll be in touch. I haven’t given up.’

The white-faced look of concentrated panic she threw at him made him wince. Not for himself but for her. It obviously hadn’t been the right thing to say, and what was worse, he had actually known that before he opened his mouth. What the hell was the matter with him? He wasn’t normally so gauche, far from it; but then the truth was that normally when it came to women, he had had more practice using his powers of tact and subtlety to fend them off, not draw them on.

‘Wow,’ Taylor’s companion commented after Bram had gone. ‘Now that’s what I call a sexy man and a half. Who was he?’

‘Brampton Soames, the head of Soames Computac.’

‘What!’ The other woman’s eyes widened even further. ‘All that and money, too. I’d have thought he’d be much older. Hasn’t he got an adult son?’

‘I really don’t know,’ Taylor responded dismissively in a voice which warned that Bram Soames, his sex appeal and his adult son were subjects in which she had absolutely no interest whatsoever. Which wasn’t completely true. She had an interest all right, but it wasn’t the same one as her colleague, who was now bemoaning the fact that she hadn’t arrived just that little bit earlier before Bram had been about to leave.

Taylor’s interest had nothing to do with his sexy good looks, his charismatic personality or his reputed millionaire status; her interest centred solely on the fact that he was a man and that as such she wanted nothing whatever to do with him.

‘What is it with her?’ she had once overheard one of her younger female colleagues demanding, unaware that she was actually within earshot. ‘She acts and dresses like some old-fashioned spinster from a pre-war film. I know she’s got virgin written all over her, but if she just made a bit of an effort, dressed herself up a bit more, changed her hairstyle, she could probably still get herself a man.’

Get herself a man. Taylor had had to bite down hard on the inside of her mouth to prevent herself from screaming out aloud that a man was the last thing she wanted, the very last thing.

‘She’s obviously got some kind of hang-up about sex,’ the girl had continued blithely.

A hang-up about sex. Taylor’s body had shaken with silent mirthless laughter. Her colleague was still enthusing about Brampton Soames. Taylor looked pointedly at her watch. It had been a present from her parents, a reward for passing her A levels.

She had been terrified during that final year at school that she would disappoint them, that she wouldn’t achieve the high grades they expected of her, that she would let them down. Her elder sister had left Bristol University with first class honours and had then gone on to achieve the highest marks in her year in her postgraduate course.

Caroline had wanted to become a surgeon but their father had dissuaded her. ‘It would have been different were she a boy,’ he had explained dispassionately, ‘but as a woman she’ll be better off with a career which allows her to combine it more easily with a family.’

Their father wasn’t the kind of man who wanted his daughters to be token men; he wanted their scholastic achievements to reflect his own brilliance. As one of the country’s leading research biologists, he was well aware of the importance of inherited gene patterns for preserving excellence, but he was a very male man as well. His critical approval of her as she grew up had always been important to Taylor. A frowning look at her across the breakfast table in her early teenage years, the small comment that he didn’t care for her new hairstyle, or that she seemed to be putting on a little weight could cast a dark shadow over the whole day, while her father’s approving smile could leave her basking in warmth and sunshine.

Her mother had equally high standards. She’d trained as a pathologist but had only worked part-time after the birth of her daughters. Like Taylor’s father, her family too had a long history in medicine, combined with a very solid upper middle class county background. Both girls had been sent to private schools where the emphasis was equally divided between academic success and social grooming.

Without anything specific ever having been said Taylor knew her parents had very high expectations of her. Caroline had once been well on her way to fulfilling those expectations. When she returned from her year off in Australia, visiting distant relations who owned and ran a huge outback sheep station, she had been going to study law—a choice of career thoroughly approved of by their father. Quite naturally, since it had been, in effect, his choice.

As she reflected on the traumas of that long-ago summer, Taylor felt her throat close up on the hot acid burn of emotion.

Damn Brampton Soames. This was his fault, making her feel like this, making her remember….

She didn’t see her sister any more. Her parents had disowned Caroline after she had broken all the rules and married a trainee manager she had met and fallen in love with on the Australian sheep station. Taylor could still remember her parents’ shock, their outrage and disgust at what she had done. They had cut her out of their lives and warned Taylor that she must do the same, and she had complied with their demands. Taylor had become doubly anxious not to fail them—in any way.

She planned to leave her office slightly early this evening; there was a library book to collect and she had some shopping to do. She didn’t like being out when it was dark if she could avoid it. Winter evenings were an exception, of course, and she had had to develop various coping strategies to deal with them—like unobtrusively falling into step beside another woman in the street, not travelling by public transport unless it was absolutely necessary. Instead she used a small private-hire taxi firm which specialised in supplying only female drivers.

It was an expensive luxury, but one she was prepared to make other sacrifices to afford. Still, she was always glad when the dark nights started to lighten. The dark always made her feel uncomfortable, wary…afraid. She always slept with all the lights on in her flat, including the lamp in her bedroom, if you could call it sleeping. She had trained herself to wake at the slightest noise—her body stiff and alert as her anxious glance probed her room, her ears strained for sound.

She doubted that Bram Soames slept like that. No, he would sleep deeply and confidently, his big powerful body spread across the bed. And if he had a woman there beside him, no doubt he would keep her chained possessively to his side with that way some men had of throwing an imprisoning arm or leg over their partner.

Bram Soames. She hadn’t given much thought to what kind of man he might be when Sir Anthony had mentioned his visit and asked her to give him the file. All she knew about him was that he had agreed to work on a computer program to help people with speech difficulties to communicate. An ambitious project and very praiseworthy—if he could do it. If not? Well, no doubt it would gain him and his company a good deal of free publicity, she’d decided sourly. No, she hadn’t given much thought to what kind of man he might be, but she knew now that he was the complete antithesis of all that she might have imagined had she done so.

That strong physical sexual presence that had invaded her office, making her feel nervous and afraid; that unashamed uninhibited sexual arousal of his body which he had made no attempt to conceal. Over the years she had come across men far more predatory sexually, but somehow they had not unnerved her in the way that he had. Perhaps because they hadn’t seemed to invite her to share the amusement, his bemusement, almost, at his own reaction to her—as though it had caught him off guard as much as it had her.

But that was impossible, of course. A man of his age…of his experience. Well, he was wasting his time with her.

‘I haven’t given up,’ he had warned her.

Her body shook suddenly, her teeth chattering. Shock, that was all it was, shock. Odd that such a stupid unimportant thing should do that to her when…

‘I’m sorry,’ Taylor told her colleague, who she realised was watching her curiously. ‘I have to go. Can we sort this out in the morning?’

The first thing Jay did once he had checked into the Pierre, his hotel in New York, was to ring his secretary in London.

‘Is my father around?’ he asked, once he had discovered there were no important messages waiting for him.

‘I don’t think so,’ she told him. ‘But I’ll check for you.’

Irritably Jay stared out of his bedroom at the view of Manhattan beneath him. He had flown Concorde, using the time to go over his strategy for negotiating with the Japanese, and had decided that it still might be easier to pressure his father to change his mind and agree to the deal. Having mentally rehearsed his arguments and how he would block his father’s attempts to counter them, he was not very pleased to be told Bram had left the building and that no one seemed to know where he had gone.

Jay cursed as he replaced the receiver. He was tempted to take the risk of lying to the Japanese, hoping that he could persuade his father to change his mind…. No, that was too much of a risk, Jay acknowledged.

He hadn’t told his father that he planned to be away for two full weeks. Jay had friends, contacts he had made at Harvard whom he planned to see while he was in New York. Many of them now held extremely influential positions, and if his father could be fooled into believing that Jay was contemplating crossing the Atlantic and joining forces with one of them, driven to do so by his own father’s lack of faith in him… Jay smiled cynically to himself, reached for his Filofax and checked through the list of appointments.

There was no way he was ready to give up on the Japanese deal, and if he had to use some subtle manipulation to force his father to give way, then so be it. He would.

Yes, in many ways his stay in New York could turn out to be a highly profitable one, not least because… A faintly cruel smile curled his mouth as he reached into his luggage and removed a small package.

There was nothing particularly remarkable about the very ordinary unmarked video it contained—unless, of course, you happened to know what was on the video.

His father had reminded him about Plum’s birthday. He started to laugh. He only hoped that Plum would appreciate, enjoy, get as much pleasure from receiving her gift as he was going to get from giving it to her. He suspected that she certainly wouldn’t appreciate just how much effort he had put into getting it for her.

Ten minutes later as he stepped outside the hotel and gave the driver an address in SoHo, he glanced frowningly at his watch. He had a dinner engagement later on with an ex-girlfriend who was now based in the city, but with any luck his appointment shouldn’t take too long. His destination was one of the large loft-conversion apartments which had once been the home of the city’s artists. The woman who owned the loft and worked from it was an artist, too, in her own way. Jay had found out about her through a friend of a friend who had heard about the kind of work she did.

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.

‘Have you seen Helena recently?’ she asked him. ‘I really must get in touch with her.’

Olivia Carstairs and Helena had been at Roedean together. They had kept in touch over the years and it was through Helena that Bram knew Olivia.

‘We received an invitation to Plum’s eighteenth, but unfortunately Gerald is due to go to Russia the day before. It’s such a pity about Plum. I really feel for poor Helena. But then teenage girls can be so difficult.’

Her voice held the confidence of being the mother of four sons, Bram noticed wryly.

‘And of course, the problem is,’ Olivia continued, ‘by the time she does come to her senses, the poor girl will have gained such a dreadful reputation. I remember when I was at—’ She broke off, apologising. ‘Oh dear, I’d better go. Gerald looks as though he’s in trouble. The problem with these affairs is that one never has the time to talk to the people one really wishes to converse with. You will give Helena my love?’

‘I shall,’ Bram assured her.

Her comments about his goddaughter hadn’t been motivated by malice but, even so, they made him frown. In other circumstances he would have been tempted to talk to Plum himself, to try gently to help her understand that she could not and would not find the emotional security she was seeking by trying to purchase it with sex. However, he was acutely aware that Plum considered herself to be in love with him—how could he not be when she had earnestly and forthrightly told him so on more than one occasion?

Two years ago, when she was still not quite sixteen, he had let himself into his apartment one night to find her waiting in his bed for him. His fortieth-birthday present.

The combination of her too adult sexuality and her too youthful body and face had filled him with a mixture of despair and distaste. How could he explain to her that his love for her was that of an adult for a child, and that to him the thought of knowingly being sexually stirred by any fifteen-year-old girl was acutely repugnant. Her straight coltish limbs, her high small breasts, which she was displaying to him with such terrifying insouciance, were those of a child, not a woman.

In the end he had had to leave her in possession of his bed and spend the night in a hotel. Since then she might not have gone so far as invading his bed, but she certainly still insisted that she loved him.

On the other side of the room Anthony was talking to the aide of one of the charity’s royal patrons. Bram made his way over to join them.

‘Ah, Bram.’ Anthony welcomed him with a smile, introducing him to his companion. ‘I was just telling Charles here about you. I’m sorry I had to break our appointment this afternoon, by the way, but no doubt Taylor was able to help you.’

‘Very much so,’ Bram agreed, as the royal aide turned away to speak to someone else. ‘But…’

‘But?’ Anthony repeated, frowning as he picked up on the hesitation in Bram’s voice. ‘Was there a problem?’

‘Not with your archivist,’ Bram assured him. ‘Far from it. But I have to admit I just wasn’t prepared for the amount of material she gave me. I haven’t had time to look at it properly yet, but I doubt that I’m going to be able to extract the statistics I need without some very knowledgeable assistance.’

‘Well, that needn’t be a problem,’ his friend assured him. ‘In fact, the person in the best position to help you is Taylor herself. She’s been with the charity for a long time and the new information-collating system we put in last year was very much her baby.’

‘Well, if you’re sure she can spare the time,’ Bram responded reluctantly. ‘I must admit she would seem to be the ideal choice, especially if, as you say, she’s familiar with your own computer system.’

While Anthony was assuring him that some satisfactory arrangement could be reached, Bram was inwardly marvelling at his own hitherto unsuspected capacity for duplicity and manipulation. He had never before in his life imagined, or needed to imagine, employing the kind of deceitful sleight of hand he was using now. He had simply never had the need…or the desire.

He had a gut-deep feeling that working alongside Taylor was not going to be a good idea—either for his libido or his emotions. But the attractive proposition of another chance to get close to Taylor far outweighed any possible doubts.

‘I imagine she must have come to you straight from university,’ he heard himself saying to Anthony further compounding his deceit.

‘No. She did actually go to university, but she left without taking her degree. I’m not sure why.’ He started to frown. ‘She’s an extremely private person who doesn’t encourage personal questions, although I do know that she eventually obtained her degree via the Open University system. She’s got a first-rate brain. And a good sense of humour, too, when she allows it to surface. Sometimes, though, it’s almost as though she’s afraid of laughing, as though she’s afraid of…’

‘Living,’ Bram suggested quietly.

‘How high do you rate your chances of being able to come up with something for us?’ Anthony asked.

‘It’s hard to say,’ Bram responded honestly. ‘Especially since I need to break down all the reference material and collate it properly.

‘What I’m hoping to do is to establish some common ground between the different degrees of communication problems and to use that as the base for a general program which can then, hopefully, be adapted to meet the needs of the individual user. But as yet we’re a long, long way from that stage.’

‘Well, having Taylor seconded to you should help.’

‘Oh, it will,’ Bram told him truthfully. ‘It will.’

‘I’ll speak to her first thing in the morning. It shouldn’t be too much of a problem. She was complaining only the other week that since we’ve put in this new computer system, she’s finding she has time on her hands.

‘I was discussing this project with our patron this afternoon,’ Anthony continued. ‘He was very enthusiastic about it. It’s going to make one hell of a difference if you can pull it off. Commercially for you as well as for us.’

‘Potentially, yes.’ Bram agreed cautiously, aware that he was now voicing the same doubts which Jay had expressed earlier—but from a very different standpoint.

It was almost one o’clock when he eventually left the reception and made his way back home.

He did not, however, retire straight to bed. Instead, he went into his study, a square room to the rear of the house, with windows which overlooked a surprisingly large garden. With the heavy antique damask curtains closed, shutting out the sounds of the city, it was almost possible for him to imagine he was back on the fens.

Almost… A wry smile curled his mouth as he contrasted the expensive elegance of his present surroundings with the small, shabby cottage he had rented there. The two places, the two lifestyles, were worlds apart, but he was still the same man.

No, not the same, he acknowledged. He had changed the moment he had walked into Taylor’s office. She intrigued him, interested him, aroused his curiosity, his compassion—and his desire! And if he did desire her, was that so very wrong? Not wrong, perhaps, but certainly foolhardy—surely he had learned enough about life to realise the stupidity of wanting a woman who did not want him?

He picked up the file. He hadn’t lied when he told Anthony he was going to need help collating the information she had given him… Well, not totally, although he suspected she would take convincing of that fact.

And if she chose not to be convinced, if she refused to work with him? To work with him—was that all he wanted? Would he be able to stop at merely working with her? He was more than forty, he reminded himself, well capable of controlling whatever inappropriate physical or emotional desire Taylor aroused in him. As he had done the first time they met? His body tensed a little uncomfortably as he looked down and saw what he had doodled on the edge of the file. A small and extraordinarily feisty-looking little mouse.

Chapter 4

Down below, to the left of Jay’s bedroom window, Fifth Avenue lay under a haze of car exhaust fumes and heat. To the right the trees in Central Park were just beginning to lose the bright, fresh greenness of early spring. The temperature was rising, and with the approach of summer came an energetic and collective shedding of layers of clothing from women’s bodies, which should have rejoiced the heart of any red-blooded male, Jay acknowledged as his glance lingered briefly on the slim, golden limbs of a girl crossing the street below him.

Perhaps if he had been able to make his father see reason, bring him round to his point of view, he might have felt more inclined to join the general rush to welcome summer.

As it was… New Yorkers obviously had conveniently short memories, he decided cynically. In another six weeks’ time they would be moaning about the stifling heat of their city. In another six weeks…

On the surface his meeting with the Japanese had gone well enough; they had seemed to accept his careful noncommittal statement that he and his father both felt they needed more time before coming to a final decision about such a very important step. On the surface… Oh, they had been polite enough, but there had been that firm reminder that they would not wait for ever, that resources for investment were finite and there were other small companies in which they were interested. Like Jay they had other business in New York, and their comment had somehow sounded more like a warning than general conversation.

Another meeting had been set up for six weeks’ time. Six weeks—would that be long enough to bring his father around to his point of view? To make him see sense? To make him realise how very, very vulnerable they were, and how much they needed the kind of partnership the Japanese were offering?

Jay frowned impatiently as he continued to stare out of the window. What was his father doing—thinking—was he regretting not agreeing with him?

The familiar edginess and anger he always felt when he and his father were apart, when others were in a better position to influence him than he was himself, were beginning to make him wish he hadn’t committed to a two-week stay in New York. Damn. Jay silently cursed himself—and Plum. Still, it would be worth the wait just to see her face when he gave her her ‘present.’ Hers and everyone else’s, once they realised just what it was.

He was already regretting rearranging his dinner date with Nadia, but she had wanted to see him, or so she’d said.

Their affair had ended more than six years ago, and although he continued to hear, through mutual acquaintances, about her almost meteoric career progress, they had not kept in touch on a personal basis.

He glanced at the phone, wondering if it was too late to ring her and cancel their date for the second time, but then, if he did, he was grimly aware of the conclusions she was likely to draw.

‘If there’s one thing I can’t stand, it’s a man who sulks,’ she had once told him pithily, after they had quarrelled.

‘I do not sulk,’ he had countered angrily, but she had raised her eyebrows and mocked.

‘Oh no? If you believe that, then you’re nowhere near as intelligent as you like to pretend to be, Jay. When it comes to handing out the silent withdrawal treatment you’re an expert. And they say that women are manipulative! The moment a situation comes along where you think you might not win, you don’t want to be involved. You back off and retreat into that cosy, safe little world of yours and you bar the door behind you.’

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.’

If he had expected to catch her off guard, he was disappointed.

‘It’s a possibility, yes,’ Nadia allowed, pausing to accept the drink the waiter had brought her.

‘A possibility,’ Jay mocked. ‘How very romantic…’

‘Marriage should never be about romance,’ Nadia told him firmly. ‘Romance is…’

‘For lovers?’ Jay suggested. He was enjoying baiting her, enjoying using her to relieve the tension of the past few days, he acknowledged savagely as he watched the anger flare briefly in her eyes before she controlled her reaction.

‘Romance is an illusion, is what I was going to say. Temptingly sweet at first, but it can soon become unpleasantly cloying.’

‘So there is to be no romance in this marriage of yours…. But there will, I trust, be love.’

He was treading on very dangerous ground, Jay recognised, dangerous for himself as well as for her.

‘Yes, there will be love,’ Nadia confirmed, but she didn’t add that the love would be Alaric’s for her rather than the other way around.

‘How is your father, by the way?’ she asked with deliberate mock innocence. Talking about his father had always been a good way of goading Jay in the old days.

‘He’s fine,’ Jay responded tersely. ‘Look, Nadia—’

‘And still unmarried,’ Nadia hazarded, ignoring the keep-off signs he was posting. ‘What a waste. Do you know, Jay, it’s a pity that you and I met when I was so young. If we were to meet now and you were to introduce me to your father…I suspect that he’d be the one I’d want and not you.’

It was, Nadia recognised with an odd spurt of surprise, the truth. She had been twenty-one when she met Jay; he had been just that little bit younger and she had been tired of older men, older lovers. She had met Jay’s father a couple of times when he visited Jay at university, and on both occasions Jay had been angrily reluctant to introduce her to his father, who had arrived unexpectedly.

The first time she had naïvely assumed Jay’s reluctance sprang from his possessive streak and that he was afraid that she might prefer his father to him.

She had been right about the possessiveness but wrong, oh, so wrong, about the focus of it. The reason he had wanted to exclude her had not been because he was afraid she might prefer his father’s company, but because he had been afraid that his father might prefer hers.

She had taunted him mercilessly with that fact once she had discovered it, unable to understand then as she did so clearly now that she had been equally jealous and resentful of the fact that Jay so obviously preferred his father’s company to hers…that his father was more important to him than her.

‘Still not outgrown our daddy complex, I see, Jay,’ she murmured dulcetly. ‘But then he is quite a man, isn’t he…your father. Not that you’d ever allow any woman to get close enough to find out just how much of a man. You know, I feel very sorry for your father. It can’t be easy, having a son like you, possessive, obsessive….’

She tensed as he half made to stand up, his eyes dark with anger. Inwardly she cursed herself. He was going to walk out on her.

Her relief when she realised that he was simply summoning the waiter left her feeling sick and angry. This wasn’t how it was supposed to be. She was the one in control here, not Jay. But she could see from his expression that he had guessed what she was thinking.

‘What do you want from this meeting, Nadia?’ he asked her softly. ‘If it’s to use me to get rid of the aggression you can’t vent on your tame, docile, neutered husband-to-be, then you should have found somewhere more private to do it. Mind you, I’m sure our fellow diners would be enthralled by one of your virtuoso performances—they, after all, haven’t seen one before. I, on the other hand, have—and if it’s another kind of appetite you wanted to satisfy…well, the same thing applies. Sex in public places never turned me on—you should have remembered that.’

Nadia fought to control her urge to scream at him. She could feel the blood receding from her skin and then flooding hotly back over it. She had forgotten just how clever and quick he could be…how cruelly scalpel-like the words which he used with such skin-stripping precision. He was better informed about her than she had imagined. Someone had drawn him a very accurate picture of Alaric’s character. Foolish of her not to have anticipated that.

‘Well,’ he prompted.

‘Well what,’ Nadia responded. ‘You’re wrong, Jay. I don’t want either to argue with you or go to bed with you.’

‘Liar. Oh, come on, Nadia,’ he demanded when she remained silent, ‘why the hell else would you agree to see me? After all, what else did we ever do other than fight or fuck?’

What else had they done? They had laughed, loved, argued, played.

‘Good in bed, is he, this fiancé of yours?’

‘He loves me,’ Nadia responded obliquely. The waiter had brought their food. She looked at it with distaste. Jay, on the other hand, was eating his with apparent relish.

‘He loves you.’ Jay laughed, causing every other woman in the place to focus on him with hungry appreciation.

‘He might love you, Nadia, but that wasn’t what I asked. Does he make you scream in ecstasy when he touches you? Does he make you plead with him to hold you, stroke you, lick you, suck you until…’

‘Stop it…stop it,’ Nadia demanded fiercely. Her appetite had gone completely now.

‘Still the same old Nadia,’ Jay mocked her, confident that he had got the upper hand now.

‘Oh, go to hell,’ Nadia cursed him.

He laughed again. ‘I thought you always claimed that was where our relationship took you. What exactly is it you’re hoping to get from me, Nadia?’

‘Nothing. I’ve already got what I wanted,’ she told him fiercely, and it was true. ‘You see, the reason I agreed to have dinner with you wasn’t because I wanted to relive old memories by going to bed with you.’ She gave him a cold smile. ‘It was simply because I wanted to remind myself of all the reasons why I’m glad that it’s a man like Alaric I’m going to marry, and not a man like you.’

Jay’s eyebrows rose.

‘You mean you needed reminding?’ His smile wasn’t a kind one. ‘Is that all you wanted to remind yourself of, Nadia? Are you sure?’

‘Positive,’ she told him firmly. ‘And besides, I want a man who is completely mine, completely adult…not one who’s so obsessed with his father that he can hardly bear to let him out of his sight. No, I pity the woman you marry, Jay…if you ever marry. She’ll always come a poor second to your obsession with your father.

‘What would you do, by the way, if he ever did remarry? He isn’t like you. He is capable of love… real love.’

‘My father won’t marry.’

Several of the other diners looked up as Jay’s harsh denial rang out across the quiet room.

‘You mean, you won’t let him,’ Nadia retaliated. ‘But how could you stop him if that was what he wanted to do? He’s still a relatively young man, Jay. Only in his mid-forties…if that. Plenty young enough to father a family…a second son. It’s a well-known fact that older men tend to dote on their children, especially when they’re their second family…to give them the time they didn’t give their first children. How will you like that, Jay?’

‘My father will not marry. The last thing he wants is another child, another son!’

‘Oh, really? Has he told you that? Is he afraid that he might turn out like you?’

Nadia was on a roll now, confident that she had got Jay on the run, that her sharp little darts were reaching the vulnerable tender heart of him.

What he couldn’t know was that they were piercing her heart as well, reminding her of the pain she had experienced when she first realised that with Jay she could never come first. His father held that place in his emotions; she did not even come a poor second.

Thank God for Alaric, with whom she would always come first. Alaric, who adored and worshipped her. Alaric, who shrugged off his family’s dislike and disapproval of her. Alaric, who would move mountains for her if she wished it. Alaric, whose methodical, earnest lovemaking might satisfy her physically but could never, ever transport her to the intense emotional heights to which Jay’s touch had once taken her. And could take her again.

Immediately she shut down on the thought. She had made her decision…her choice. And even if Jay had wanted her…loved her…

The thought of Jay loving anyone, abandoning himself to such a need of anyone, made her smile bitterly to herself.

‘He doesn’t need to tell me,’ Jay exploded, ignoring the second part of her taunt. ‘It goes without saying that a man of his age…’

He stopped speaking as Nadia started to laugh.

‘A man of his age… Oh, come on, Jay. How old is he exactly?’

‘Forty-two,’ Jay told her brusquely, his dislike of her questions on the subject colouring his voice.

Nadia could vividly remember his reluctance, his anger the first time she had questioned him about his father, his reluctance to reveal the small age gap between them, his obvious insecurity about his whole relationship with his father.

‘Forty-two—that’s nothing,’ Nadia taunted.

‘More than old enough for him to have married well before now, had he wanted to do so,’ Jay retaliated.

‘Could he have done that, Jay?’ she asked softly. ‘Could he have married…? Or would you have found some way of preventing him from doing so?’

‘My father lives his own life and—’

‘Does he? Or does he live the life you’ve restricted him to?’

‘He’s an adult…mature…the founder of a multimillion-pound business. He makes his own decisions, Nadia.’

‘Oh, I’m not questioning your father’s abilities nor his intelligence. They’re obvious for anyone to see. Nor am I suggesting that he’s the kind of man who’s too weak to control his own life. I have met him, remember, Jay. I know exactly how much of a man your father is—and how much of a father, a very compassionate father…. If I was a woman looking for a man to be a good father to my children, your father would be the kind of man I’d choose…that any woman would choose. But then you already know that, don’t you, and that’s one of the reasons you’re so possessive about him. You don’t want the competition of sharing him with any little half-brother or -sister, you don’t—’

‘You don’t know what the hell you’re talking about,’ Jay interrupted her furiously, pushing back his chair and standing up.

He was going to walk out on her, Nadia recognised, stunned, shocked as he removed some money from his wallet and flung it down on the table.

There was a tight white line of anger around his compressed mouth, the bones in his face starkly sharp beneath his skin as he fought for self-control. As he turned on his heel and left her, Nadia acknowledged that there had never been anything in their relationship, intensely physical and passionate though it had been, that had come anywhere near matching the inferno of white-hot emotions his relationship with his father provoked.

Would any woman ever be allowed to produce that kind of emotional reaction in him? If one did, it certainly wouldn’t be her, Nadia acknowledged mentally as the waiter came up to the table.

‘My friend had to leave,’ Nadia told him crisply, firmly making sure that the calm eye contact she exchanged with him reinforced her statement.

Half an hour later, on her way back to her apartment, she acknowledged that this was not precisely how she had envisaged ending her evening.

So what had she wanted…? Sex…a final fling before she settled down? A nostalgic trip back into the past to a world when her whole universe had been bound by Jay’s arms, when all she had wanted or needed was her love for him…? Her whole world… Not his…never his—which was why she had ended their relationship in the first place.

Why would any woman ever be stupid enough to love such a man…? Why…? Because she was a woman, and because Jay, for all his faults, possessed that dangerous brand of masculinity and maleness that women, even grown-up, adult, mature, intelligent women like her had been programmed to ache for in a way they could never ache for a nice, kind, worthwhile man like Alaric.

Damn Jay. Damn him. Damn him, damn him…! She was, Nadia recognised, crying.

As Jay strode out of the restaurant a cruising taxi pulled to a halt alongside the kerb, but Jay dismissed it with a curt shake of his head.

Human company or conversation, no matter how mundane, was the last thing he felt like, right now. He was not a physically violent man, and certainly had never felt even remotely tempted to strike a woman, but if he had stayed in that restaurant much longer, listening to Nadia’s taunts… She had always been good at getting under his skin, trying to dig too deeply into his most personal thoughts and feelings. What the hell had she meant, suggesting that his father might want to marry, have children?

Just for a moment he closed his eyes, the noise of the traffic becoming a muted, distant roar as he was swept back into the past, to a memory of his seven-year-old self saying angrily to his father, ‘You don’t love me.’

‘Of course I love you, Jay,’ had been his father’s calm, gentle response.

‘But you didn’t want me. You never wanted me to be born,’ Jay had insisted, recalling the cruel comments his grandparents had often made about his conception.

And Bram, of course, with his belief in honesty, had not been able to refute his accusation.

His father marrying, conceiving children, whose birth was something wanted, planned, children whom he would welcome and love, and not have foisted on him the way that Jay had been. Children who would believe it when Bram told them that he loved them, children who would have no idea of what it meant to doubt their right to their father’s love. Unlike him.

But then, long, long before Bram had even come into his life Jay had known the truth about his own conception.

Bram’s parents and Jay’s mother’s parents had been neighbours in the small, exclusive, upper-middle-class area of the town with its large detached houses each set in its own grounds.

Jay’s mother’s father held a high-ranking local government position at county level. Jay’s mother had been an only child. Bram’s father had been an architect, the senior partner in a prestigious local practice. Bram, too, had been an only child. Neither wife had worked; both sets of parents had socialised together occasionally; both men had played golf and both women had given their time to the same local charities. So it was inevitable that Bram and Jay’s mother should have known each other, even though they were at separate, single-sex schools and she had been two years Bram’s senior.

Jay’s earliest memories of his mother were of someone pretty and loving, but also someone lacking in any real authority or power. It was his grandparents, and especially his grandfather, who decided how they all lived their lives.

His mother pouted, wheedled and manipulated her father into buying her new clothes and paying for expensive holidays. But when it came to her son… Jay had quickly learned that her quick, almost frightened, look at her father meant that he, Jay, had done something to displease his grandfather and that, for his mother’s sake, he must not do it again.

As he grew older, it sometimes seemed to him that he was making his grandfather angry just by being there. Despite all the attention his grandparents lavished on him whenever other people were around, when he was on his own it was obvious they didn’t really like him at all. His grandfather often got very cross and talked angrily about ‘that bastard who caused us all this trouble.’

It was when he started playschool that Jay first realised he didn’t have something that other children had—or rather, someone.

He could still vividly remember another boy coming up to him and saying importantly, ‘My daddy’s a doctor. What does your daddy do?’

Nonplussed, Jay had stared at him, but when he got home he had asked his mother, ‘Where’s my daddy?’

She had burst into tears and cried so much that his grandmother had come to see what all the fuss was about. His mother’s tears and his grandmother’s consequent anger frightened Jay so much that when his grandmother had insisted he repeat his question for his grandfather when he came home later, he had stammered so badly he had hardly been able to get the question out.

‘Where’s your daddy…? A father is something you haven’t got. Your father doesn’t give a damn about you or about anyone just so long as he—’

‘Daddy, please…’ Jay’s mother had intervened, but his grandfather had overruled her.

‘No. If he’s old enough to ask questions then he’s old enough to learn the truth. To be told how his precious father ruined our lives.’

It was years later when Jay learned the complete truth. After one of his quarrels with Helena, she had turned on him and told him fiercely, ‘You ought to be damn glad you’ve got a father like Bram. When I think… He was fourteen when you were conceived. Fourteen. Under age still, while your mother…well, of course Bram’s far too much of a gentleman to say so, but it’s obvious that she must have been the one to…

‘Your grandfather, her father, wanted her to have a termination when he found out she was pregnant, but it was too late. Bram’s parents offered to adopt you, but her parents wouldn’t hear of it. No. Bram was to agree to have nothing whatsoever to do with either her or you, ever again, and in return for that they’d actually allow Bram’s parents to give their precious daughter ten thousand pounds to help to bring you up.

‘If you want my opinion,’ Helena had added viciously, ‘the chances are that Bram isn’t really your father at all. Your mother had been involved in a relationship with someone else, and it was when that ended that she turned to your father for consolation. That was when you were conceived, according to her. Personally, I would be surprised if…’

Jay hadn’t wanted to hear any more. He had walked away from her in the same way he had walked away from Nadia tonight. He had been thirteen then. Now he was twenty-seven—old enough to know that walking away from a problem never solved it.

No one else had ever suggested to him that Bram might not be his father, least of all Bram himself, and physically they were so much alike. Knowing Helena, her comment was probably something she had made up on the spur of the moment, driven by the frustration of her resentment of him and her belief that he came between her and his father.

She would undoubtedly have denied it, but Jay knew that her feelings for his father went far deeper than those of mere friendship, and while she might have forgotten the taunt she had thrown at him in the heat of the moment, Jay himself had not.

The sharp, angry blare of a car horn brought him out of his reverie. He wasn’t a child any more, but an adult male; it had been a stupid piece of self-betrayal to let Nadia get so deeply under his skin.

‘You’re too hard on Nadia, Jay,’ his father had once rebuked him gently after witnessing them quarrelling. ‘Can’t you see how much she loves you?’

Love…what was it? Jay wasn’t sure that he knew—or that he wanted to.

As he waited for the lights to change at the intersection, he was frowning, suddenly anxious to get back to his hotel and ring his father.

Chapter 5

‘You’re seconding me to work with Bram Soames? But what about my work here?’ Taylor asked sharply, her forehead pleating in a frown as she confronted Sir Anthony across his desk, and fought to conceal from him the shock his announcement had given her.

‘You’ve said yourself that since we installed this new computer system you’ve got time on your hands,’ Sir Anthony reminded her.

‘To a point, but there are things…surely someone else…’ Someone else, anyone else, Taylor thought as she fought to control her panic. It had never occurred to her when her boss had asked her to spare him a few minutes, what he intended to say to her. The very thought of working closely with an unknown man filled her with anxiety. Her fear of anyone guessing what she was feeling was almost as strong as the anxiety itself.

‘There isn’t anyone else,’ Sir Anthony was saying now. ‘At least no one with your experience. I appreciate that what I’m asking falls outside your normal field of operation, but if Bram can produce a viable working program—’ He gave a small lift of his shoulders.

‘If he can produce a working program,’ Taylor countered. ‘It’s been tried before without any real success.’

‘Yes, I know that and so does Bram, but since he’s prepared to give up his time free of charge—’

‘Free of charge? There’s no such thing as a free lunch,’ Taylor commented cynically. ‘He must be expecting to get something out of it.’

‘Not Bram,’ Sir Anthony denied.

‘Why? What makes him so different?’ Taylor asked the question almost reluctantly, unwilling to be drawn into discussing a man she had already decided she didn’t want to like.

‘Well, Jay, for a start,’ he told her, explaining when he saw her frown.

‘Jay is his son. Bram had to take full responsibility for him when his mother was killed in a car accident. He was still at university at the time. Bram’s parents did offer to adopt the boy, but Bram wouldn’t hear of it. He said that Jay was his son. His responsibility. A lot of men would have let them go ahead, ducked out…. Bram’s tutors did their best to dissuade him. They were forecasting a brilliant future for him. He had a first-class brain. But he wouldn’t listen. Jay came first.’

‘And that makes him a candidate for sainthood?’ Taylor asked sharply. ‘Women…girls in their thousands make that kind of sacrifice every day of the week without getting any praise for it. Far from it.’

‘Maybe so,’ Sir Anthony allowed, ‘but it’s their choice to become mothers. Bram had no choice. No say in whether or not he became a father.’

‘Rubbish,’ Taylor retorted angrily. ‘He had every choice. Presumably his son’s mother didn’t tie him to the bed and force him to impregnate her.’

Taylor could tell from Sir Anthony’s expression that her sudden forthrightness had surprised him. It had surprised her as well. Any kind of discussion that touched upon sexual matters, even in the mildest way, was normally something she avoided like the plague, but her boss’s comments, his attitude, had angered her so much that she had felt impelled to speak out.

‘Bram was only fourteen when Jay was conceived,’ Sir Anthony told her quietly. ‘It isn’t a subject that he ever liked discussing….’

‘But he made sure, all the same, that everyone knew he wasn’t to blame,’ Taylor remarked bitterly.

She knew she was overreacting, but she just couldn’t withhold the words or control the emotions that lay behind them, even though she knew she would regret her outburst later.

‘It wasn’t actually Bram who told us,’ Sir Anthony answered her. ‘It was his father. He was very bitter about the way the girl’s family had treated Bram, and about the way he felt Bram’s life had been blighted by what happened. Bram has always put others’ needs before his own.’

Taylor realised that she was wasting her time continuing to protest about being seconded to work with Bram, little though she liked the idea.

Little though she liked it? Loathing was a closer description to what she was actually feeling. Loathing, fear, panic, anger, but most of all fear… Fear at the thought of working closely with a man she did not know. Fear at the thought of being subjected to his will, his domination, fear at the thought of having to be alone with him, fear at its most basic and damaging level, fear in its most humiliating and degrading form; fear of a woman for a man simply because he was a man.

But, of course, there was no way she could explain those feelings to Sir Anthony, no way she could explain them to anyone.

When she read articles in magazines about people who had contracted the HIV virus and were afraid of the consequences, of making their vulnerability public, Taylor knew exactly what they were suffering. She had suffered like that for twenty years, albeit on a different plane. She knew exactly what it felt like, the fear, the pain, the isolation, the feeling of being apart, different from the rest of the human race. She knew exactly what it was like to have to guard her every comment in case she unwittingly betrayed herself; to remove herself from any kind of physical or emotional contact with other people; to protect them from the consequences of any kind of intimacy with her at the same time as she protected herself.

The past, her past, was always with her, a constant reminder, and a constant warning….

‘Look, I can see you’re not keen on the idea of working with Bram,’ Sir Anthony acknowledged, ‘but—’

‘No. I’m not,’ Taylor agreed, interrupting him to snatch at the escape route he was unwittingly offering to her.

There was no point in trying to explain to him that it wasn’t just Bram Soames she didn’t want to work closely with, it was any and every man.

It had taken almost two years before she had finally conquered her anxiety enough to feel comfortable working with Sir Anthony, before her brain and her emotions finally caught up with what her instincts were telling her—that her boss was the happily married man he purported to be and that his kindness towards the female members of his staff sprang from a genuine, slightly old-fashioned avuncular and protective attitude towards the female sex as a whole, rather than from some hidden, ulterior motive. However, to feel comfortable working with Sir Anthony was one thing. Bram Soames was something—someone—altogether different.

‘If it’s any consolation to you, I suspect that Bram is as reluctant to work with you as you are with him,’ Sir Anthony told her.

‘You suspect?’ Taylor questioned him sharply, stifling the unexpected stab of feminine chagrin his comment gave her. Why should she feel annoyed because Bram Soames didn’t want to work with her? For years she had trained herself not to be in any way responsive to men, to treat them as though they simply did not exist. It was easier that way…safer…for her, for them.

‘Bram is rather better at concealing his feelings than you are,’ Sir Anthony answered her dryly.

‘Try looking at the fact that I want you to work alongside him as a compliment rather than a punishment,’ he coaxed. ‘Because that is what it is. I know how you feel about your work, Taylor. After all, I’ve tried hard enough in the past to prise you away from your precious archives and to get you to play a far more active role on the public relations side of things. You’ve got the brain for it and the expertise and you’ve got a very special gift for being able to put your point across—when you choose to use it.

‘Now that we’ve put in that new computer system and you’ve got spare time on your hands…’

Taylor could feel the panic starting to explode inside her. Public relations work, anything that brought her into the public eye in any way at all, terrified her. At least, if she was working with Bram Soames her contact would be limited to him and conducted in circumstances over which she would have some control.

‘No one knows the history of the society as well as you do,’ Sir Anthony was saying persuasively, ‘which is why I want you to work alongside Bram. This project is too important to allow personal feelings to prejudice it. I appreciate that the two of you might not exactly become kindred spirits, but…’

‘But for the sake of the cause, I should be prepared to sacrifice myself,’ Taylor suggested wryly, her mouth twisting slightly.

‘Actually, that wasn’t what I was going to say,’ Sir Anthony rebuked her mildly. ‘I was simply going to point out that you’re not being very fair to Bram. He’s a very likeable chap, you know. Kind. Well-intentioned. Most women—’ he began and then stopped, as though he realised that he was treading on very dangerous ground.

‘Most women would what?’ Taylor demanded. ‘Most women would welcome the chance to work so closely with a handsome, rich, available, heterosexual man?’

How could she explain to her boss that those very attributes that in his eyes made Bram Soames so attractive to the majority of her sex, only served to increase her own fear and revulsion, because the one thing he had not mentioned in that brief catalogue, which as far as she was concerned was the most important, was the word power; no man could possess all the attributes Sir Anthony had just listed and not be conscious of the power they gave him. Power over her sex, power over her, and, as she had good cause to know, power could be abused.

‘So, it’s agreed then,’ she heard Sir Anthony say firmly. ‘I’ve suggested to Bram that I leave it to him to liaise with you. I know you’ll do your best to help him.’

He stood, leaving Taylor with no option but to follow suit and to allow him to shepherd her towards his office door.

Later on in the safety of her own office she could feel the shock starting to sink in. She ought to have taken a firmer stand, to have refused outright to work with Bram Soames. But how could she have done so? By giving up her job? She wasn’t financially independent enough to do that; jobs like hers weren’t easy to come by. And besides, she liked her job. She liked its solitude, its security and safety. She liked the reassurance of the routine she had established. The thought of leaving and trying to make a fresh start somewhere else filled her with even greater panic.

Damn Bram Soames! Damn him and his precious program! And yet, even as she cursed him mentally, Taylor acknowledged that she was being selfish and unfair. If he could succeed in writing such a program it would transform the lives of so many people.

Perhaps, if she could just focus on that fact and hold fast to it, it might help to make the unbearable somehow bearable, she decided sombrely.

Her office was situated at the top of the building, its narrow, barred window the only source of natural daylight. Some time ago it had been suggested that she move to a lower floor and a larger office with a much bigger window, but she had refused.

It was pointless trying to explain to other people that the narrowness of her existing office window, its thick, almost opaque glass and steel bars, were infinitely preferable to her than something larger, which someone might look or step through. Just thinking about such a possibility made her shudder. How could she ever give up her job here and go somewhere else? Here, in surroundings where she had worked for years, her small eccentricities—as others thought of them—were tolerated; in a different environment…a new environment…

She closed her eyes and then opened them abruptly as her telephone rang.

Some sixth sense warned her who the caller would be, but it was still a shock to hear Bram Soames’s unmistakable warm male voice on the other end of the line.

‘I hope I’m not pre-empting things by telephoning you so soon,’ she heard him saying after he had identified himself. ‘But Anthony did promise he would speak to you as soon as he could about the possibility of our working together, and I was wondering if he—’

‘Yes,’ Taylor interposed tersely. ‘Yes, he’s told me.’ The palm of the hand gripping the receiver was already damp with anxiety, the forefinger of her other hand curling nervously in and out of the plastic-covered coil linking the receiver to the base unit.

Bram could hear the tension in her voice and hoped that she wasn’t equally able to hear the reluctance in his. There was, he reminded himself firmly, absolutely no reason whatsoever why he should not work with her. No logical reason at all.

So, why then, this gut feeling that he would be far safer to retreat?

The silence from Taylor’s end of the line was slightly unnerving. If it hadn’t been for the slightly erratic sound of her breathing he might almost have thought she’d hung up on him.

Firmly pushing his personal thoughts to the back of his mind, he said calmly, ‘I think before we can get down to any serious work we need to have a preliminary discussion. I was wondering if you were free tomorrow afternoon?’

In her office Taylor flipped over the page of her diary. It was completely blank.

‘No, I’m sorry… I already have an appointment then.’ Did her voice sound as betrayingly unconvincing to him as it did to her? She almost hoped he would guess that she was lying and decide to ask Sir Anthony to suggest someone else to help him, and she held her breath as she waited for his response.

‘I see…. Well, in that case, I wonder…I’m eager to get started on this project as soon as possible. At the moment I’ve got some free time, but…’

He paused while Taylor reflected coolly that if he had hoped to impress or bully her by playing the big powerful, dominant, successful businessman he was going to be disappointed.

‘I wouldn’t normally ask you to work outside office hours, but is there any chance that we could meet tomorrow evening, say about six-thirty?’

Six-thirty—after the rest of the office staff had gone home and only the cleaners were around. Taylor cursed herself inwardly for the trap her fib had built around her.

‘I…in the office? I think the building is locked up at six,’ she told him quickly. ‘I don’t think…’

‘We could have our discussion here,’ Bram told her after a moment’s silence. ‘I could send a car for you and—’

‘No. No…there’s no need. I…’

The total panic he could hear in her voice made Bram frown. She had struck him as such a contained, almost over-controlled person, on the surface at least, that he was unprepared for the intensity of emotion he could hear in her voice.

‘I…I’ll cancel my afternoon appointment,’ Taylor told him shakily. ‘I…what time did you have in mind?’

‘Two-thirty?’ Bram suggested diplomatically.

‘Yes…very well then…’ Taylor agreed. Her throat felt raw with tension, the muscles aching, the sound of her voice unfamiliarly husky.

Her body was drenched in cold sweat and she was starting to shiver. It took her four attempts before she managed to put the receiver down correctly.

If just talking to Bram Soames could affect her like this, then what was she going to be like when she was working with him? It was pointless, useless telling herself that a man with his sexual magnetism, his strong blend of power and charisma—a very obviously heterosexual man who had apparently chosen to remain unattached—was hardly likely to express even the remotest interest in her. The knee-jerk sexual male response she had witnessed in his body at their first meeting did not count. The fact that a man like Bram Soames could and no doubt did have his pick of eager women who made a career out of pursuing men like him, was not the point. The point was that he was a man.

As she focused numbly on the small oblong of obscured daylight from her barred window, she acknowledged that in many ways the window was like her life, what to another woman would be restrictive was to her protective. She needed that protection.

She knew there had been whispered speculation among her colleagues about her sexual orientation. The very fact that she shunned male company so determinedly was bound to give rise to it. But Taylor had no sexual or emotional desire for her own sex. A small, bitter smile twisted her mouth. Unbelievable as those who knew her or thought they knew her might find it, there had been a time when she, too, had dreamed of falling in love, getting married, having children; when sexually she had been open and curious.

And if she was honest with herself, there were still times when, deep down, she felt those needs, nights when she lay awake not just tormented by her fears but filled with bitter anger as well.

It was twenty years now. Twenty years, and there had not been a single day during that time when she had not been conscious of the past, when she had not been fearful of its being recreated, when she had not abandoned the habit of stopping, checking… watching…waiting.

Twenty years. Almost a life sentence, she acknowledged bitterly, but her life was not over yet. She was thirty-nine, that was all.

She could live to be twice that age; both her paternal and her maternal grandparents had. Her parents… She swallowed painfully. Neither of her parents had lived to see fifty. Their deaths haunted her still. They always would.

‘You must not blame yourself. You are not to blame,’ she had been told.

Her head was beginning to ache, the tight knot into which she had pulled her hair dragging on her scalp. It was a luxury at night to let it down and release her neck muscles from the strain of supporting the heavy weight.

Perhaps she ought to wear her hair short. The last time she had done so had been on her sixteenth birthday. The trip to her mother’s hairdresser had been a present paid for by her father, a ritual on the path to adulthood.

She could remember how nervously she had watched her reflection in the mirror as the stylist lopped off her heavy, childish braids. The pretty urchin cut had emphasised the delicate bones of her face, made her eyes seem enormous. Her mother had frowned and commented that the style was rather too adult for her, but Taylor had seen in her father’s eyes male approval for her transformation. She wasn’t a child any more, she was a woman.

She had kept her hair short for several years after that, and just before she had gone to university she had allowed the stylist to experiment with blonde highlights woven into the strands of hair that framed her face.

Her mother had denounced the effect as far too sophisticated and her father hadn’t even noticed the change. Both had been preoccupied then over her sister, who had written from Australia breaking the news of her impend-ing marriage.

‘We don’t want a big fuss, just a quiet ceremony for the two of us…’ she had written to Taylor. ‘And besides, I know our parents don’t approve of what I’m doing.’

That had been a gross understatement of their parents’ views. It had shocked Taylor to hear her parents say that they wanted nothing to do with her sister until she came to her senses and returned home-alone.

Somewhere at the back of her mind she had always been aware that their love came attached to a price tag, but seeing the actual evidence of that suspicion left her feeling very vulnerable, which was why-Her telephone rang again, and she reached out to answer it, glad to escape the painful introspection of her thoughts.

The cab driver gave Taylor a brief smile as she stopped outside the small block of apartments where Taylor lived.

She was a fairly new driver for the firm; most of their regular clients were considerably older than Taylor, who she thought looked about her own age, and, as far as she could see, perfectly healthy.

When she asked curiously in the office about her, no one had been able to tell her anything other than the fact that Taylor had been a regular customer for some years.

The block of apartments was set in neat, well-kept gardens, screened from the main road by trees and shrubs. Initially, when she had gone to view the property Taylor had been put off by this aspect; anything designed to screen the property from the road could also provide a screen for someone trying illicitly to enter the apartments. But in the end she had forced herself to overcome her unease and accept that she was unlikely to find anything better.

The apartment did, after all, fulfil all her other criteria. The large detached Victorian house had been carefully converted into six good-sized apartments, all designed to meet the needs of retired couples. The conversions had been advertised as possessing all the latest security features, locking windows and intercoms.

Taylor had also liked the fact that all the other occupants were people who believed in keeping themselves to themselves; quiet retired professional couples or singles who exchanged polite pleasantries if and when they met before retreating thankfully into their own private domains.

Her own apartment was slightly cheaper than the others and slightly larger, since it was in what had originally been the attic.

It had two bedrooms, each with its own bathroom, a large, pleasant sitting room, a small dining room, an even smaller study, which just about housed her desk and bookshelves, and a neat galley kitchen.

Since no one other than herself was ever allowed inside, there was no one to comment about the apartment’s lack of homely touches. There were no small pots of herbs on the sunny kitchen windowsill, no leafy green plants in the sitting room, no family mementoes—materially worthless, but sentimentally irreplaceable—marring the elegant perfection of the sitting room, decorated and furnished in a cream colour. Even Taylor’s bedroom with its cool eau-de-Nil colour scheme had an almost anonymous feel to it, as though its owner was afraid to leave any personal stamp on the room in case it betrayed her in some way.

Automatically Taylor paused before entering the lift, turning to glance over her shoulder.

The hallway was empty. She stepped quickly into the lift and pressed the button.

Once again, when the lift stopped and the doors opened, she paused to check before stepping out of it, walking quickly across the dove-grey carpeting into the foyer of her apartment.

It took time to unlock the special double lock to her apartment door. Taylor stood sideways as she did so, which made the task more difficult but gave her a clear view both of the lift and of the stairs.

Once inside her apartment she relocked the doors. And then, as she always did, she walked slowly and almost nervously through every room, checking the empty spaces and the locked windows.

Only when this had been done did she allow herself to relax enough to go into her bedroom and close the thick curtains which screened out the light so effectively she had to turn on a lamp before she removed her suit jacket and started to unpin her hair.

As she opened the drawer in her dressing table where she kept her pin box she paused, hesitated and then, so quickly that it was almost as though she was afraid of what she was doing, she reached into the back of the drawer and removed a heavy silver photograph frame. Holding her breath, she turned it over and stared almost greedily at the photograph inside.

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.

Common sense, logic, told her that there was no way she would be in danger. He was quite obviously not a sexual predator, and most certainly not one who was so desperate for a woman…for sex, that he needed to waste his time attempting to seduce her, when no doubt there were countless women more than willing to fall into bed with him.

‘We’ll have to walk, though, I’m afraid,’ he added teasingly, when she thanked him and accepted. ‘Richard will have gone home by now.’

Despite her mounting colour Taylor still managed to look him in the eye.

He was just about to open the office door for her when it was thrust inwards, narrowly missing banging into Taylor. A whirlwind of a girl erupted into the room, apparently oblivious to Taylor’s presence as she flung herself headlong into Bram’s arms and demanded breathlessly, ‘Oh, you are still here…good…Bram, be a darling, will you, and take me out to dinner tonight. I haven’t seen you in simply ages, and it would be yummy going out with you. Even more yummy if we forgot about dinner altogether and went to bed instead…’ she added suggestively, her voice dropping to a throaty purr that made the fine hairs on Taylor’s nape rise in sharp reaction.

Bram, Taylor could see, instead of wrapping his arms around the girl as she so plainly wanted and Taylor had plainly expected—after all, she was everything a man could possibly want, startlingly pretty, young, coaxing and extremely sexy—Bram was, in fact, holding her firmly at arm’s length, his face registering not pleasure but rather an almost paternal sternness.

‘Plum, I’m sorry but I can’t. I’m already going out to dinner—’

‘What?’ For the first time Plum seemed to become aware of Taylor’s presence, her mouth drooping slightly as she studied her with keen competitiveness—and then dismissed her, Taylor observed wryly.

‘Oh, but—’ she started to protest as she turned back to Bram.

He stopped her calmly. ‘No buts.’

‘But, Bram, I need to talk to you.’

‘Not now, Plum, I’m afraid. As you can see, I’m busy.’

‘But you’ll ring me? Take me out to lunch?’

‘I’ll try.’

‘Well, if you’re really too busy…’

The hostility in the girl’s eyes as she turned to look at her made Taylor acutely uncomfortable, but before she could speak, Bram was ushering Plum out into the corridor and Taylor had to wait for him to return before she could say quickly, ‘Look, you don’t have to give me dinner. I don’t want to cause you any problems with your… your friend.’

Try as she might Taylor couldn’t help stumbling betrayingly over the last word of her hastily rehearsed little speech.

It had surprised her how much the other woman’s obvious sexual possessiveness about Bram had affected her. But then it had been a long time since she had last been in close contact with such intense sexuality. The girl, whoever she was, seemed to wear it like a weapon, Taylor decided as she groped mentally for the right description. A gauntlet, a challenge which she threw down aggressively in front of Taylor, warning her off.

Not that she had had any need to do so. The last thing…

‘Plum isn’t my friend, and she certainly isn’t my lover, if that’s what you’re thinking.’ She heard Bram interrupting her turbulent thoughts. ‘She’s my goddaughter.’

‘Your goddaughter.’

Taylor couldn’t keep the shock out of her voice, and she knew her expression must have given her away when Bram continued quietly, ‘She’s going through a bit of a difficult time, and what she really needs more than anything is someone she can lean on, someone she can trust, someone who loves her as a person. It’s a pity that she and Jay don’t get on better, because…’

‘Jay?’ Taylor questioned, her curiosity aroused as Bram opened the office door for her and ushered her out. It wasn’t like her to allow herself to exhibit interest in other people; it involved too much risk, too much danger, and she was irritated with herself for having done so now. But it was too late. Bram was already starting to answer her question as he guided her towards the lift.

‘Jay is my son. He and Plum have known each other all their lives, well, at least all Plum’s life. Jay’s twenty-seven now and she’s only just coming up for eighteen.’

‘Twenty-seven.’ Despite what Sir Anthony had already told her, she felt slightly shocked. A brief glance in Bram’s direction as the lift started to descend confirmed what she already knew. Even under the starkly revealing light of the lift, he looked far, far too young to be the father of a twenty-seven-year-old. Not because he had deliberately tried to cultivate a younger image—on the contrary, his suit was sober and traditionally cut, his shirt white and his tie plain.

Just visible when one was standing as close to him as Taylor was now forced to do, were one or two slightly silvered strands of hair lightening the rich darkness of the rest. The fine lines fanning out around his eyes added to rather than detracted from his sexuality, and to judge from the way he moved his body beneath the covering of his suit…

Taylor swallowed uncomfortably, her own body suddenly far too hot.

It was years since she had experienced that kind of physical reaction to a man—years since she had allowed herself to experience it.

You were made for this—for love, for sex.

The words escaped from the barriers she had put up against such memories, and like the memory of the man who had spoken them they made her shudder in sick panic.

Bram frowned as he saw the tremor galvanising her body, and the way her face suddenly paled.

Just for a brief moment she had seemed to relax, the unguarded interest in her face when she queried Jay’s age such a contrast to her previous wary tension that Bram had surprised himself by wanting to go on talking to her so that he could prolong that interest. It was like watching someone suddenly come to life; seeing them as a whole three-dimensional figure for the first time.

The lift had stopped, and as they walked through the foyer and out into the street Bram paused to watch a young couple on the other side of the road. They had obviously had a quarrel, and the girl was refusing to get into their car. The young man, growing tired of her refusal, suddenly let go of the door he had been holding open and lunged forward, picking the girl up bodily. As he turned to deposit her in the car she tried to escape, wriggling protestingly in his arms.

Taylor, too, had stopped to watch, but when Bram laughed in amusement at their antics, Taylor turned on him, her face bone-white, her eyes so dark with anger and pain that Bram caught his breath at the intensity of emotion in them.

‘Of course, you would think it’s funny. You’re a man,’ Taylor told him bitterly. ‘And because you’re a man you think that it’s perfectly acceptable for another man to manhandle a woman, to physically force her to do something she doesn’t want to do, to use his physical strength to compel her into obeying him, forcing her….’

Taylor was literally shaking now, and Bram was caught between an instinctive desire to defend himself and his compassionate awareness of her distress.

Out of the corner of his eye he saw the young man deposit the girl back on the ground with gentle care, her angry protests dying away as she reached up towards him.

‘Look,’ Bram commanded Taylor quietly, taking hold of her and firmly turning her round to face the previously warring couple.

The girl’s arms were wrapped firmly around her lover, her face tilted up towards his, one hand reaching up to pull his head down towards her own as she started to kiss him with passionate intensity.

Taylor, who had begun to pull away from his restraining hand, stiffened, her body as immobile as a statue, her attention riveted on the couple on the opposite side of the road. An aching, painful longing boiled up inside her, bringing sharp stinging tears to her eyes as emotions she had long thought forgotten and dismissed, suddenly filled her. She wanted desperately to turn away from the sight of that passionate, intense embrace, from the young woman’s obvious need for her lover.

Once she had felt like that, ached like that, loved like that, and through those emotions she had betrayed not just herself but had also caused…

The sound she made as she whirled round, pulling frantically against Bram’s restraining hand, reminded him of an animal caught in a trap; the low muted sound so riven with agony and fear that his immediate reaction was to reach out and take hold of her, to bind her to him so tightly that he separated her from her pain, protected her from it. Instinctively he fought down his reaction. She was a stranger to him, after all, a woman he barely knew, a woman whom his sense of self-preservation had already told him he would be wiser not to get to know.

Against his hand he could feel the indentation of her waist, so much sharper, so much narrower than her clothes suggested, her bones tiny and fragile beneath her skin. She wasn’t thin; the soft swell of her breasts, the curve of her hips, were richly feminine. But her bone structure was very delicate and her body was much lighter than it should have been, her flesh worn down by whatever deep-rooted anxiety it was that caused those shadows in her eyes, that sense he had of her wariness, her fear.

From her reaction to the couple on the other side of the road, her vocal outburst to him, he guessed that at some point in her life there had been a man, a relationship, which had caused her intense pain. The kind of pain that made her intensely suspicious of his sex and very determined to remain aloof and withdrawn from it.

He told himself that he was glad.

Firmly he withdrew from her, his hand dropping to his side. The young couple were now climbing amicably into their car, the small incident over, their quarrel apparently forgotten.

He glanced thoughtfully towards Taylor as she turned her face away from him in an attempt to conceal her expression, calmly falling into step beside her as he waited for her to make some comment, to give him some explanation for her reaction. One glance into Taylor’s shuttered face warned him against making any kind of comment.

Shakily, Taylor tried to compose her chaotic emotions. The small incident with the quarrelling couple had upset her more than she wanted to admit, disturbing old ghosts, reactivating feelings, fears she had thought she had long ago brought firmly under control.

The whole episode had left her feeling horribly weak and vulnerable; angry both with herself for being so susceptible to what she had seen and with Bram for witnessing that susceptibility. She knew she ought to be grateful to him for his tactful silence, his lack of uncomfortable curiosity, but instead the knowledge that he was aware enough of the intensity of her reaction to feel that she needed to be treated with caution and compassion only increased her feelings of angry panic.

She didn’t want him feeling sorry for her, knowing that she felt vulnerable. She wanted to be able to dislike him, to feel disdain and contempt for him, to dismiss him as someone who possessed the kind of personality traits she most disliked and feared instead of…instead of what? Instead of witnessing her reaction to a scene that not only had aroused her deepest fears and most painful memories, but also had resurrected far more dangerous and unwanted emotions and needs.

Watching that young couple embrace with such open passion, feeling the male touch of Bram’s fingertips against her waist, her body—

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…’

‘But you haven’t finished your meal,’ Bram protested.

‘I…I’m not very hungry,’ he heard Taylor reply. ‘And besides, it’s…it’s getting dark and…’

Had she been another woman, a different woman, he might have been tempted to tease her a little about her reaction—an overreaction—but because he could sense how genuinely agitated and upset she was, Bram held his tongue.

‘Let me at least get you a taxi,’ he offered quietly. ‘As you say, it is getting dark. My fault, I’m afraid. I was enjoying the self-indulgence of talking about myself so much that I hadn’t realised the time. You’re a very good listener,’ he added warmly.

‘I…I really must go.’

She was avoiding looking directly at him, Bram recognised.

‘And…I prefer to use my own taxi firm, if you don’t mind. The drivers are all women…and…’

It was obvious to Bram that she didn’t like having to disclose even little pieces of personal information. But why? Did she feel that he would mock her, make fun of her for her obvious fear? Did she really think he was that kind of man, so crass and insensitive?

Of course, he could understand how any woman might feel wary of entrusting herself to an unknown man. You only had to listen to the news, read the papers….

But Taylor’s fear was more specific than that, he was sure of it. It wasn’t the tentative unknowing fear of a sexually naïve, inexperienced woman, the old-fashioned ‘spinster’ beloved of satirists of another age. No, Taylor’s fear was more specific, more acute than that.

‘Well, let me at least get the maître d’ to call the taxi firm for you,’ Bram suggested gently.

Reluctantly Taylor gave him the number. She knew that he was only trying to be kind…to be helpful; that with Bram, in Bram, she had nothing to fear. But old habits die hard and old fears even harder.

She had let her guard down much too far when she had been listening to him talking about his life. She had been unprepared for his question about the fact that she had left university with her course unfinished.

‘It must have been very hard for you, losing your parents like that,’ he was saying to her now as he walked with her towards the door. ‘I know how badly the deaths of his mother and grandparents affected Jay, although, of course, he was—’

‘Only a child, while I was practically an adult,’ Taylor supplied harshly for him.

‘None of us is ever so mature that we don’t suffer when we lose people we love,’ Bram contradicted her gently. ‘And if you had no other close family to turn to, to share your grief with, then—’

‘I don’t want to talk about it.’

Bram could hear the panic in her voice, feel it in her tense body as she stood by the door, scanning the traffic for her taxi, desperate to escape from him.

‘You might enjoy dwelling on the past,’ she added fiercely, ‘but I don’t. Nothing can change what happened. Nothing.’

She was perilously close to tears, Bram recognised in concern. He reached out his hand to touch her, to assure her that the last thing he had intended to do was to upset her, but she was already stepping away from him, exclaiming in patent relief, ‘My taxi’s here…I must go….’

A little later, as he made his own way home, Bram pondered on the events of the evening. He hadn’t been lying or exaggerating when he had said to Taylor that she was easy to talk to. She was. When she allowed herself to drop her guard and relax, there was something about her, an air of gentleness, of tranquillity, that invited confidences.

He only wished that he had been able to make her feel as secure and content in his company as he had felt in hers.

Careful, he warned himself. The pendulum that hung so delicately between his sexual desire for her and his emotions, was beginning to swing way, way too far into the emotional sector.

Desiring Taylor physically was something he could control and contain. Loving her…loving her? He started to frown. Now where had that idea…that word with all its connotations come from? He’d have to be a fool to go and let himself do something like loving Taylor. And he wasn’t that…was he?

‘Oh, no. Bram, come and take a look at this. Isn’t it the most garish display you’ve ever seen? Who on earth would ever want to plant anything like that?’ Helena demanded as she drew Bram’s attention to a brilliantly coloured, tightly planted bed of modern annuals.

‘It’s certainly rather colourful,’ Bram agreed mildly.

It had become an annual event, this visit of his and Helena’s to the Chelsea Flower Show, something they had done together ever since their first years as friends. Neither of Helena’s husbands had been interested in horticulture, unlike Bram, who had thoroughly enjoyed the opportunity his fen cottage garden had given him to have a vegetable and salad plot.

Neither the size of his London garden nor the size of his commitment to his business, permitted him that kind of self-indulgence any longer, but he still enjoyed his annual pilgrimage to the mecca, the Holy Grail as it were, of all things horticultural—although, unlike Helena, he chose not to slavishly follow the gardening fads touted by the more up-market papers and magazines.

He had seen gardens filled to the brim with clashing, brilliant colours which had pleased the eye and gladdened the soul in their own ways, just as much as a garden laid out on all the meticulous principles of planting and taste. It all depended upon how you looked at it, Bram mused. On whether one saw the miraculous bounty of a living, growing plant as just that, or felt and saw it as something that had to be rigidly selected and sited. Or whether it was simply nature’s design that filled one with pleasure, or one’s own.

However, he was far too kind to say as much to Helena, who seemed to take it as a personal insult if any of the exhibitors failed to meet her rigorous standards of what was and what was not good taste.

Bram watched her affectionately as she moved forward to examine one of the exhibits more closely, and then, out of the corner of his eye, a familiar face caught his attention. His voice warmed with pleasure and something else that made Helena turn her head and focus in surprise on him as he exclaimed, ‘Taylor!’ Then, ‘Excuse me a moment, would you, Helena, I’ve just seen someone I know.’

Following him as he made his way through the crowd to the tall, red-haired woman who was standing alone, transfixed almost, the expression in her eyes both guarded and anxious as she watched him, Helena started to frown as she realised that Bram’s quarry must be the woman Plum had described to her.

‘She’s far too old for Bram,’ Plum had protested, ‘and not at all pretty.’

Her daughter had been wrong on both counts, Helena recognised, although pretty was perhaps not the best word to describe Taylor. It didn’t do her justice, for one thing. She was beautiful, Helena thought, or rather she had the potential to be, and there was no doubt what Bram thought about her. His pleasure in seeing her was there for all to notice.

After two marriages and a friendship of more than twenty years, Helena had thought that she had finally grown out of her old infatuation with Bram. She had grown out of it, she told herself sternly. Bram was her friend, that was all, and if she did feel slightly wary, slightly suspicious and very cross about the woman he was now talking to, her feelings were merely those of a friend, a concerned and very old friend…that was all.

As she reached Bram’s side, Helena could hear him saying, ‘Look, since you’re obviously here on your own, why don’t you join us. Helena and I were just about to go and have a cup of coffee in the members’ enclosure, weren’t we, Helena?’

Loyally, Helena confirmed this statement, at the same time wondering why on earth Bram was having to work so hard to get the other woman to join them. Normally her sex was the one issuing invitations to Bram, not the other way around. But while she envied Taylor Bram’s obvious interest in her, at the same time she grudgingly approved of the other woman’s demeanour.

Whatever the relationship between them, it obviously wasn’t Taylor who had been pursuing Bram, Helena acknowledged, as Taylor fell reluctantly into step beside her. Beside her, Helena noticed, and not beside Bram.

‘I didn’t realise you were a gardener,’ Bram told Taylor, outmanoeuvring her tactic to avoid being too close to him by changing direction so that he could walk on the other side of her.

‘I’m not,’ Taylor responded shortly. ‘I just like looking….’

Visiting the show was one of her small, very special treats, an annual event she always looked forward to. As a flat dweller she had no garden, and her parents hadn’t been the type to encourage a small child’s enjoyment of growing things, disapproving of the disruption and mess it caused.

‘Which is your favourite stand?’ she heard Bram asking her, his voice taking on a teasing warmth as he coaxed. ‘Come on, it’s all right, you can tell us. I promise we won’t tell if you admit to a predilection for something that isn’t socially acceptable and fashionable.’

‘He’s only saying that because he loves the most appalling displays of overplanted annuals.’ Helena sniffed disparagingly.

‘While you won’t look at anything that isn’t filled with dank, dark topiary and insipid white flowers,’ Bram teased back.

‘I…I like the physic garden,’ Taylor heard herself admitting, ‘and…and the herbs…they’re so…so…’

‘So soothing and healing,’ Bram suggested gently for her.

Taylor gave him a wary look.

‘Yes. That’s part of it…but it’s also the fact that they’ve been grown and used for so many centuries. They’re timeless, eternal. When you think that people, civilisations, were cultivating and using them hundreds upon hundreds of years ago…’ She gave a small expressive shrug.

‘Come on, the members’ enclosure is just over here,’ Bram told them, turning towards Taylor and touching her lightly on the arm as he indicated the direction.

It was the briefest, the most fleeting of touches imaginable, but Helena could see how highly charged with physical and emotional tension it was—both Bram’s and Taylor’s. They weren’t already lovers, she decided intuitively, but if Bram had his way it wouldn’t be long before they were. And Taylor…did she reciprocate his feelings…his desire?

On the surface she might not seem to, but all that wary tension had to have some cause. And besides, what woman in her right mind would turn down a man like Bram?

Despite the fact that the enclosure was busy and full, Bram managed to find them a small table, disappearing in the direction of the bar once he was sure that they were both comfortable.

‘Have you known Bram long?’ Helena asked Taylor, once they were on their own. She wasn’t being inquisitive, she reassured herself. After all, Bram was one of her oldest friends. She had every right to feel protective of him, to want to make sure any new woman who entered his life knew how fortunate she was and appreciated what a very special man, a very special human being, Bram was.