Power Games

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.