Power Games

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….