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‘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?
