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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.
