Power Games

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

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

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

More titles by PENNY JORDAN

For the ultimate indulgence be sure to download the stunningly sensational ebooks

TO LOVE, HONOUR AND BETRAY

and

NOW OR NEVER

Pure escapism, pure passion, pure decadence…it’s impossible to resist!

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

Power Games

Penny Jordan

www.millsandboon.co.uk

MILLS & BOON

Before you start reading, why not sign up?

Thank you for downloading this Mills & Boon book. If you want to hear about exclusive discounts, special offers and competitions, sign up to our email newsletter today!

SIGN ME UP!

Or simply visit

signup.millsandboon.co.uk

Mills & Boon emails are completely free to receive and you can unsubscribe at any time via the link in any email we send you.

Prologue

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

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

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

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

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

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

‘No one,’ the woman assured her quietly.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

‘Over?’

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

Chapter 1

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

‘Very,’ the other woman had agreed.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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