Power Games

Nadia fought to control her urge to scream at him. She could feel the blood receding from her skin and then flooding hotly back over it. She had forgotten just how clever and quick he could be…how cruelly scalpel-like the words which he used with such skin-stripping precision. He was better informed about her than she had imagined. Someone had drawn him a very accurate picture of Alaric’s character. Foolish of her not to have anticipated that.

‘Well,’ he prompted.

‘Well what,’ Nadia responded. ‘You’re wrong, Jay. I don’t want either to argue with you or go to bed with you.’

‘Liar. Oh, come on, Nadia,’ he demanded when she remained silent, ‘why the hell else would you agree to see me? After all, what else did we ever do other than fight or fuck?’

What else had they done? They had laughed, loved, argued, played.

‘Good in bed, is he, this fiancé of yours?’

‘He loves me,’ Nadia responded obliquely. The waiter had brought their food. She looked at it with distaste. Jay, on the other hand, was eating his with apparent relish.

‘He loves you.’ Jay laughed, causing every other woman in the place to focus on him with hungry appreciation.

‘He might love you, Nadia, but that wasn’t what I asked. Does he make you scream in ecstasy when he touches you? Does he make you plead with him to hold you, stroke you, lick you, suck you until…’

‘Stop it…stop it,’ Nadia demanded fiercely. Her appetite had gone completely now.

‘Still the same old Nadia,’ Jay mocked her, confident that he had got the upper hand now.

‘Oh, go to hell,’ Nadia cursed him.

He laughed again. ‘I thought you always claimed that was where our relationship took you. What exactly is it you’re hoping to get from me, Nadia?’

‘Nothing. I’ve already got what I wanted,’ she told him fiercely, and it was true. ‘You see, the reason I agreed to have dinner with you wasn’t because I wanted to relive old memories by going to bed with you.’ She gave him a cold smile. ‘It was simply because I wanted to remind myself of all the reasons why I’m glad that it’s a man like Alaric I’m going to marry, and not a man like you.’

Jay’s eyebrows rose.

‘You mean you needed reminding?’ His smile wasn’t a kind one. ‘Is that all you wanted to remind yourself of, Nadia? Are you sure?’

‘Positive,’ she told him firmly. ‘And besides, I want a man who is completely mine, completely adult…not one who’s so obsessed with his father that he can hardly bear to let him out of his sight. No, I pity the woman you marry, Jay…if you ever marry. She’ll always come a poor second to your obsession with your father.

‘What would you do, by the way, if he ever did remarry? He isn’t like you. He is capable of love… real love.’

‘My father won’t marry.’

Several of the other diners looked up as Jay’s harsh denial rang out across the quiet room.

‘You mean, you won’t let him,’ Nadia retaliated. ‘But how could you stop him if that was what he wanted to do? He’s still a relatively young man, Jay. Only in his mid-forties…if that. Plenty young enough to father a family…a second son. It’s a well-known fact that older men tend to dote on their children, especially when they’re their second family…to give them the time they didn’t give their first children. How will you like that, Jay?’

‘My father will not marry. The last thing he wants is another child, another son!’

‘Oh, really? Has he told you that? Is he afraid that he might turn out like you?’

Nadia was on a roll now, confident that she had got Jay on the run, that her sharp little darts were reaching the vulnerable tender heart of him.

What he couldn’t know was that they were piercing her heart as well, reminding her of the pain she had experienced when she first realised that with Jay she could never come first. His father held that place in his emotions; she did not even come a poor second.

Thank God for Alaric, with whom she would always come first. Alaric, who adored and worshipped her. Alaric, who shrugged off his family’s dislike and disapproval of her. Alaric, who would move mountains for her if she wished it. Alaric, whose methodical, earnest lovemaking might satisfy her physically but could never, ever transport her to the intense emotional heights to which Jay’s touch had once taken her. And could take her again.

Immediately she shut down on the thought. She had made her decision…her choice. And even if Jay had wanted her…loved her…

The thought of Jay loving anyone, abandoning himself to such a need of anyone, made her smile bitterly to herself.

‘He doesn’t need to tell me,’ Jay exploded, ignoring the second part of her taunt. ‘It goes without saying that a man of his age…’

He stopped speaking as Nadia started to laugh.

‘A man of his age… Oh, come on, Jay. How old is he exactly?’

‘Forty-two,’ Jay told her brusquely, his dislike of her questions on the subject colouring his voice.

Nadia could vividly remember his reluctance, his anger the first time she had questioned him about his father, his reluctance to reveal the small age gap between them, his obvious insecurity about his whole relationship with his father.

‘Forty-two—that’s nothing,’ Nadia taunted.

‘More than old enough for him to have married well before now, had he wanted to do so,’ Jay retaliated.

‘Could he have done that, Jay?’ she asked softly. ‘Could he have married…? Or would you have found some way of preventing him from doing so?’

‘My father lives his own life and—’

‘Does he? Or does he live the life you’ve restricted him to?’

‘He’s an adult…mature…the founder of a multimillion-pound business. He makes his own decisions, Nadia.’

‘Oh, I’m not questioning your father’s abilities nor his intelligence. They’re obvious for anyone to see. Nor am I suggesting that he’s the kind of man who’s too weak to control his own life. I have met him, remember, Jay. I know exactly how much of a man your father is—and how much of a father, a very compassionate father…. If I was a woman looking for a man to be a good father to my children, your father would be the kind of man I’d choose…that any woman would choose. But then you already know that, don’t you, and that’s one of the reasons you’re so possessive about him. You don’t want the competition of sharing him with any little half-brother or -sister, you don’t—’

‘You don’t know what the hell you’re talking about,’ Jay interrupted her furiously, pushing back his chair and standing up.

He was going to walk out on her, Nadia recognised, stunned, shocked as he removed some money from his wallet and flung it down on the table.

There was a tight white line of anger around his compressed mouth, the bones in his face starkly sharp beneath his skin as he fought for self-control. As he turned on his heel and left her, Nadia acknowledged that there had never been anything in their relationship, intensely physical and passionate though it had been, that had come anywhere near matching the inferno of white-hot emotions his relationship with his father provoked.

Would any woman ever be allowed to produce that kind of emotional reaction in him? If one did, it certainly wouldn’t be her, Nadia acknowledged mentally as the waiter came up to the table.

‘My friend had to leave,’ Nadia told him crisply, firmly making sure that the calm eye contact she exchanged with him reinforced her statement.

Half an hour later, on her way back to her apartment, she acknowledged that this was not precisely how she had envisaged ending her evening.

So what had she wanted…? Sex…a final fling before she settled down? A nostalgic trip back into the past to a world when her whole universe had been bound by Jay’s arms, when all she had wanted or needed was her love for him…? Her whole world… Not his…never his—which was why she had ended their relationship in the first place.

Why would any woman ever be stupid enough to love such a man…? Why…? Because she was a woman, and because Jay, for all his faults, possessed that dangerous brand of masculinity and maleness that women, even grown-up, adult, mature, intelligent women like her had been programmed to ache for in a way they could never ache for a nice, kind, worthwhile man like Alaric.

Damn Jay. Damn him. Damn him, damn him…! She was, Nadia recognised, crying.

As Jay strode out of the restaurant a cruising taxi pulled to a halt alongside the kerb, but Jay dismissed it with a curt shake of his head.

Human company or conversation, no matter how mundane, was the last thing he felt like, right now. He was not a physically violent man, and certainly had never felt even remotely tempted to strike a woman, but if he had stayed in that restaurant much longer, listening to Nadia’s taunts… She had always been good at getting under his skin, trying to dig too deeply into his most personal thoughts and feelings. What the hell had she meant, suggesting that his father might want to marry, have children?

Just for a moment he closed his eyes, the noise of the traffic becoming a muted, distant roar as he was swept back into the past, to a memory of his seven-year-old self saying angrily to his father, ‘You don’t love me.’

‘Of course I love you, Jay,’ had been his father’s calm, gentle response.

‘But you didn’t want me. You never wanted me to be born,’ Jay had insisted, recalling the cruel comments his grandparents had often made about his conception.

And Bram, of course, with his belief in honesty, had not been able to refute his accusation.

His father marrying, conceiving children, whose birth was something wanted, planned, children whom he would welcome and love, and not have foisted on him the way that Jay had been. Children who would believe it when Bram told them that he loved them, children who would have no idea of what it meant to doubt their right to their father’s love. Unlike him.

But then, long, long before Bram had even come into his life Jay had known the truth about his own conception.

Bram’s parents and Jay’s mother’s parents had been neighbours in the small, exclusive, upper-middle-class area of the town with its large detached houses each set in its own grounds.

Jay’s mother’s father held a high-ranking local government position at county level. Jay’s mother had been an only child. Bram’s father had been an architect, the senior partner in a prestigious local practice. Bram, too, had been an only child. Neither wife had worked; both sets of parents had socialised together occasionally; both men had played golf and both women had given their time to the same local charities. So it was inevitable that Bram and Jay’s mother should have known each other, even though they were at separate, single-sex schools and she had been two years Bram’s senior.

Jay’s earliest memories of his mother were of someone pretty and loving, but also someone lacking in any real authority or power. It was his grandparents, and especially his grandfather, who decided how they all lived their lives.

His mother pouted, wheedled and manipulated her father into buying her new clothes and paying for expensive holidays. But when it came to her son… Jay had quickly learned that her quick, almost frightened, look at her father meant that he, Jay, had done something to displease his grandfather and that, for his mother’s sake, he must not do it again.

As he grew older, it sometimes seemed to him that he was making his grandfather angry just by being there. Despite all the attention his grandparents lavished on him whenever other people were around, when he was on his own it was obvious they didn’t really like him at all. His grandfather often got very cross and talked angrily about ‘that bastard who caused us all this trouble.’

It was when he started playschool that Jay first realised he didn’t have something that other children had—or rather, someone.

He could still vividly remember another boy coming up to him and saying importantly, ‘My daddy’s a doctor. What does your daddy do?’

Nonplussed, Jay had stared at him, but when he got home he had asked his mother, ‘Where’s my daddy?’

She had burst into tears and cried so much that his grandmother had come to see what all the fuss was about. His mother’s tears and his grandmother’s consequent anger frightened Jay so much that when his grandmother had insisted he repeat his question for his grandfather when he came home later, he had stammered so badly he had hardly been able to get the question out.

‘Where’s your daddy…? A father is something you haven’t got. Your father doesn’t give a damn about you or about anyone just so long as he—’

‘Daddy, please…’ Jay’s mother had intervened, but his grandfather had overruled her.

‘No. If he’s old enough to ask questions then he’s old enough to learn the truth. To be told how his precious father ruined our lives.’

It was years later when Jay learned the complete truth. After one of his quarrels with Helena, she had turned on him and told him fiercely, ‘You ought to be damn glad you’ve got a father like Bram. When I think… He was fourteen when you were conceived. Fourteen. Under age still, while your mother…well, of course Bram’s far too much of a gentleman to say so, but it’s obvious that she must have been the one to…

‘Your grandfather, her father, wanted her to have a termination when he found out she was pregnant, but it was too late. Bram’s parents offered to adopt you, but her parents wouldn’t hear of it. No. Bram was to agree to have nothing whatsoever to do with either her or you, ever again, and in return for that they’d actually allow Bram’s parents to give their precious daughter ten thousand pounds to help to bring you up.

‘If you want my opinion,’ Helena had added viciously, ‘the chances are that Bram isn’t really your father at all. Your mother had been involved in a relationship with someone else, and it was when that ended that she turned to your father for consolation. That was when you were conceived, according to her. Personally, I would be surprised if…’

Jay hadn’t wanted to hear any more. He had walked away from her in the same way he had walked away from Nadia tonight. He had been thirteen then. Now he was twenty-seven—old enough to know that walking away from a problem never solved it.

No one else had ever suggested to him that Bram might not be his father, least of all Bram himself, and physically they were so much alike. Knowing Helena, her comment was probably something she had made up on the spur of the moment, driven by the frustration of her resentment of him and her belief that he came between her and his father.

She would undoubtedly have denied it, but Jay knew that her feelings for his father went far deeper than those of mere friendship, and while she might have forgotten the taunt she had thrown at him in the heat of the moment, Jay himself had not.

The sharp, angry blare of a car horn brought him out of his reverie. He wasn’t a child any more, but an adult male; it had been a stupid piece of self-betrayal to let Nadia get so deeply under his skin.

‘You’re too hard on Nadia, Jay,’ his father had once rebuked him gently after witnessing them quarrelling. ‘Can’t you see how much she loves you?’

Love…what was it? Jay wasn’t sure that he knew—or that he wanted to.

As he waited for the lights to change at the intersection, he was frowning, suddenly anxious to get back to his hotel and ring his father.

Chapter 5

‘You’re seconding me to work with Bram Soames? But what about my work here?’ Taylor asked sharply, her forehead pleating in a frown as she confronted Sir Anthony across his desk, and fought to conceal from him the shock his announcement had given her.

‘You’ve said yourself that since we installed this new computer system you’ve got time on your hands,’ Sir Anthony reminded her.

‘To a point, but there are things…surely someone else…’ Someone else, anyone else, Taylor thought as she fought to control her panic. It had never occurred to her when her boss had asked her to spare him a few minutes, what he intended to say to her. The very thought of working closely with an unknown man filled her with anxiety. Her fear of anyone guessing what she was feeling was almost as strong as the anxiety itself.

‘There isn’t anyone else,’ Sir Anthony was saying now. ‘At least no one with your experience. I appreciate that what I’m asking falls outside your normal field of operation, but if Bram can produce a viable working program—’ He gave a small lift of his shoulders.

‘If he can produce a working program,’ Taylor countered. ‘It’s been tried before without any real success.’

‘Yes, I know that and so does Bram, but since he’s prepared to give up his time free of charge—’

‘Free of charge? There’s no such thing as a free lunch,’ Taylor commented cynically. ‘He must be expecting to get something out of it.’

‘Not Bram,’ Sir Anthony denied.

‘Why? What makes him so different?’ Taylor asked the question almost reluctantly, unwilling to be drawn into discussing a man she had already decided she didn’t want to like.

‘Well, Jay, for a start,’ he told her, explaining when he saw her frown.

‘Jay is his son. Bram had to take full responsibility for him when his mother was killed in a car accident. He was still at university at the time. Bram’s parents did offer to adopt the boy, but Bram wouldn’t hear of it. He said that Jay was his son. His responsibility. A lot of men would have let them go ahead, ducked out…. Bram’s tutors did their best to dissuade him. They were forecasting a brilliant future for him. He had a first-class brain. But he wouldn’t listen. Jay came first.’

‘And that makes him a candidate for sainthood?’ Taylor asked sharply. ‘Women…girls in their thousands make that kind of sacrifice every day of the week without getting any praise for it. Far from it.’

‘Maybe so,’ Sir Anthony allowed, ‘but it’s their choice to become mothers. Bram had no choice. No say in whether or not he became a father.’

‘Rubbish,’ Taylor retorted angrily. ‘He had every choice. Presumably his son’s mother didn’t tie him to the bed and force him to impregnate her.’

Taylor could tell from Sir Anthony’s expression that her sudden forthrightness had surprised him. It had surprised her as well. Any kind of discussion that touched upon sexual matters, even in the mildest way, was normally something she avoided like the plague, but her boss’s comments, his attitude, had angered her so much that she had felt impelled to speak out.

‘Bram was only fourteen when Jay was conceived,’ Sir Anthony told her quietly. ‘It isn’t a subject that he ever liked discussing….’

‘But he made sure, all the same, that everyone knew he wasn’t to blame,’ Taylor remarked bitterly.

She knew she was overreacting, but she just couldn’t withhold the words or control the emotions that lay behind them, even though she knew she would regret her outburst later.

‘It wasn’t actually Bram who told us,’ Sir Anthony answered her. ‘It was his father. He was very bitter about the way the girl’s family had treated Bram, and about the way he felt Bram’s life had been blighted by what happened. Bram has always put others’ needs before his own.’

Taylor realised that she was wasting her time continuing to protest about being seconded to work with Bram, little though she liked the idea.

Little though she liked it? Loathing was a closer description to what she was actually feeling. Loathing, fear, panic, anger, but most of all fear… Fear at the thought of working closely with a man she did not know. Fear at the thought of being subjected to his will, his domination, fear at the thought of having to be alone with him, fear at its most basic and damaging level, fear in its most humiliating and degrading form; fear of a woman for a man simply because he was a man.

But, of course, there was no way she could explain those feelings to Sir Anthony, no way she could explain them to anyone.

When she read articles in magazines about people who had contracted the HIV virus and were afraid of the consequences, of making their vulnerability public, Taylor knew exactly what they were suffering. She had suffered like that for twenty years, albeit on a different plane. She knew exactly what it felt like, the fear, the pain, the isolation, the feeling of being apart, different from the rest of the human race. She knew exactly what it was like to have to guard her every comment in case she unwittingly betrayed herself; to remove herself from any kind of physical or emotional contact with other people; to protect them from the consequences of any kind of intimacy with her at the same time as she protected herself.

The past, her past, was always with her, a constant reminder, and a constant warning….

‘Look, I can see you’re not keen on the idea of working with Bram,’ Sir Anthony acknowledged, ‘but—’

‘No. I’m not,’ Taylor agreed, interrupting him to snatch at the escape route he was unwittingly offering to her.

There was no point in trying to explain to him that it wasn’t just Bram Soames she didn’t want to work closely with, it was any and every man.

It had taken almost two years before she had finally conquered her anxiety enough to feel comfortable working with Sir Anthony, before her brain and her emotions finally caught up with what her instincts were telling her—that her boss was the happily married man he purported to be and that his kindness towards the female members of his staff sprang from a genuine, slightly old-fashioned avuncular and protective attitude towards the female sex as a whole, rather than from some hidden, ulterior motive. However, to feel comfortable working with Sir Anthony was one thing. Bram Soames was something—someone—altogether different.

‘If it’s any consolation to you, I suspect that Bram is as reluctant to work with you as you are with him,’ Sir Anthony told her.

‘You suspect?’ Taylor questioned him sharply, stifling the unexpected stab of feminine chagrin his comment gave her. Why should she feel annoyed because Bram Soames didn’t want to work with her? For years she had trained herself not to be in any way responsive to men, to treat them as though they simply did not exist. It was easier that way…safer…for her, for them.

‘Bram is rather better at concealing his feelings than you are,’ Sir Anthony answered her dryly.

‘Try looking at the fact that I want you to work alongside him as a compliment rather than a punishment,’ he coaxed. ‘Because that is what it is. I know how you feel about your work, Taylor. After all, I’ve tried hard enough in the past to prise you away from your precious archives and to get you to play a far more active role on the public relations side of things. You’ve got the brain for it and the expertise and you’ve got a very special gift for being able to put your point across—when you choose to use it.

‘Now that we’ve put in that new computer system and you’ve got spare time on your hands…’

Taylor could feel the panic starting to explode inside her. Public relations work, anything that brought her into the public eye in any way at all, terrified her. At least, if she was working with Bram Soames her contact would be limited to him and conducted in circumstances over which she would have some control.

‘No one knows the history of the society as well as you do,’ Sir Anthony was saying persuasively, ‘which is why I want you to work alongside Bram. This project is too important to allow personal feelings to prejudice it. I appreciate that the two of you might not exactly become kindred spirits, but…’

‘But for the sake of the cause, I should be prepared to sacrifice myself,’ Taylor suggested wryly, her mouth twisting slightly.

‘Actually, that wasn’t what I was going to say,’ Sir Anthony rebuked her mildly. ‘I was simply going to point out that you’re not being very fair to Bram. He’s a very likeable chap, you know. Kind. Well-intentioned. Most women—’ he began and then stopped, as though he realised that he was treading on very dangerous ground.