Power Games. PENNY JORDAN
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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