Читать книгу Power Games - Пенни Джордан, Penny Jordan - Страница 6

‘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.

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.