Читать книгу Power Games - Пенни Джордан, PENNY JORDAN - Страница 8

Down below, to the left of Jay’s bedroom window, Fifth Avenue lay under a haze of car exhaust fumes and heat. To the right the trees in Central Park were just beginning to lose the bright, fresh greenness of early spring. The temperature was rising, and with the approach of summer came an energetic and collective shedding of layers of clothing from women’s bodies, which should have rejoiced the heart of any red-blooded male, Jay acknowledged as his glance lingered briefly on the slim, golden limbs of a girl crossing the street below him.

Perhaps if he had been able to make his father see reason, bring him round to his point of view, he might have felt more inclined to join the general rush to welcome summer.

As it was… New Yorkers obviously had conveniently short memories, he decided cynically. In another six weeks’ time they would be moaning about the stifling heat of their city. In another six weeks…

On the surface his meeting with the Japanese had gone well enough; they had seemed to accept his careful noncommittal statement that he and his father both felt they needed more time before coming to a final decision about such a very important step. On the surface… Oh, they had been polite enough, but there had been that firm reminder that they would not wait for ever, that resources for investment were finite and there were other small companies in which they were interested. Like Jay they had other business in New York, and their comment had somehow sounded more like a warning than general conversation.

Another meeting had been set up for six weeks’ time. Six weeks—would that be long enough to bring his father around to his point of view? To make him see sense? To make him realise how very, very vulnerable they were, and how much they needed the kind of partnership the Japanese were offering?

Jay frowned impatiently as he continued to stare out of the window. What was his father doing—thinking—was he regretting not agreeing with him?

The familiar edginess and anger he always felt when he and his father were apart, when others were in a better position to influence him than he was himself, were beginning to make him wish he hadn’t committed to a two-week stay in New York. Damn. Jay silently cursed himself—and Plum. Still, it would be worth the wait just to see her face when he gave her her ‘present.’ Hers and everyone else’s, once they realised just what it was.

He was already regretting rearranging his dinner date with Nadia, but she had wanted to see him, or so she’d said.

Their affair had ended more than six years ago, and although he continued to hear, through mutual acquaintances, about her almost meteoric career progress, they had not kept in touch on a personal basis.

He glanced at the phone, wondering if it was too late to ring her and cancel their date for the second time, but then, if he did, he was grimly aware of the conclusions she was likely to draw.

‘If there’s one thing I can’t stand, it’s a man who sulks,’ she had once told him pithily, after they had quarrelled.

‘I do not sulk,’ he had countered angrily, but she had raised her eyebrows and mocked.

‘Oh no? If you believe that, then you’re nowhere near as intelligent as you like to pretend to be, Jay. When it comes to handing out the silent withdrawal treatment you’re an expert. And they say that women are manipulative! The moment a situation comes along where you think you might not win, you don’t want to be involved. You back off and retreat into that cosy, safe little world of yours and you bar the door behind you.’

That had been just one of the quarrels which had ultimately led to the collapse of their relationship. In personality they were poles apart. Nadia was the great-granddaughter of Russian immigrants who had fled to London at the time of the revolution; her nature was passionate and volatile, and when she believed in something, she believed in it utterly and completely—and expected those close to her to believe in it as well.

When Jay had refused to do so she had denounced him as being too cold, too clinical, too good at using logic to deny real feelings.

But Nadia had had a logic of her own, a logic which had ultimately led to her ending their relationship. She’d told Jay that, although sexually he was a very good lover, the cost of maintaining their relationship was an investment she was not prepared to make. ‘Think of our relationship as a bank,’ she had told him fiercely. ‘I am the one who does all the emotional paying in, Jay. You are the one who is always drawing out, who makes no contribution emotionally.

‘I have too much respect for myself, too many things I want to do with my life, to burden myself with that kind of debt. I am not like your father, endlessly prepared to fund your emotional poverty. I have a need to make withdrawals of my own…to require my own support. Fucking you is heaven, but loving you would be hell.’

No, he mused, theirs had not been the kind of relationship which would allow them now to sit down comfortably together and reminisce over their shared past.

Not that Nadia had ever been the type to waste time reminiscing about the past. She lived in the present and worked for the future. Even while at London University she had been very clear-minded about what she wanted, where she was going….

‘I am a citizen of the world,’ she had been fond of saying. ‘The fate which has denied me the right to a country of my own has also freed me to live without any hampering emotional attachments to any particular country. My great-grandparents might have settled here in Britain, but they were always treated as outsiders. I owe no more loyalty to Britain than I do to anywhere else.’

‘But it’s Britain, the British people, who have given you your security, your education…your freedom.’ Jay had challenged her.

‘No,’ Nadia had countered fiercely. ‘These are things I have taken for myself…worked for myself…. I do not owe anyone anything.’

She had never made any secret of her ambitions, and now, by all accounts, she was well on the way to fulfilling them.

Half an hour later as Jay stood under the shower letting the spray hammer his flesh, he found himself thinking about her again.

She had been his first really serious lover, challenging and mocking him in the days before she finally allowed him to catch her, and continuing to do so even afterwards.

He had never discovered just how or with whom she had learned the sexual expertise which had made her such a skilled lover. Now, with hindsight, he suspected it had been with an older man—or men. She had certainly been confident enough to tell him quite clearly and firmly when he didn’t please or satisfy her as she wanted.

She had been the first woman, the only woman, when he thought about it, who had made it clear that she considered the act of cunnilingus one that she not only had every right to expect from him as a regular part of their lovemaking, but also one by which she judged the manner of a man.

‘Only a man who is ignorant of the true pleasure of sex thinks that all he has to do to give a woman satisfaction is to penetrate her,’ Nadia had declared scornfully after listening to a fellow male undergraduate boasting about the number of times he had “fucked” his partner in one twenty-four-hour period.

‘For a woman, penetration is nothing. It is the way a man savours and relishes the scent and taste of her, the way he lingers over every tiny lick and suck. There is nothing…nothing more erotic than having a man beg to be allowed to go down on you. Nothing.’

Jay had learned since that she had been both right and wrong. There were women to whom cunnilingus was everything, the only orgasmic pleasure, and there were also women who did not feel sexually satisfied unless they had been physically penetrated—and there were women who filled the distance between the two by desiring and enjoying an infinite variety of intimacies.

In his experience sex was not so much a mutual pleasure as a mutual trade-off; it wasn’t just the New Age seriousness of the dawning of the nineties, trailing its ghoulish warnings about promiscuity and AIDS, which was making sex something that people felt more inclined to hang back from rather than rush into. It was a general feeling of cynicism about the motivations behind the act, a disinclination to believe that it was done, ultimately, for anything more than personally selfish motives.

‘Time was when a guy who stayed at home and gave himself a hand job was considered a maladjusted weirdo…pathetic,’ Jay had overheard one man telling another in the changing rooms at his gym. ‘Now a guy’s only got to say in public that he prefers to take responsibility for his own sexual release and he’s got every woman in the place convinced he’s Mr Sensitive New Man.’

He, personally, might not have taken things that far, Jay admitted, but his sex drive had certainly diminished over the past few years.

Beauty without brains had never appealed to him, even when he was younger, but now… When had he first begun to feel that there was something empty about his relationships, something lacking?

He moved uncomfortably across the room, irritated by his thoughts. He had Nadia to blame for this emotional introspection.

Nadia paused in the act of smoothing the fine black wool crêpe of her dress over her thirty-three-inch hips, frowning as she moved a little closer to the mirror to study her reflection critically.

There came a point when a woman was approaching her thirtieth birthday where being enviably slim could suddenly change to being unenviably thin—scraggy, in fact, with brittle chicken-stick bones and skin that, without the healthy satin gleam of youth, could appear far less appealing to male eyes than the plumper flesh of more rounded women. Treading the fine line between slender suppleness and that ageing, desiccated thinness was an art. So far she had more than mastered it. The warm silken flesh of her bare arms contrasted perfectly with the fabric and colour of her dress. Her legs, clad in the sheerest of sheer stockings, were exactly the same colour as her discreetly tanned arms—just enough to give a healthy glow rather than a winter pallor, but never, ever enough to mimic the overtanned look of an older generation, who had learned too late of the damaging effects of the sun, which they had embraced with such passionate adoration.

Her dress was simple but elegant, and it fitted perfectly, emphasising the narrowness of her waist and the slenderness of her hips, the delicate swell of her breasts—and if a man was discerning enough, and Jay would be—the fact that beneath it her breasts were bare, small enough and firm enough to allow them to be so.

All that would change if she married Alaric.

He would want children and soon and, of course, there would be pressure on her to conform to the stereotype of WASP wife and motherhood.

If she married him. Was there really any doubt? He would be the perfect husband for her in every way. She couldn’t put off her decision much longer. Her frown deepened.

Had Jay appeared in the Big Apple at just the right moment?

It was often said that a woman never forgot her first lover, and while Jay had not been that, he had certainly been the first man to touch her emotions, the first man she had loved.

It was six years since they had last met…since they had parted. What would Jay see tonight when he looked at her? A desirable woman? An older version of the ex-lover he had walked away from without any apparent regrets? A successful career woman who had made a name for herself in one of the toughest career arenas in the world? Life was tough enough on Wall Street when you were a man; when you were a woman…

It was seven-thirty, time for her to leave. She picked up her wrap.

Nadia saw Jay before he saw her. She had purposefully arrived at the restaurant early and gone straight to the table he’d booked.

She could see him now, pausing to survey the occupants of the dimly lit room, standing a good six inches above the maître d’ and drawing every pair of female eyes in the place to him, Nadia observed wryly.

And no wonder. While to her his features had been instantly recognisable—they were, after all, carved on her memory, her senses for all time—her femininity marvelled at the subtlety with which nature had transformed a young man—a very good-looking young man—into an adult male, a predator, a hunter at the full height of his power. His young male frame with its long rangy bones had become subtly more muscular, harder, sexier, all the soft flesh of youth stripped away, replaced by a much harder and far more masculine covering that revealed the true magnificence of his bone structure.

Given the chance, the entire female population of the restaurant would have gladly given voice to a long, verbal orgasm just watching him, Nadia reflected cynically, and didn’t he just know it.

He had seen her now, the green eyes meeting hers briefly before disengaging as he strode purposefully towards her.

‘Nadia…’

Even his voice had become more masculine, deeper, more positive, sending a small electric frisson of sensual awareness zigzagging down her spine.

Very impressive, Nadia acknowledged, as he sat down opposite her. But she was determined not to let him know what she was thinking, to make sure that she was the one who kept control of the situation.

‘Drink?’ she asked him, adding gently, ‘I hear things didn’t go too well with the Japanese….’

Jay’s eyebrows rose, his eyes calm, slightly surprised. ‘Oh?’ He gave a small dismissive shrug. ‘I thought they went rather well, but then I suppose it all depends on your point of view.’

‘You weren’t able to give them any real commitment,’ Nadia told him.

‘I didn’t want to give them any firm commitment,’ Jay corrected her. ‘Their offer is only one of several options we’re considering at the moment.’

‘We?’ Nadia pounced. ‘Ah…of course…your father. His is the final decision, isn’t it?’

‘Why exactly did you want to have dinner with me, Nadia? Not to talk business, surely.’

She had rattled him, even though he was fighting hard not to show it, Nadia exulted. She wondered what he would say if he knew that she also had dealings with his Japanese contacts, and that for the first time in her professional life she had broken one of her golden rules. She had kept back from her clients a piece of important information by not telling them that no matter what Jay might say to them, it was his father and not he whose decision would be final. What she was even more reluctant to dwell on was why she had kept that information to herself.

‘No…not just to talk business,’ she agreed with a smile. ‘We’re old friends,’ she went on. ‘It’s a long time since we last met….’

‘Old friends?’ Jay queried. ‘You and I were never friends, Nadia. Lovers…yes…friends, no.

‘I understand you’re getting married.’

If he had expected to catch her off guard, he was disappointed.

‘It’s a possibility, yes,’ Nadia allowed, pausing to accept the drink the waiter had brought her.

‘A possibility,’ Jay mocked. ‘How very romantic…’

‘Marriage should never be about romance,’ Nadia told him firmly. ‘Romance is…’

‘For lovers?’ Jay suggested. He was enjoying baiting her, enjoying using her to relieve the tension of the past few days, he acknowledged savagely as he watched the anger flare briefly in her eyes before she controlled her reaction.

‘Romance is an illusion, is what I was going to say. Temptingly sweet at first, but it can soon become unpleasantly cloying.’

‘So there is to be no romance in this marriage of yours…. But there will, I trust, be love.’

He was treading on very dangerous ground, Jay recognised, dangerous for himself as well as for her.

‘Yes, there will be love,’ Nadia confirmed, but she didn’t add that the love would be Alaric’s for her rather than the other way around.

‘How is your father, by the way?’ she asked with deliberate mock innocence. Talking about his father had always been a good way of goading Jay in the old days.

‘He’s fine,’ Jay responded tersely. ‘Look, Nadia—’

‘And still unmarried,’ Nadia hazarded, ignoring the keep-off signs he was posting. ‘What a waste. Do you know, Jay, it’s a pity that you and I met when I was so young. If we were to meet now and you were to introduce me to your father…I suspect that he’d be the one I’d want and not you.’

It was, Nadia recognised with an odd spurt of surprise, the truth. She had been twenty-one when she met Jay; he had been just that little bit younger and she had been tired of older men, older lovers. She had met Jay’s father a couple of times when he visited Jay at university, and on both occasions Jay had been angrily reluctant to introduce her to his father, who had arrived unexpectedly.

The first time she had naïvely assumed Jay’s reluctance sprang from his possessive streak and that he was afraid that she might prefer his father to him.

She had been right about the possessiveness but wrong, oh, so wrong, about the focus of it. The reason he had wanted to exclude her had not been because he was afraid she might prefer his father’s company, but because he had been afraid that his father might prefer hers.

She had taunted him mercilessly with that fact once she had discovered it, unable to understand then as she did so clearly now that she had been equally jealous and resentful of the fact that Jay so obviously preferred his father’s company to hers…that his father was more important to him than her.

‘Still not outgrown our daddy complex, I see, Jay,’ she murmured dulcetly. ‘But then he is quite a man, isn’t he…your father. Not that you’d ever allow any woman to get close enough to find out just how much of a man. You know, I feel very sorry for your father. It can’t be easy, having a son like you, possessive, obsessive….’

She tensed as he half made to stand up, his eyes dark with anger. Inwardly she cursed herself. He was going to walk out on her.

Her relief when she realised that he was simply summoning the waiter left her feeling sick and angry. This wasn’t how it was supposed to be. She was the one in control here, not Jay. But she could see from his expression that he had guessed what she was thinking.

‘What do you want from this meeting, Nadia?’ he asked her softly. ‘If it’s to use me to get rid of the aggression you can’t vent on your tame, docile, neutered husband-to-be, then you should have found somewhere more private to do it. Mind you, I’m sure our fellow diners would be enthralled by one of your virtuoso performances—they, after all, haven’t seen one before. I, on the other hand, have—and if it’s another kind of appetite you wanted to satisfy…well, the same thing applies. Sex in public places never turned me on—you should have remembered that.’

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.