Power Games - PENNY JORDAN

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that he separated her from her pain, protected her from it. Instinctively he fought down his reaction. She was a stranger to him, after all, a woman he barely knew, a woman whom his sense of self-preservation had already told him he would be wiser not to get to know.

      Against his hand he could feel the indentation of her waist, so much sharper, so much narrower than her clothes suggested, her bones tiny and fragile beneath her skin. She wasn’t thin; the soft swell of her breasts, the curve of her hips, were richly feminine. But her bone structure was very delicate and her body was much lighter than it should have been, her flesh worn down by whatever deep-rooted anxiety it was that caused those shadows in her eyes, that sense he had of her wariness, her fear.

      From her reaction to the couple on the other side of the road, her vocal outburst to him, he guessed that at some point in her life there had been a man, a relationship, which had caused her intense pain. The kind of pain that made her intensely suspicious of his sex and very determined to remain aloof and withdrawn from it.

      He told himself that he was glad.

      Firmly he withdrew from her, his hand dropping to his side. The young couple were now climbing amicably into their car, the small incident over, their quarrel apparently forgotten.

      He glanced thoughtfully towards Taylor as she turned her face away from him in an attempt to conceal her expression, calmly falling into step beside her as he waited for her to make some comment, to give him some explanation for her reaction. One glance into Taylor’s shuttered face warned him against making any kind of comment.

      Shakily, Taylor tried to compose her chaotic emotions. The small incident with the quarrelling couple had upset her more than she wanted to admit, disturbing old ghosts, reactivating feelings, fears she had thought she had long ago brought firmly under control.

      The whole episode had left her feeling horribly weak and vulnerable; angry both with herself for being so susceptible to what she had seen and with Bram for witnessing that susceptibility. She knew she ought to be grateful to him for his tactful silence, his lack of uncomfortable curiosity, but instead the knowledge that he was aware enough of the intensity of her reaction to feel that she needed to be treated with caution and compassion only increased her feelings of angry panic.

      She didn’t want him feeling sorry for her, knowing that she felt vulnerable. She wanted to be able to dislike him, to feel disdain and contempt for him, to dismiss him as someone who possessed the kind of personality traits she most disliked and feared instead of…instead of what? Instead of witnessing her reaction to a scene that not only had aroused her deepest fears and most painful memories, but also had resurrected far more dangerous and unwanted emotions and needs.

      Watching that young couple embrace with such open passion, feeling the male touch of Bram’s fingertips against her waist, her body—

      She faltered in midstep, overwhelmed by a sudden compulsion to tell him that she had changed her mind, that she didn’t want dinner after all…that she couldn’t spend any more time with him. But it was already too late; he was already pointing out the restaurant entrance to her, and her own logic was telling her that she had made enough of a fool of herself already.

      Chapter 7

      ‘I’m sorry. I must be boring you.’ Bram smiled across the table at Taylor. ‘I do tend to get a bit carried away about this project.’

      ‘It’s a very challenging project to take on,’ Taylor agreed as she forked up another delicious mouthful of carbonara.

      She wasn’t quite sure what she had expected from the restaurant. A certain degree of up-market exclusivity, a sense of being a little out of place? But she had been totally wrong on both counts. The restaurant was comfortable rather than elegant, and very obviously family owned and run. The glorious taste of the food had instantly transported her back to the last holiday she, her parents and her sister had shared before everything had started to go wrong.

      Tuscany had been relatively undiscovered then, and her teenager’s developing mind and senses had eagerly absorbed the new experiences the holiday had brought.

      She could still remember the hot dry scent of the countryside; her delight in its medieval towns, in history brought sharply into focus. The reality of it was so clear that she’d had only to close her eyes to imagine she was back in the days of the Borgias when Italy had been at the height of its political and financial powers.

      And then there had been the food.

      Hastily she brought herself back to the present, watching Bram’s expression as he responded to her comment.

      ‘Yes, I know. Jay feels we should be concentrating on expansion and not—’ Bram broke off. ‘He and I are going through a difficult patch at the moment. Our relationship has never been an easy one, which is more my fault than his.’

      As he looked directly at her, Taylor tried to mask her curiosity, but it was too late; he had seen it.

      ‘I was fourteen when Jay was conceived,’ he told her. ‘It was the result of…well, let’s just say it wasn’t exactly planned or wanted by either his mother or myself. And as far as I’m concerned, no child should have to grow up knowing that he wasn’t wanted.’

      ‘Fourteen!’ Taylor protested, trying and failing to master her shock.

      ‘Yes. I agree. Not an ideal age to become a father,’ Bram conceded. ‘Not for me and certainly not for Jay….’

      ‘Fourteen,’ Taylor repeated, her food forgotten as she tried to remember herself at that age, tried to imagine how she might have felt at the thought of becoming a mother.

      ‘You must have been…’

      ‘What?’ Bram asked her grimly, without allowing her to finish. ‘Oversexed? A coercive bully?’ He shook his head. ‘No, I wasn’t either. It wasn’t like that. The whole thing was quite literally an accident, in every sense of the word…. Jay’s mother was the daughter of our neighbours. We’d grown up together, so to speak. She was older than I was, sixteen to my fourteen. She’d been dating someone, another boy. I didn’t know him, but they’d had a quarrel and she turned to me for…for a shoulder to cry on and…consolation. Only things got slightly out of hand. Neither of us ever intended—it was the first time for me and I remember feeling afterwards rather bewildered and let down, wondering what all the fuss was about.

      ‘I was at an all-boys school, and of course there’d been the usual bragging and young male bravado. The most I’d ever experienced before was a rather clumsy attempt to kiss a girl at a party, but Tara—’ he paused, looking away from Taylor abruptly ‘—her parents were very strict. Too strict, according to mine, and of course in the time-honoured way of young girls she’d rebelled against them. Her boyfriend, the one she’d quarrelled with, was someone her parents didn’t approve of. They’d already forbidden her to go on seeing him, but I doubt they had any idea just how far the relationship had gone.

      ‘I must admit to being slightly shocked when Tara told me. There was no one else for her to confide in, I suppose. Like me she was at boarding school without any close girlfriends locally to talk to.’

      ‘When she saw how shocked I was she teased me about it. Asked me if I’d done it yet…forced me to confess that I hadn’t. She’d always enjoyed teasing me. I can remember how embarrassed I felt, especially when she started boasting to me about her boyfriend’s physical attributes.

      ‘I suppose that was what did it really. The need to prove myself, as it were. I doubt, originally, that she’d intended it to go any further than a piece of playful teasing. She could see how my body had reacted to what she was saying, and when she reached for my zip, I doubt she’d got anything more in mind than making fun of me for my excitement.

      ‘However, as I said, one thing led to another, and without either of us really intending it to happen, we became lovers….’

      Bram’s mouth twisted slightly. ‘Lovers. In reality that was the last thing we were. In reality Jay’s conception was a pathetic, clumsy,

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