Power Games. PENNY JORDAN

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