Power Games. PENNY JORDAN

this is Mr Soames,’ the secretary announced.

      ‘Bram.’ Bram introduced himself, stretching out his hand. The look of icy hauteur he received in return was deliberately contrived, a just punishment no doubt for his body’s flagrant breaking of the rules, but the way her body flinched away from him wasn’t. That reaction was far more basic and instinctive.

      ‘I’ve extracted the information from the records that Sir Anthony asked me to obtain for you,’ she was saying to him as the secretary left. ‘Here it is….’

      At any other time Bram would merely have been gently amused and perhaps a little saddened for her at the way she pushed the file towards him, removing her hand from it as though she feared he might somehow make an attempt to touch her. But for some reason on this occasion, and with this woman, her reaction hurt him personally, not for her sake, for his own.

      ‘I understand that you’ve worked for the charity for almost twenty years.’ Was he imagining the sharp flicker of fear beneath the ice that wintered her eyes? He didn’t think so. So what then was she so afraid of, so afraid that her fear generated an anger with herself that he could almost feel? Him? His question? Both?

      Intrigued as much by her contrasting emotions as by the cause of them, Bram found himself wanting to know more about her—much more. He wanted to protect her, and at the same time he also had a very male and far less altruistic desire to unwrap her poor punished body from its cruel constrictions and watch as the anger and coldness were banished from her eyes by warmth and laughter.

      Somewhere? Where? His arms…his bed…his…

      Whoa…hold on, he warned himself firmly. Didn’t he have enough complications already in his life without adding any more? And besides, hadn’t she already made it plain that there was no way she was going to reciprocate the kind of thoughts he was having?

      ‘Your file,’ he heard her say coldly, her voice sharp with irritation.

      Why was he looking at her like that, watching her like that? Taylor wondered angrily. As though…as though… Hurriedly she looked away from him, feeling both angry and defensive. She didn’t like people, men, watching her so closely. It made her feel nervous…angry…edgy, sending alarm bells clanging through her nervous system. What was it about that kind of look in a man’s eyes—sexually curious, sexually interested, sexually predatory—that once seen, you never forgot, never failed to recognise? It infuriated her that he was looking at her like that. She had done nothing to encourage his interest after all, far from it.

      ‘Will you have dinner with me?’

      The quiet question shocked her, fear and anger leaping through her body like two choke-chained guard dogs taught to respond to threat.

      Bram had known what her answer would be even before he asked the question and as he measured her hostility and rejection he wondered if he had totally taken leave of his senses. There were women, plenty of them, who would have moved heaven and earth to be invited out by him, but this woman would never be one of them.

      ‘No.’

      There was nothing restrained or polite about her sharp refusal. The small word was explosive with anger and resentment and spiked with her fear. She threw it at him as though it were a hand grenade, a weapon she wanted to use to destroy him completely. It was too late now to tell her that from the moment he had walked into her office, his behaviour had been so completely out of character that even he had been surprised by it. He doubted she would believe him and knew that she would not want to believe him—him or any man who dared to overstep the boundaries she had set around herself.

      Bram had come across women who were genuine man-haters, but they had been nothing like this woman. Their feelings had sprung from cold dispassionate contempt. Hers had been formed in far hotter and more painful fires. He wondered if she knew how vulnerable she seemed and how much that vulnerability made him ache for her—in every sense, the emotional and the physical.

      He was just about to say he was sorry and attempt to soothe her when her office door opened and another woman came in, apologising for interrupting, after a quick and femininely appreciative glance in Bram’s direction. Watching the dismissive way Taylor turned her back on him to attend to the other woman’s query, Bram mentally shrugged as he headed towards the door. And then stopped, some impulse he hadn’t known he possessed making him pause and murmur softly to her before he left. ‘I’ll be in touch. I haven’t given up.’

      The white-faced look of concentrated panic she threw at him made him wince. Not for himself but for her. It obviously hadn’t been the right thing to say, and what was worse, he had actually known that before he opened his mouth. What the hell was the matter with him? He wasn’t normally so gauche, far from it; but then the truth was that normally when it came to women, he had had more practice using his powers of tact and subtlety to fend them off, not draw them on.

      ‘Wow,’ Taylor’s companion commented after Bram had gone. ‘Now that’s what I call a sexy man and a half. Who was he?’

      ‘Brampton Soames, the head of Soames Computac.’

      ‘What!’ The other woman’s eyes widened even further. ‘All that and money, too. I’d have thought he’d be much older. Hasn’t he got an adult son?’

      ‘I really don’t know,’ Taylor responded dismissively in a voice which warned that Bram Soames, his sex appeal and his adult son were subjects in which she had absolutely no interest whatsoever. Which wasn’t completely true. She had an interest all right, but it wasn’t the same one as her colleague, who was now bemoaning the fact that she hadn’t arrived just that little bit earlier before Bram had been about to leave.

      Taylor’s interest had nothing to do with his sexy good looks, his charismatic personality or his reputed millionaire status; her interest centred solely on the fact that he was a man and that as such she wanted nothing whatever to do with him.

      ‘What is it with her?’ she had once overheard one of her younger female colleagues demanding, unaware that she was actually within earshot. ‘She acts and dresses like some old-fashioned spinster from a pre-war film. I know she’s got virgin written all over her, but if she just made a bit of an effort, dressed herself up a bit more, changed her hairstyle, she could probably still get herself a man.’

      Get herself a man. Taylor had had to bite down hard on the inside of her mouth to prevent herself from screaming out aloud that a man was the last thing she wanted, the very last thing.

      ‘She’s obviously got some kind of hang-up about sex,’ the girl had continued blithely.

      A hang-up about sex. Taylor’s body had shaken with silent mirthless laughter. Her colleague was still enthusing about Brampton Soames. Taylor looked pointedly at her watch. It had been a present from her parents, a reward for passing her A levels.

      She had been terrified during that final year at school that she would disappoint them, that she wouldn’t achieve the high grades they expected of her, that she would let them down. Her elder sister had left Bristol University with first class honours and had then gone on to achieve the highest marks in her year in her postgraduate course.

      Caroline had wanted to become a surgeon but their father had dissuaded her. ‘It would have been different were she a boy,’ he had explained dispassionately, ‘but as a woman she’ll be better off with a career which allows her to combine it more easily with a family.’

      Their father wasn’t the kind of man who wanted his daughters to be token men; he wanted their scholastic achievements to reflect his own brilliance. As one of the country’s leading research biologists, he was well aware of the importance of inherited gene patterns for preserving excellence, but he was a very male man as well. His critical approval of her as she grew up had always been important to Taylor. A frowning look at her across the breakfast table in her early teenage years, the small comment that he didn’t care for her new hairstyle, or that she seemed to be putting on a little weight could cast a dark shadow over the whole day, while her father’s approving smile could leave her basking in warmth and sunshine.