word of her hastily rehearsed little speech.
It had surprised her how much the other woman’s obvious sexual possessiveness about Bram had affected her. But then it had been a long time since she had last been in close contact with such intense sexuality. The girl, whoever she was, seemed to wear it like a weapon, Taylor decided as she groped mentally for the right description. A gauntlet, a challenge which she threw down aggressively in front of Taylor, warning her off.
Not that she had had any need to do so. The last thing…
‘Plum isn’t my friend, and she certainly isn’t my lover, if that’s what you’re thinking.’ She heard Bram interrupting her turbulent thoughts. ‘She’s my goddaughter.’
‘Your goddaughter.’
Taylor couldn’t keep the shock out of her voice, and she knew her expression must have given her away when Bram continued quietly, ‘She’s going through a bit of a difficult time, and what she really needs more than anything is someone she can lean on, someone she can trust, someone who loves her as a person. It’s a pity that she and Jay don’t get on better, because…’
‘Jay?’ Taylor questioned, her curiosity aroused as Bram opened the office door for her and ushered her out. It wasn’t like her to allow herself to exhibit interest in other people; it involved too much risk, too much danger, and she was irritated with herself for having done so now. But it was too late. Bram was already starting to answer her question as he guided her towards the lift.
‘Jay is my son. He and Plum have known each other all their lives, well, at least all Plum’s life. Jay’s twenty-seven now and she’s only just coming up for eighteen.’
‘Twenty-seven.’ Despite what Sir Anthony had already told her, she felt slightly shocked. A brief glance in Bram’s direction as the lift started to descend confirmed what she already knew. Even under the starkly revealing light of the lift, he looked far, far too young to be the father of a twenty-seven-year-old. Not because he had deliberately tried to cultivate a younger image—on the contrary, his suit was sober and traditionally cut, his shirt white and his tie plain.
Just visible when one was standing as close to him as Taylor was now forced to do, were one or two slightly silvered strands of hair lightening the rich darkness of the rest. The fine lines fanning out around his eyes added to rather than detracted from his sexuality, and to judge from the way he moved his body beneath the covering of his suit…
Taylor swallowed uncomfortably, her own body suddenly far too hot.
It was years since she had experienced that kind of physical reaction to a man—years since she had allowed herself to experience it.
You were made for this—for love, for sex.
The words escaped from the barriers she had put up against such memories, and like the memory of the man who had spoken them they made her shudder in sick panic.
Bram frowned as he saw the tremor galvanising her body, and the way her face suddenly paled.
Just for a brief moment she had seemed to relax, the unguarded interest in her face when she queried Jay’s age such a contrast to her previous wary tension that Bram had surprised himself by wanting to go on talking to her so that he could prolong that interest. It was like watching someone suddenly come to life; seeing them as a whole three-dimensional figure for the first time.
The lift had stopped, and as they walked through the foyer and out into the street Bram paused to watch a young couple on the other side of the road. They had obviously had a quarrel, and the girl was refusing to get into their car. The young man, growing tired of her refusal, suddenly let go of the door he had been holding open and lunged forward, picking the girl up bodily. As he turned to deposit her in the car she tried to escape, wriggling protestingly in his arms.
Taylor, too, had stopped to watch, but when Bram laughed in amusement at their antics, Taylor turned on him, her face bone-white, her eyes so dark with anger and pain that Bram caught his breath at the intensity of emotion in them.
‘Of course, you would think it’s funny. You’re a man,’ Taylor told him bitterly. ‘And because you’re a man you think that it’s perfectly acceptable for another man to manhandle a woman, to physically force her to do something she doesn’t want to do, to use his physical strength to compel her into obeying him, forcing her….’
Taylor was literally shaking now, and Bram was caught between an instinctive desire to defend himself and his compassionate awareness of her distress.
Out of the corner of his eye he saw the young man deposit the girl back on the ground with gentle care, her angry protests dying away as she reached up towards him.
‘Look,’ Bram commanded Taylor quietly, taking hold of her and firmly turning her round to face the previously warring couple.
The girl’s arms were wrapped firmly around her lover, her face tilted up towards his, one hand reaching up to pull his head down towards her own as she started to kiss him with passionate intensity.
Taylor, who had begun to pull away from his restraining hand, stiffened, her body as immobile as a statue, her attention riveted on the couple on the opposite side of the road. An aching, painful longing boiled up inside her, bringing sharp stinging tears to her eyes as emotions she had long thought forgotten and dismissed, suddenly filled her. She wanted desperately to turn away from the sight of that passionate, intense embrace, from the young woman’s obvious need for her lover.
Once she had felt like that, ached like that, loved like that, and through those emotions she had betrayed not just herself but had also caused…
The sound she made as she whirled round, pulling frantically against Bram’s restraining hand, reminded him of an animal caught in a trap; the low muted sound so riven with agony and fear that his immediate reaction was to reach out and take hold of her, to bind her to him so tightly 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,
