as she watched Jay, Bonnie was mentally assessing him. She already knew that the video he had handed her would not contain any frames of him. He was far too guarded, too wary, too suspicious to involve himself in anything which might be used to harm him. And too controlled. Much too controlled for a man so obviously sexually attractive, and she suspected, totally heterosexual.
‘What exactly is it you want me to do with this?’ she asked Jay as she took the tape from him.
‘Professionalise it,’ he told her promptly.
‘Professionalise.’ Her eyebrows rose, the bastardised word having sounded odd delivered in his cool very crisp British voice. ‘I’ll have to look at it first,’ she warned him.
‘How long will that take?’ he asked, flicking back his cuff to glance at his watch. A plain utilitarian Rolex, which she noticed looked as though he had owned it for a long time. He was, she recognised, very arrogant, self-assured…perhaps too much so.
She didn’t allow herself to smile as she told him calmly, ‘Normally two weeks, but at the moment I’m very busy, so it could be three if things go well. I’ll have to check it out first.’
‘I don’t have three weeks. I’m only in New York for a fortnight.’ He stopped and gave her a penetrating look.
Arrogant, yes, but perhaps not totally without some instinct for other people’s reactions, Bonnie acknowledged.
‘It’s a birthday present,’ he told her, changing tack. ‘My father’s…a very close friend…’
His father’s what? Bonnie wondered thoughtfully.
‘How long before you can let me know?’
‘You can ring me in three days’ time to find out if I can actually do anything with it.’
He wasn’t pleased, Bonnie recognised, and he would have tried to pressure her to give him precedence, had she not intimated that he had no option but to accept what he was being told.
Jay was already regretting the impulse that had led him to telephone Nadia from London, asking her out to dinner. They had originally met at university and had become lovers after an aggressive and lengthy pursuit on his part, not as she had once accused him, because he had particularly wanted her, but because everyone else did. Their romance had already been over then, ended by Nadia, who had told him calmly that in bed he was too good, and out of it, nowhere near good enough.
Jay hadn’t been unduly concerned about the ending of their relationship, Nadia’s razor-sharp brain, coupled with her healthy feminine intuition, had begun to make him irritably wary. She asked too many questions, and drew too many conclusions. She had a top-flight job now with a New York firm of brokers, and it had crossed Jay’s mind when he originally got in touch with her that she might be able to provide an angle on the people he was negotiating with. But now his father’s firm rejection of his plans had soured his mood. And the mocking amusement in Bonnie Howlett’s eyes as she told him how long he would have to wait to get his video hadn’t improved it. He wasn’t quite sure yet how he intended to give Plum her ‘present,’ publicly or privately. Privately would probably be best—not that he had the slightest compunction about staging a public viewing of it. After all, if she was stupid enough to make the damn thing in the first place, and then leave it where it could so easily be found…
It irritated the hell out of him the way his father constantly made excuses for her. And, of course, he knew why. Christ, his father even let her get away with claiming that she loved him and that she thought Bram was just about the sexiest, most gorgeous man that ever was.
‘It’s a lovely thought, but truthfully, little one, I’m far too old for you,’ Bram had told her the first time she propositioned him.
Jay knew this because Plum had told him about it herself, crying that her heart was broken because his father had rejected her.
‘And I know I could make it good for him,’ she had told Jay earnestly. She might love his father, but that certainly didn’t stop her from being sexually promiscuous on a scale that caused those who knew about her reputation to view her with either approval or contempt depending upon their outlook. What irked Jay most of all was that despite it all, she still somehow managed to preserve an almost dewy-eyed look of innocent freshness and to hang on to her place in his father’s affections—a place higher up the scale than his own? Right now, though, he needed to decide what to do about dinner with Nadia. The last thing he needed was that incisively sharp brain of hers latching on to his mood and then questioning it. He’d move his dinner date with her to another evening, he decided, when he would be in a better frame of mind to handle her.
In Jay’s experience, the best and easiest way to silence a woman’s questions was to take her to bed. But the thrill of sexual conquest wasn’t one that motivated him any more. In his teens and at university, yes, he had gone through a phase of equating manhood with sexual conquest.
‘You like being in control too much,’ Nadia had accused him just before she ended their relationship. ‘In fact, you don’t just like it, you need it. Well, I’m tired of being “given” my orgasm, like a child given a sweet, and if you must know, I’d get a lot more pleasure from going to bed with a man who genuinely wanted me. The only pleasure you get from having sex with me is that of knowing you’re in control. Well, not any more.’
Since then he’d never repeated the mistake of allowing any woman to get to know him as well as Nadia had done—in bed or out of it.
Chapter 3
In London Bram was going out for the evening—not à deux with an ex-lover, but rather more formally at the invitation of the Foreign Secretary, who was hosting a small reception.
Bram knew, or was acquainted with, many of the other guests. There had been a suggestion the previous year that he might be nominated for an honour in the New Year’s Honours list until he had very firmly let it be known that, gratified though he was, he did not wish to be considered. He did not believe that, in the present economic climate, the amassing of a large personal fortune merited such a nomination—no matter how honestly earned or through how much hard work and even taking into consideration the concurrent input into the exchequer via the Inland Revenue.
‘You give as much to charity, and probably more, than most of the others being nominated, and you can be sure they won’t be turning their honours down,’ Jay had pointed out cynically.
‘I give a small percentage of my income, but I do nothing,’ had been Bram’s response.
Worldly ambition, wealth had never really motivated him. He had simply been in the right place at the right time and with the right kind of skills. His business success had, to his mind, been founded on chance and luck. The small empire which had developed from it, the people he employed who were dependent upon it, they were his responsibility and he took that responsibility seriously, as he had tried to explain to Jay. He suspected that Jay had not understood his desire to protect their employees and preferred, instead, to believe that his father was deliberately thwarting him.
It had perhaps been unwise, Bram acknowledged, to remind Jay of Plum’s forthcoming birthday. Jay was so hostile towards her. Because he couldn’t see the similarities between the childhood traumas which had led to the adult emotional problems of them both, or because he could?
Did Jay recognise that the roots of Plum’s promiscuity, her intense need for
