Penny Jordan - Power Play

The drawer contained her most private files. There were only four of them. Four very special files. Those who thought they knew her would have said it was typical of Pepper that she should carry the key to that drawer with her at all times—wearing it as other women might wear a lover’s gift.

There were no names on the files. She didn’t need them. Each had been built painstakingly over the years, information garnered in minute amounts until she had found what she wanted.

And now the final piece of information was in her hands, and from it she would forge the tool from which she would orchestrate her revenge.

Revenge—not a word for the squeamish.

An “emotional read…richly developed and intriguing.”

—Romantic Times on To Love, Honor and Betray

FOR BETTER FOR WORSE

CRUEL LEGACY

POWER GAMES

A PERFECT FAMILY

TO LOVE, HONOR AND BETRAY

THE PERFECT SINNER

www.mirabooks.co.uk

Chapter 1

Chapter 2

Chapter 3

Chapter 4

Chapter 5

Chapter 6

Chapter 7

Chapter 8

Chapter 9

Chapter 10

Chapter 11

Chapter 12

Chapter 13

Chapter 14

Chapter 15

Chapter 16

Chapter 17

Chapter 18

Chapter 19

Chapter 20

Chapter 21

In London perhaps more than any other city in the world there are certain streets whose names are immediately synonymous with money and power.

Beaufort Terrace is one of them; a graceful curve of stone-faced three-storey Regency buildings. Spiked black railings curve away from the flights of stone steps that lead up to each Adam door. These railings are tipped with gold, and rightly so—the rents for the suites of offices in these buildings are reputed to be the highest in the city.

Pepper Minesse was probably more familiar with this street than anyone else who rented office space on it. Her company had been one of the very first to move in when the renovators and interior designers moved out. She owned the three-storey building right at the heart of the Regency curve. As she paused briefly outside it she was conscious of the fact that a man walking down the opposite side of the street had stopped to look at her. She was wearing a black suit from Saint Laurent. It had a deep “V” neck and looked as though she wasn’t wearing anything underneath it. In actual fact she was wearing a black silk camisole, but Pepper had learned long ago the value of distracting people she was negotiating with, whether those negotiations were for business or personal reasons; she was one of those few women who exude both sexuality and power, and men felt challenged by her. When it suited her she let them think she was a challenge they could master.

Expensive cars were parked either side of the road, testifying to its exclusivity. Merchant bankers and money men fought like rabid dogs for premises here. Minesse Management did not pay any rent: it earned it. In addition to the building she owned in the centre of the terrace Pepper owned two others.

It had been a long hard fight for her to get where she was today. She knew she didn’t look like a woman who headed a multi-million-pound empire; for a start, she looked too young. She was fast approaching her twenty-eighth birthday and there was nothing she didn’t know about the complexities of human nature.

Minesse wasn’t really her surname; she had adopted it by deed poll. It was an anagram of the word nemesis, and so, she thought, a fitting title for her business. She liked Greek mythology; its almost wholesale indictment of the emotions that ruled mankind appealed to the cynical side of her nature.

It struck her as ironic and very revealing that a society that could bury under the carpet child molestation and abuse could throw up its hands in righteous horror at the very sound of the word revenge. She liked it, but then she came from an old culture; from a race that knew the rightness of exacting a just penalty for a man’s crimes.

As she walked into the building the sun caught the coiled chignon of her hair, throwing out prisms of dark red light. When she stood in the shadows it looked black, but it wasn’t. It was a deep dense burgundy. An unusual colour; a rare colour even, nearly as rare as the dense violet blue of her eyes.

As she walked into the building the man across the road studied the slim length of her legs acquisitively. She was wearing sheer black stockings. They were pure silk and she ordered them by the gross.

As she caught sight of Pepper the receptionist smiled nervously. All her staff held Pepper faintly in awe. She set very exacting standards, and she was known to be a tireless worker herself. She had had to be. She had built up the agency from nothing, and now it handled some of the world’s top media and sports stars, negotiating for them advertising revenues that bolstered their incomes well into the millionaire bracket.

The girl behind the reception desk was twenty-one years old. She was a pretty blonde with the longest legs Pepper had ever seen. That was why she employed her. Looking at them kept the clients’ minds occupied while they waited to see her.

Beyond the cool grey and black décor of the reception area, with its discreet touches of white and its Bauhaus chairs, was a luxurious interview room. Concealed behind its banks of pared-down designer wall units was the most up-to-date video and sound equipment on sale anywhere. Anyone who wanted to use one of her clients in any sort of televised promotion had to prove to her first that they knew what they were doing.

Pepper skirted the waiting room, knowing that she didn’t have any appointments. Had anyone asked her she could probably have run through her diary for a whole month without missing out a thing; she had a brain that was needle-sharp and far more flexible than the most advanced computer.

Her secretary looked up at her as she walked into her office. Miranda Hayes had been with Minesse Management for five years, and she still knew very little more about her boss than she had done on the first day she started work there.

She caught the scent of the perfume that Pepper had specially blended for her in Paris, and envied the cut of the black suit. The body inside it was almost voluptuously curved, but Miranda suspected that her boss didn’t carry an ounce of surplus flesh.

She wondered if she exercised and if so where. Somehow Pepper Minesse didn’t look the type; Miranda couldn’t in a thousand lifetimes imagine her cool, controlled boss hot and sweaty after a physically demanding workout.

“Any calls?” asked Pepper.

Miranda nodded.

“Jeff Stowell called to remind you about the cocktail reception for Carl Viner at the Grosvenor tonight.”

A briefly upraised eyebrow suggested a certain degree of impatience that the young tennis star’s agent should find it necessary to remind her.

“He said there’s going to be someone there who wants to meet you,” Miranda added.

“Did he say who?”

Miranda shook her head. “Do you want me to get him back?”

“No,” Pepper told her decisively. “If Jeff wants to play cloak-and-dagger games he must play them alone. I’m too busy to join in.”

She opened her office door and walked inside, closing it behind her, leaving only the lingering trace of her perfume.

There was nothing feminine about the room. When she had commissioned the interior designer, she had told him she wanted it to exude a subtle aura of power.