Penny Jordan - Power Games

Jay cursed as he replaced the receiver. He was tempted to take the risk of lying to the Japanese, hoping that he could persuade his father to change his mind…. No, that was too much of a risk, Jay acknowledged.

He hadn’t told his father that he planned to be away for two full weeks. Jay had friends, contacts he had made at Harvard whom he planned to see while he was in New York. Many of them now held extremely influential positions, and if his father could be fooled into believing that Jay was contemplating crossing the Atlantic and joining forces with one of them, driven to do so by his own father’s lack of faith in him… Jay smiled cynically to himself, reached for his Filofax and checked through the list of appointments.

There was no way he was ready to give up on the Japanese deal, and if he had to use some subtle manipulation to force his father to give way, then so be it. He would.

Yes, in many ways his stay in New York could turn out to be a highly profitable one, not least because… A faintly cruel smile curled his mouth as he reached into his luggage and removed a small package.

There was nothing particularly remarkable about the very ordinary unmarked video it contained—unless, of course, you happened to know what was on the video.

His father had reminded him about Plum’s birthday. He started to laugh. He only hoped that Plum would appreciate, enjoy, get as much pleasure from receiving her gift as he was going to get from giving it to her. He suspected that she certainly wouldn’t appreciate just how much effort he had put into getting it for her.

Ten minutes later as he stepped outside the hotel and gave the driver an address in SoHo, he glanced frowningly at his watch. He had a dinner engagement later on with an ex-girlfriend who was now based in the city, but with any luck his appointment shouldn’t take too long. His destination was one of the large loft-conversion apartments which had once been the home of the city’s artists. The woman who owned the loft and worked from it was an artist, too, in her own way. Jay had found out about her through a friend of a friend who had heard about the kind of work she did.

He got the cabbie to drop him off on the corner and then walked down the street, pausing to examine the small discreet brass plate outside the address he wanted. It proclaimed that the building was owned by Aphrodite Films Ltd. The woman Jay had come to see was Aphrodite Films and Aphrodite Films was…

Well, what was Aphrodite Films? First and foremost it was in a class of its own, fulfilling and satisfying a market which it had created, a market which had nothing to do with Hollywood and also nothing to do with the shadowy pornographic cousins on the other side of the industry; or so Bonnie Howlett always soothingly reassured her clients.

Clients came to her because they could be assured of two things. The first was that they would get what they wanted and the second was that Bonnie guaranteed absolutely, completely and for ever, that their business with her was confidential. As she always told them, with the fees she charged, she could make far more money from what she was doing with the guarantee of complete confidentiality she gave them, than she could from blackmailing them.

And Bonnie’s clients believed her. They believed her, they trusted her, and they told their friends about her. And in all the years she had been giving those guarantees, Bonnie had never broken one. No one other than herself and the client ever saw the finished product, of which there was always only one copy. What the client then chose to do with that copy was her business and hers alone.

Bonnie had had women come to her who confessed they would rather kill themselves than have anyone else know what they were doing, and others who admitted just as openly that what they were planning was to be a special surprise for a boyfriend or lover.

Bonnie had long ago ceased to be shocked or surprised by the desires and needs of human nature. Sometimes she did feel sadness and pity, but she kept these emotions strictly to herself. It was not, after all, her job to feel emotion for her clients, simply to see that they got what they wanted.

Now as she let Jay into her office, she looked at him warily. It was very unusual for her to be approached by a male client, and if he hadn’t been so insistent that what he wanted was simply to have a small tape tidied up a little, to look more professional, she would probably have refused to see him altogether. Her business was to supply women, her own sex, with the kind of visual sexual stimulation they wanted, specific visual stimulation, in which normally they themselves featured, generally in their own individual fantasy.

If necessary, she could and did provide these women with the partner or partners of their choice—partners who came with a strictly monitored clean bill of health. Mostly young out-of-work actors who were only too glad of the confidentiality clauses she insisted on them signing, and the fact that no one else would ever see what they had done. Working on the pornographic side of the industry was still a big no-no on the legit side of the business—it did not do to get found out. No one who worked for Bonnie ever got found out and she paid well. Or rather her clients did. A woman wanted to have herself videotaped enjoying the sexual attention of two different men? No problem, Bonnie could arrange it.

That she might also want these same men dressed up in the clothes of the eighteenth century, with one of them posing as a highwayman, seducing her inside the coach he had stopped on some quiet rural stretch of road, was also no problem. Bonnie knew just the right location…just the right coach…just the right place to get the dress.

Now 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.