Silver

Angrily Silver contemplated leaving the books where he had put them on the top of the dresser, but she owned that she was really too exhausted to get involved in a lengthy argument. She could take them upstairs; she need not actually read them… and if he thought she was going to answer his damned questions…

‘Amazing,’ he said quietly behind her when she turned her back on him. ‘I can feel your anger from here, and yet I can hold you against my body and feel nothing. Try projecting as much energy into feeling desire as you do into feeling rage,’ he instructed her. ‘It would be a far more worthwhile expenditure of energy.’

‘I don’t want to feel desire,’ she gritted at him. ‘I don’t need to feel it…’

‘If you honestly believe that, then nothing I can teach you will be of the slightest benefit to you,’ he told her coldly, ‘and you’re wasting my time as well as your own. Stop behaving like a petulant child, Silver. You’re the one who wanted this, and you’re paying me two million pounds to get it. If you’re not prepared to take this thing seriously, then you might as well walk out of here now and save us both a lot of aggravation.’

Biting her lip, Silver walked away from him without making any response.

Later, as she lay in bed, she acknowledged the point he had made. She must learn to adopt some of his own cool ability to distance himself emotionally. This time here with him was a chasm she had to cross, no matter how painful or frightening that crossing. There was no way she could just close her eyes and will herself over it, no matter how much she might ache to be safely on the other side.

CHAPTER FOUR (#ud021e172-fc01-5d36-9a15-512200762e38)

IT WASN’T easy, but then nothing in her life had been, apart from her early childhood relationship with her father. But this was different from any other obstacle Silver had ever had to overcome, and her nights became haunted by the savage bite of Jake’s voice, the acid-cool neutrality of his curt instructions, the calm indifference with which he blocked her every attempt to outmanoeuvre him, when, driven beyond caution, she pushed recklessly at his astounding self-control, waiting for the storm to break and his temper to overwhelm his mastery of his emotions.

It never did; she was always the one forced to back down from the confrontation. She was the one forced to withdraw and regroup… And on and on it went, instructions, criticism, cool, curt, matter-of-fact reminders of what she was trying to achieve, while all the time she felt she would go insane and break down completely beneath the unrelenting pressure.

Another woman would have done; but then another woman would never have taken the dangerous course she had chosen in the first place. She was as hard on herself as he was, grimly reminding herself that this was her own choice—a necessary means to a specific end—and that if she could not control her dislike and resentment of the man for long enough for him to teach her what she needed to know, then she had little or no chance of fulfilling her ultimate promise to herself. And all the time she clung on to the vision that drove her: the vision of Charles, awestruck, spellbound, held in total thrall to her beauty, trapped by his desire for her as she had been by hers for him. Nothing else would do… nothing less would satisfy what she felt inside… And it was for that vision that she endured when others would have given up.

There were times when Silver thought almost fancifully that it was only that granite-hard, stubborn mingling of English and Irish blood within her that made her go on where others, more sensible perhaps than she, would have backed down. She was beginning to recognise within herself a certain grim relentlessness that she had thought belonged exclusively to her father. It was like coming abruptly face to face with a stranger within herself—shockingly and heart-stoppingly terrifying, until she forced herself to accept that it was simply one facet of her own personality.

She had been with Jake almost a month and, although she herself didn’t realise it yet, she had already learned much.

He knew it, though, and he observed with a certain detached clinicality that already her voice had developed a subtle sensuality, that she moved differently, more voluptuously, with more awareness; and he knew these things without seeing them; felt them, heard them; sensed them growing within her while she herself remained oblivious to what was happening to her, too caught up in what had become a fierce personal battle to prove to him that she would succeed to notice the slow, progressive steps she was already taking along the road she had chosen for herself.

He told her as much one cold afternoon when a blizzard outside had turned the world grey-white, and Silver filled the sitting-room with the tension of her impatience… with her longing to break free of the constrictions he placed upon her, of her role as supplicator and pupil, which she constantly wanted to challenge, and overset.

‘You’re too impatient,’ he told her emotionlessly after she had flung herself away from him and gone to stand in front of the window. ‘The Chinese have a saying: “A journey of a thousand miles begins with the first step”…’

Silver narrowed her eyes and turned round, glowering at him, and then she caught herself up. It still had the power to astonish her that she should be so intensely aware of him and antagonised by him in so many minute ways, and yet that she should almost totally forget so often that he was blind.

It was as though he possessed some power that enabled him to project himself past his blindness and render it completely unimportant.

‘Come back here, Silver, and we’ll go through it again. Unless, of course, you’ve changed your mind…’

Changed her mind… She swung back to the window. How many times had she longed to do so, but stubbornly refused to allow herself to give in? Sometimes she thought his clinical detachment was meant to be deliberately abrasive… that he wanted her to give in and back down… that he was secretly and deliberately torturing her by forcing her to go over and over every tiny caress, every inflection of the words he made her say, the things he made her do.

She had learned a lot from him since that first night, had been slowly and inexorably inculcated with the information and expertise she had wanted.

Now she knew exactly how to touch a man to arouse him in desire—and not just to touch him, but to look at him, smile at him, speak to him. And now, if she managed to get through today’s lesson without telling him to go to hell, she would know how to argue with him and still challenge him to desire.

The lessons… the supply of information seemed inexhaustible, like a ceaseless stream pouring relentlessly into her, so that there were times when she wanted to scream at him, ‘Stop… enough!’ Times when she felt as though her spirit would break in two beneath the weight of his accumulated cynicism and knowledge… when she wasn’t sure which of them despised the other the more… when for some odd, uncomfortable reason, instead of screaming defiance at him, she wanted to break down and cry, without having an atom of understanding of why she should feel that way.

And harder to bear than everything he had taught her about his own sexuality had been the knowledge he had forced on her about her own… not as a woman, but as an individual… She had learned for instance that the mere pressure of his fingers against the inner flesh of her arm could make her jerk back from him in fierce tension… that the sensation of his mouth against her throat, his hand against her breast could evoke responses that had to be frozen at birth; although he said nothing, did nothing to show that he was aware of what was happening to her, instincts as ancient as the race she herself had sprung from warned her that he had known… Had known and yet hadn’t used that knowledge against her… and that confused her.

She closed her eyes, blotting out the blinding whiteness of the blizzard and thinking instead of Ireland… of the ancient castle of stone, facing out across the Atlantic, guardian of the land beyond which had been the stronghold of a race of Irish princes until one of her ancestors had seduced and married one of the noble daughters. If she closed her eyes, she could see the castle now, rising up out of the mist that blew in off the sea… Rugged, dauntless, austere, swept by gales and storms in winter and in no way to be compared with Rothwell, that jewel of Palladian splendour and richness set in its lush green English farmlands. And yet… and yet it was to Kilrayne that she ached to return now… It was Kilrayne that had been her refuge, Kilrayne that offered her surcease and comfort.

Kilrayne… If she kept her eyes closed she could almost imagine she was there, standing in front of the huge fireplace in the great hall, warming herself on the heat of the massive logs needed to fill the enormous grate. The room would smell of oak-smoke and soot, the draughts lifting the faded banners and tapestries from the walls, and outside the Atlantic gale would hurl the rain against the narrow, leaded window-slits.

Kilrayne, a dark grey fortress, built for defence and not pleasure; Kilrayne, whose stone walls had more than once run red with the blood of its enemies. Charles hated it… He shivered in the draughts, complained about the smoking fires, loathed the narrow passages and huge stone-walled rooms.

Silver, on the other hand, loved it… loved the sharp contrast between the dull grey stone and the richness of its tapestries and embroidered bed-hangings… its stone-flagged floors and glowing Oriental carpets, the massive heaviness of its furniture and the pewter dullness of its silver; commissioned in France and smuggled back from that country, so the story went, by an Irish Jacobite younger son of the family banished to Ireland to keep him out of the way of Hanover George’s revenge.

She and her father had spent every spring there. He had always said that there was nowhere quite like Ireland in the spring, when the sky was washed clean and soft by the wind from the Atlantic and the hedgerows and fields of the south turned a green that could not be rivalled anywhere in the world.

He would arrive there at the same time as the season’s first crop of foals. He used to take her with him when he visited the stables, carefully instructing her in the good points to look for, pointing out to her which foals they would keep and which they would sell, and why.

Later in the year he would go to Argentina, where he bought his polo ponies, and here again he would instruct her, tutoring her so that she learned without ever knowing that she did so.

It was only in the winter, when he always returned to Rothwell so that he could hunt with the Belvoir, that she refused to accompany him. Much as she enjoyed the spectacle and pageant of the hunt, she had never been able to endure being in at the kill, and her father rode to hounds at the very forefront of the chase.

Sometimes Charles had accompanied him, both of them looking in their different ways intensely male and virile… very much the epitome of the traditional image of upper-class manhood.

Her father had loved to hunt—had been a first-class rider… Other men sustained falls, broken limbs, the jocular teasing of their peers, but her father had never been unseated once. He had always shrugged his skill aside, claiming modestly that it was his mounts who deserved the credit and not him.

And yet he had died on the hunting field, thrown by a young and untried mount, who had panicked and bolted, dragging his unconscious rider so that by the time they were able to stop him her father was dead.

An accident… or was it? Her father’s doctor had told her gently that there was a possibility that her father might have committed suicide. Suicide… It had come as a shock to her to discover that there were areas of her father’s life about which she knew nothing… shadows darkening it which might have led to his taking his own life…

An accident… suicide… or murder…? Her mouth twisted bitterly. She knew which it was. Charles had murdered her father; she was sure of it. And she knew why. Charles, upon whom she had looked as near perfect; believing that his outer, golden perfection mirrored an equally golden heart. How wrong she had been… how naïve… But she was naïve no longer, and she intended to make Charles pay—and not just for what he had done to her, for his cruelty, his cynical callousness towards her, for the threats he had used to show her how defenceless she was without her father to protect her—for who would believe the hysterical claims of a fat, plain young woman who it was known was speaking out of jealousy and spite, against the assured sophistication of a man like Charles? No, it was more for her father’s sake that she was determined to hunt him down, to stalk him, and finally to trap him, exposing him to himself and to the world for the person that he really was. Her father… God, how she missed him even now. He was the only person who had ever really loved her, who had ever really cared…

Her throat closed on a surge of deep emotion, and then, like a knife ripping into a tender, unhealed wound, she heard Jake saying coldly, ‘It’s your time we’re wasting, Silver, not mine. I promised you a month… after that…’

‘You’ll what…?’ she demanded savagely. He couldn’t see her face, couldn’t see the suspicious glitter of the tears she was fighting to suppress, but even so she lashed out at him verbally, hating him for being present at her moment of betrayal. ‘Double the price? I haven’t paid you yet, Jake,’ she reminded him, driven by her own demons to taunt softly, ‘What would you do if I walked out of here and refused to pay you a penny?’

That she was punishing him for Charles’s faults and for her own weakness she knew quite well, but the fierce pace he was setting her, the gruelling insistence on perfection, which was like nothing she had ever undergone before, was undermining her self-control, making her want to draw retaliatory blood, making her hate herself for the way he pierced her defences and pushed her from her sanctuary of icy remoteness into the painful world of feelings and emotions. She had turned her back on that world when she had turned her back on herself, totally destroying the woman she had once been. And she hated him for making her bitterly conscious of the fact that that woman and some of her vulnerabilities still remained; that she had not, as she had thought, completely obliterated and buried her.

Jake was silent for so long that she actually began to think with relief that he hadn’t heard her, and then he said quietly, and very pleasantly, ‘How you do like to flirt with fire. Why not try it and see?’ And without a single threat being made Silver was overwhelmed by the pressure of a menace so strong that she physically shivered beneath it, awestruck that a voice and face that could look so benign and unemotional should at the same time be able to convey such an intensity of purpose. How different he was from Charles… as dark-visaged and formidably boned as a Roman god of war, where Charles was all golden promise, all physical perfection, with the face and body of a Greek statue. Under a similar threat, though, as she now had good cause to know, Charles would have reacted with violence and malevolence, so intense and strong that the shock of it would have terrorised his victim. Jake, while equally formidable, used so little anger, and no physical force, and yet the effect he was having on her right now was far more powerful, so much more effective than anything Charles had ever said or done.

Idly she wondered who would be the victor if the two men were ever to confront one another as enemies. Pound for pound, inch for inch they were probably evenly matched, both tall, well-muscled men, although Jake had a way of moving that was somehow far more intimidating than Charles’s aggressively male stride.

Physically, there was surely no comparison. Charles had the looks of a screen idol, and the charisma… Jake, on the other hand, had the kind of face that women would find challenging and a little austere.

Charles had the natural hauteur and arrogance that came from having a privileged, wealthy background; he possessed charm, sophistication—sex appeal. He also possessed, as she had good cause to know, a deep vein of cruelty, a love of inflicting emotional and physical pain… a desire to dominate and destroy. Charles, all golden beauty on the outside, was inwardly corrupt… even evil… Silver gave a tiny shudder, remembering the extent of that evil, wondering how many lives it had touched and damaged.

Jake, on the other hand, was without such cruelty. He was hard, yes, unyielding, savagely determined, completely impervious to the kind of vanities which she knew were going to be Charles’s downfall.

In any kind of contest between them, Charles should have been the victor, and yet there was something about Jake that made her acknowledge that when he thought he was in the right he would hang on as grimly as the proverbial bulldog. She respected Jake, something she realised with a sudden start of shock she had never felt for Charles, despite her youthful idolatry of him.

A tiny frisson of unwanted sensation touched her, an awareness… sharply poignant, shockingly intense—something dangerous and not to be thought of.

She reacted to it as strongly as if Jake had physically laid hands on her and overpowered her, saying violently, ‘You can’t threaten me, Jake. I could walk out of here right this moment and there’s not a thing you could do about it.’

She looked at him, and something cynical and world-weary in his expression tightened the coil of panic gripping her.

‘You can’t even see me, never mind stop me—–’

She broke off, shaking with a mixture of panic-based rage and a deep sense of shame. That she, who had born so many taunts and cruel words because of her own physical handicap, should use such a weapon against someone else sickened her. She took one look at Jake’s shuttered, hard face, and the words of apology stuck in her throat.