Silver

‘What are you doing here, Silver?’

Silver was glad he wasn’t able to see her as her eyes widened fractionally. She hadn’t heard him come upstairs, and the sight of him standing in the doorway, looking directly at her, made her muscles clench.

She forced her body to relax, curling her mouth in the lazy, teasing smile she had been practising, knowing that it would be reflected in her voice.

‘Why don’t you come over here and find out?’

She made no comment on the fact that he had recognised her. It simply confirmed her view that she had chosen correctly… made the right decision.

She watched as the mobile eyebrows rose. It was odd, after all he had been through, that his black hair should remain untinged by any grey at all, while she…

‘Silver, I’m not in the mood to play games. Simply say what you’ve come to say and then get on your way.’

No compromise there, simply a harsh, flat statement that indicated very clearly what he thought of her. That was good…

‘I want you to be my lover,’ she told him equably. She had been practising this for over a week now, mentally rehearsing every question he would ask and every answer she would give, and now, with all the poise she could muster, which was considerable, she added coolly, ‘Or rather, should I say, I want you to teach me how to make love to a man so that he won’t be able to resist me?’

She smiled as she caught the betraying indrawn breath. Much as Annie knew about her, there was one thing she did not know.

‘You see, Jake,’ she went on, taking firm hold of her advantage, ‘I need that expertise, and I need it very badly.’

‘What the hell kind of game is this?’ he asked her angrily, and she knew that she had broken through the tough armour of his self-assurance because he swore at her, something she had never heard him do before. An odd conceit in a man who lived the way he did.

‘No game,’ she assured him smoothly. ‘Annie’s told you a lot about me, hasn’t she? About why I’m here? About what I intend to do…?’

She saw from his face that she was right, and went on as though he had invited her to do so.

‘Unfortunately, there’s one major stumbling block. As a virgin, I’m afraid that I rather lack the—er—expertise necessary for my plans…’

‘A virgin…?’

She gave him a cold smile which showed in her voice as she bit off the words. ‘Amazed? You needn’t be. As my ex-fiancé once commented, a woman as ugly as me in both face and body is hardly likely to attract lovers. Of course,’ she added pleasantly, ‘you can’t see me… and I understand that physically you might find it impossible to become my lover, but I’m sure if you were to imagine I were someone else…’

Now she had broken through his guard.

‘My God,’ he swore, ‘what kind of woman are you?’

‘The kind who generally gets what she wants and pays generously for it,’ she told him sweetly.

‘Pay?’

For the first time in the months she had known him she saw him make an awkward movement. He stepped forward automatically, as though he intended to reach out, grab hold of her, and inflict a physical punishment on her; but she had deliberately moved the chair from beside the bed to the open doorway, and as he walked into it he tensed and swore savagely under his breath. Her father would have described what she had done as cheating. She tried not to admit that knowledge. She couldn’t afford that kind of weakness… not now… not ever again.

‘Please don’t be foolish about this, Jake,’ she said with composure. ‘Obviously I should wish to pay for the skills you can teach me, just as I would pay for any other commodity.’

‘Just the way you paid for your new face,’ he jeered unkindly, but she didn’t wince. Why should she? Once she had been sensitive, vulnerable, easily hurt by others, but not any more.

‘At least I have a genuine reason for being here,’ she told him sardonically, unable to resist the temptation to punish him just a little. She saw that her barb had found its mark. He tensed momentarily, his whole stance betraying wariness, and then it was gone and he had himself under control.

‘Well, you’ve come to the wrong man, Silver,’ he told her curtly. ‘I don’t need your money. Now get the hell out of my bed before I throw you out…’

Now she had him cornered, and the fierce thrill of triumph that ran through her was visible in the brilliant glitter of her eyes.

‘You’re lying, Jake,’ she countered softly, and then, before he could speak, added coolly, ‘I could allow you to continue to lie to me, but I don’t have that kind of time to waste. You see, I happened to be standing outside Annie’s sitting-room when you were telling her how desperately you did need money.’

What she hadn’t heard was why. Annie, it seemed, knew far more about Jake than she was prepared to admit. It had been obvious to Silver from the quality of their conversation that they were two people who knew one another well—as friends, not as lovers—and, intrigued as she was by the mystery that seemed to enshroud Jake, she was pretty sure that his presence at the clinic had nothing at all to do with any supposed reaction to his surgery, as Annie had originally intimated to her in the days when she’d had far too much to accomplish herself to worry about other people’s affairs.

Lost in her own thoughts, Silver took several seconds to become alive to the deep aura of menace emanating from Jake. It washed over her in an icy cold blast, activating her own instinct for self-preservation.

‘What you want the money for, what you do with it—that’s your concern and not mine, but don’t waste both our time by lying about not needing it,’ she told him, ignoring his anger.

She waited, feeling the tension ease out of her body a little as the menace evaporated.

‘Hasn’t anyone ever told you that it’s dangerous to listen outside other people’s doors?’ he asked her.

Silver shrugged the question aside and said firmly, ‘I’m prepared to pay you a million pounds—–’

She didn’t get any further; Jake interrupted her with a smothered curse.

‘God! If it’s just your virginity you want to lose, you could lose it for free any night of the week just by picking up someone—–’

‘It isn’t,’ she interrupted him flatly. ‘If you’d listened to what I said originally, you’d realise that. My virginity isn’t of any importance. I simply mentioned it to illustrate why I need the expertise you can teach me. It isn’t pleasure I want from you, Jake. It’s simply knowledge. A crash course in what turns a man on, in what sends him out of his mind with desire… In what makes him forget everything else in the driving need to possess one particular woman.’

‘Go and buy yourself a sex manual,’ he jeered. ‘It will come much cheaper than a million pounds.’

But Silver could see where the tiny betraying nerve pulsed in his jaw as his mouth compressed, and she felt a corresponding savage kick of triumph in her own stomach. She was going to win… whether he knew it or not, she was going to win.

She didn’t make the mistake of letting him sense her triumph. He might be blind, but his other senses, already honed by the years he had spent staying alive in one after another of the world’s danger zones, had been hardened by the accident, compulsively perfected by what Annie had once, in an unguarded moment, described to her as the strongest will she had ever come across. His perception was a hundred times greater than that of the majority of sighted human beings.

‘I’ll give you twenty-four hours to think over my proposition,’ she told him coolly. ‘After that, the deal’s off.’

As she spoke, her voice was cold and brisk, formidably like that of her father, a man who had single-handedly run one of the world’s most successful private business empires. It had none of the deliberate sensuality she had injected into it before. She was a clever woman, who for the first time in her life was learning to direct that intelligence into promoting for herself a false image—which in time she was determined would become herself—and she had already learned the power of projecting conflicting messages. She did it now, contrasting the frozen chill of her voice with the deliberately erotic movements of her body. She slipped off the bed and walked slowly up to and then past him, holding herself tall, using her powerful imagination to create the role she needed.

She was a high priestess of an ancient religion, sure of her strength and her power, knowing that her body was one of her strongest tools, unconcerned by her nudity. Her hair rippled down her back, a silver cloud, her skin warmed by the room’s heat.

She didn’t touch him—that would have been a beginner’s mistake—but she walked close enough to him to be quite sure he would be aware of her nudity… of her body, with its woman’s scents and allure.

Annie had told her that he was generally an abstemious man who didn’t indulge in any of life’s pleasures greedily. It was an admission Silver had rather trapped the other woman into giving.

A dulcet comment about the anomaly of the fact that he was a man in his early thirties apparently without any intimate relationship in his life had provoked Annie into defending him, and had also elicited the information that he had once been married and that his wife was now dead.

Silver had sensed that Annie was torn between protecting Jake’s privacy and telling her more. She had been curious to know how his wife had died, but not curious enough to push Annie too hard.

She had other ways of finding out all there could possibly be to find out about him if she so chose… there were those admirable men of business in Switzerland who had looked after her father’s affairs so discreetly and who now looked after hers. But Jake Fitton’s past held no interest for her, and neither did his future. She had a use for him, that was all—a use that, once finished, would cease to be of any importance.

He let her walk past him without moving, looking stoically towards the window as though unaware of the tormenting, warm human presence of her.

Her clothes were in his bathroom. She opened the door, wondering what she would have done if he had given way and reached for her.