Silver
Penny Jordan

www.millsandboon.co.uk

Table of Contents

Cover

Title Page

PART ONE: Silver

CHAPTER ONE

CHAPTER TWO

CHAPTER THREE

CHAPTER FOUR

CHAPTER FIVE

PART TWO: Geraldine Frances

CHAPTER SIX

CHAPTER SEVEN

CHAPTER EIGHT

CHAPTER NINE

CHAPTER TEN

CHAPTER ELEVEN

CHAPTER TWELVE

CHAPTER THIRTEEN

PART THREE: Jake

CHAPTER FOURTEEN

CHAPTER FIFTEEN

CHAPTER SIXTEEN

CHAPTER SEVENTEEN

CHAPTER EIGHTEEN

PART FOUR: Silver

CHAPTER NINETEEN

CHAPTER TWENTY

CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE

CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO

CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE

Copyright

PART ONE

CHAPTER ONE

THERE were just the two of them in the ski-lift. The avalanche warning issued that morning by the Swiss Federal Avalanche Institute was keeping the other skiers away from these dangerous off-piste slopes.

In Gstaad Silver had overheard a group of guides mourning the loss of income the avalanche threat would bring.

Since the British heir to the throne had come so close to death on off-piste snow at Klosters, the authorities had clamped down heavily on guides foolish enough to allow the persuasion of their clients to overrule their own better judgement.

She, though, had no need of a guide. Neither, it seemed, did he. She recognised him. In his twenties and thirties he had been famous as an amateur racing driver, and it seemed he had never lost that need for the exhilarating thrill of speed. Especially when that thrill went hand in glove with death.

She knew he was watching her, and she knew why. In her mind’s eye she re-created an image of herself, tall and slender, wearing a cerise ski-suit, the kind that speed-skiers wore. It moulded her body, revealing high, taut breasts that owed nothing to silicone injections or indeed any other artifice. She had a narrow ribcage and waist, flaring out to feminine hips and long, long legs. It was a body which could have been that of an athlete, but which, in her, was softened into voluptuous femininity.

Her head was covered with a snug-fitting hood, and her profile as she stared silently down into the valley would have made a poet cry for the inability of mere words to convey the perfect, haunting quality of her features.

As he looked at her, Guido Bartoli wondered what it would be like to make love to her, here, high above the mountains where the air sang crystal-clear and the snow cracked ominously under its own weight. He mused that if he were to make love to her, and if she were to scream her pleasure noisily into the silence, as he liked his women to do, it would undoubtedly bring about the avalanches that were threatened. Life, death, love—the eternal triangle. He dwelt for several cynical and pleasurable moments on the possible consequences of his mental meanderings.

To be destroyed in that moment of ecstasy by the displeasure of nature at having her virgin world of silence splintered. It would be a fitting way for him to die… But for her… He looked at her again.

Deep in her eyes was that fierce, hungry look he remembered from his own youth. No, she was not yet ready to join him in mutual destruction.

He was forty-two years old, a wealthy, good-looking man whose company was still much sought after in bed and out of it. He felt the familiar clutch of excitement tighten his muscles as he watched her.

She knew he was looking at her, but she didn’t betray it. He liked that. It showed style. He wondered who she was. Most of the regular Gstaad crowd were known to him. This woman wasn’t. Neither was she someone it would be easy to overlook.

She puzzled him—intrigued him—some sixth sense telling him that there was a dichotomy about her, a mysteriousness, that in itself was a challenge.

He spoke to her, softly, so as not to arouse the wrath of the snow. In English first, since her pale skin made him think she must have Celtic origins, and then, when that got no response, in French, and finally in Italian, half a dozen ruefully apologetic words that drew no response other than a coolly enigmatic look that for some reason made him feel slight chagrin. She had eyes like those of a young hawk he had once tamed: wild and feral; dangerous both to herself and others; green eyes that threw back the reflection of the trees edging the snowfields.

The lift stopped. He had to step past her to get off. She stood back from him and apologised.

In Russian.

The shock of it made him stand and stare at her. Russian, for God’s sake! Just who the hell was she?

He stood watching her as the lift swung her upwards. Silver permitted herself a small smile. She’d heard about Guido Bartoli and wondered if they’d meet. He was an Italian count with a very Catholic marriage and a reputation for treating his mistresses with extreme generosity, as indeed he could afford to—but his wealth wasn’t what interested Silver. She had contemplated using him for the final test and then had changed her mind, but it was a good omen that they should have met, and by accident, today of all days.

She stretched luxuriously, breathing in the cold, sharp mountain air. The threat of the storm and its attendant danger exhilarated her. She felt a fierce surge of pleasure and power run through her body—a body lithe with exercise and careful honing. A body that matched the beauty of her face.

She touched her skin and frowned slightly, reaching for her goggles. She mustn’t let euphoria make her take a stupid risk… Calculated risks, now, they were a different thing altogether. Calculated risks were designed to test her progress, her readiness for a task which she had never deceived herself would be anything other than hard. She pulled on her goggles, her eyes focusing on the horizon. Green eyes with a touch of grey, that changed colour so that people who looked at her often weren’t sure what colour they really were.

It had started to snow, and the peaks above her had disappeared.

No matter… she shrugged the thought of danger aside as the lift shuddered to a halt and she got off. The only passenger… the only skier foolhardy enough to come up so high, to risk the danger of off-piste skiing. But it wasn’t on a mere whim that she was risking her life on this, one of Gstaad’s most dangerous runs. It was a very definite purpose that had brought her here. The final test, bar one…

But first the run… and then… and then the ultimate barrier must be breached. For until it was…

A fine, delicate shudder ran through her. Closing her eyes, she arched back her throat and looked upwards, an expression of rapt, fierce anticipation carving the perfect structure of her face… an expression that was almost ecstatic as her body quickened with feverish excitement, her eyes behind her goggles glittering cold as the ice- and snow-covered mountain.

She smiled to herself as she recalled the look of chagrin in Guido Bartoli’s eyes when he’d realised she was not going to respond to his flirting. It had amused her to address him in Russian. She had a facility for learning languages and was equally fluent in Italian, French and a number more. A legacy from her father, who had…

But no, she was not going to think of the past… not today. She had lived with it as her closest companion for the last two years, and today she was going to step away from it.

Guido had been right about one thing, though. She was Celtic in origin, heiress to a fortune so staggeringly large that even her trustees weren’t quite sure exactly what she was worth.

And not just heiress to a fortune, but heiress to an ancient title as well, carrying a family name that echoed with over a thousand years of history. Her ancestors had been Celtic princes when Egypt had ruled the known world. They had been princes long before the Romans had discovered the misty shores of the land of the Angles, their names written on every page of history that followed that invasion. They had also had a facility for picking a winning side, and their English titles had added weight and wealth to their hereditary Irish lineage.

She was the last of her line, and her father had reared the girl who was the only child fate had seen fit to bestow on him as the son he had never had.

She stood ready at the top of the slope, poised, alert, the adrenalin flowing through her veins like a powerful drug. The day; her life; eternity itself lay spread out before her like the village below, offered up to her as a sacrifice, as she in turn offered up herself… To live or to die… the decision was not hers. Who but the fates knew on which side they would weigh the scales? A higher power, if such an authority existed, must see into her soul and know what she planned; reared by a father who had been insistent on a sporting code of ethics that no longer existed, she had felt it only fair to give that power a chance to intervene. If it chose not to do so…

She bent her knees, her body fluid and ready, waiting until the falling snow thickened, driven by the wind, and then she dug her poles into the fresh snow and laughed out loud, throwing herself forward into the ferocity of the storm.

If she was good enough, if her skill matched her self-confidence, she would survive; if it didn’t, she would die, her body broken and her beauty destroyed.

The final test… but not the final hurdle. That still remained… and she knew enough about her own make-up to recognise what this ski-run was all about… the final psyching up for the barrier through which she must pass if she was going to go on and achieve her ultimate goal.

Snowy trees flashed past, blurred by her speed and the impact of the storm, and she felt the siren song of all she had done and would do sing in her blood.

This was her first taste of the narcotic of absolute self-confidence, but it would not be her last.

The chalet was small and utilitarian, unlike her own. Hers was a luxuriously equipped hideaway owned by a Saudi Arabian prince who had been persuaded to allow her to hire it for an unspecified amount of time. Its sole appeal for Silver was its inaccessibility. The overwhelming richness of its decor, the ostentation of its size and splendour, irritated her to the point of distaste. It was as though someone had tried to create the fabled luxury of a rich nomadic sheikh’s tent within the totally unsuitable framework of a wooden chalet.

This one, though, was everything that such a building should be. Neat and four-square, with a balcony on the upper floor and a large glass window for viewing the mountain. Smoke curled slowly from the chimney, but she didn’t hesitate as she used the key she had purloined to let herself in.

She was still wearing the cerise ski-suit. The chalet wasn’t far from where she had finished her run. Another piece of careful planning. To the rear of the property lay the garage and drive, cleared of snow for access to the narrow road that linked the remote cluster of chalets, of which it was one, with Gstaad.

She let herself in and closed the door behind her. The entrance hall was plain and yet welcoming in a way in which the large, imposing, marble-flagged hallway to her rented chalet was not.

This one had a natural wood floor covered with a rag-rug. The floor was highly polished, and Silver smiled grimly as she stepped on the rug and discovered that it had been very carefully stuck to the floor.

As she opened the inner door she saw that several other rugs covered the polished floor in the main living-room of the chalet, their textures different, so that anyone walking on them would realise even blindfolded which way they were walking. One row led to the sofa, in front of the stove, another to the small kitchen, and the third to the stairs that rose up in one corner of the room.

She didn’t linger in the living-room, despite the tempting warmth of the log-fuelled stove, but instead crossed it and went upstairs.

The chalet had two bedrooms, both with their own bathroom, and, outside, a passage linked the chalet to the garage and sauna.

She knew all this without having to look. She had done her research well, and in all honesty it hadn’t been difficult. Annie had been all too easy to milk of information. She was so ridiculously proud of Jake and all that he had done—all too ready to sing his praises to anyone who was ready to listen.

Silver wondered idly whether, when Annie visited him up here, they shared one bed or whether she slept alone. Nothing she had ever said had indicated that they were lovers—just the opposite—and Silver knew that Annie still loved her dead husband, but…

Halfway up the stairs she paused, wondering what it would be like to make love with a blind man. Would it give a woman an added thrill of excitement to know that he must learn her by touch, taste and scent alone, and therefore employ those senses to make up for his lack of sight—or would she feel repulsed by the knowledge that those dark blue eyes could see nothing other than the blackness of permanent darkness?

At the top of the stairs she wondered if he had made love to many women since losing his sight, and then she shrugged the thought aside, heading first for his bathroom, where she stripped off her clothes and stood beneath the hot sting of the shower until her skin glowed.

Then, wrapped in a huge, fluffy white towel, she went into his bedroom, noting approvingly that the simple furniture was exactly right for the chalet, that the two paintings on the wall had been chosen with taste and a good eye for colour, and that the sheets on the bed were pure cotton and freshly laundered.

For a man who was currently virtually unemployable, and who had apparently no money of his own to fall back on, he lived very well. Very well indeed, even if the chalet did belong to one of Annie’s wealthy patients.

Silver wasn’t deceived by the chalet’s apparent simplicity. Such a blending of colours and fabrics, so much use of materials that were natural rather than synthetic, so much attention to detail, right down to the pure and very expensive soap in the bathroom, not to mention the Hockneys on the wall downstairs—all whispered discreetly, to those with the properly attuned ear, of wealth and privilege. And more than that: of knowing just how such things should be done… and when, and by whom…

The chalet wasn’t representative of Jake’s taste, though; how could it be? It wasn’t his. What kind of tastes would he have, a man who spent his life with the very roughest kind of people—those who dealt in drugs—and who was in Switzerland to recover from the effects of the bomb blast which had tragically destroyed his sight.

She unstrapped the plain gold watch which had been her father’s last birthday present to her, along with the details of the various secret trust funds he had set up for her and the deeds to the Irish castle which had been in the family long before William the Bastard had ever set his covetous eyes on Harold’s England.

She had loved her father. Now he was dead—a hunting accident, one of those appalling, unthinkable accidents that should surely never have happened to such a keen and excellent sportsman, a rider admired for his ability and skill.

No accident, of course, but her father had been too wealthy, too important, had had his fingers in far too many pies that no one wanted stirring for too much fuss to be made, and, besides, only she knew the truth. A quiet announcement… the death of the Earl of Rothwell, Lord Wesford, James, William, Geraint… and so on… All his titles and dignities… all his names: family names, each showing an affiliation for the various causes her family had espoused over the years. James for the Stuarts, William for the Hanovers, Geraint, a derivation from the family’s French titles.

She still missed him. Her father had had a brain which had allowed him to build a modest inheritance, counted merely in the odd million or so, into a multi-billion-pound empire. There wasn’t an innovation or a discovery he hadn’t been aware of and involved in—secretly, subtly… he had not been a man who ever courted publicity.

He had also been a first-rate sportsman. He had had everything to live for, mourned his friends at the funeral. What a tragic waste that he should die. And she had moved among those mourners, blundering, overweight, unable to imagine the enormity of her loss, for once unaware of the amused and contemptuous looks people gave her, the raised eyebrows and unkind comments… the incredulity that a man like her father should have produced a child like her.

But that was all behind her now. This wasn’t the time to dwell on the past, other than to acknowledge what it had given her. Now she had to concentrate on the future… a future she could only be fit for if… She tensed, hearing a car drive up to the chalet. It had to be Jake. The taxi that collected him from the hospital would have picked him up at three, as it always did. Now it was almost four.

She wondered how long it would take him to find her. Not too long, surely? She had deliberately worn a particularly strong scent. She wondered if he would recognise it. She didn’t normally wear it during the daytime, and to the best of her recollection there had only been one evening occasion on which she had met him. That had been Annie’s birthday, when she had booked a table for her friend at Gstaad’s most exclusive eating spot, only to have her refuse, uncomfortably explaining that she had already agreed to have dinner with Jake.

Silver smiled to herself as she remembered how Jake had stood there and looked at her… Strange to think he was blind. No one looking at him and not knowing it would ever realise. He had somehow or other perfected a trick of looking directly at people that made it seem as though he could actually focus on them.

He hadn’t invited her to join them, simply smiled at her in that grim-lipped, scornful way of his that made it so abundantly clear what he thought of her. Rich bitch… spoiled playgirl… shallow… useless… predatory… she hugged to herself with glee the words he had not voiced but nevertheless felt, enjoying them, and the joke of it was that he had no idea that it was for that—because of his so obvious contempt and disdain—that she had picked him above the others she had contemplated approaching. His blindness only gave the situation an added piquancy.

It was a pity he knew so much about her. She had been angry when she’d discovered how much Annie had told him, but in the long run it was probably for the best. It would make any explanations so much less tedious and messy. And there would have had to be explanations, no matter whom she had chosen.

The car drove away and the door to the chalet opened. She had left the bedroom door open, but she still couldn’t hear him moving. She had noticed that about him before: that silent, menacing tread that Annie had once told her was a legacy of his early army training.

Annie had never told her why he had left the army and joined the special anti-drugs squad of carefully chosen operatives, working alone and in secret, reporting only to their superior in Whitehall. Whatever the reason, it was unimportant as far as her plans were concerned.

‘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.

She didn’t like admitting that she could make mistakes, and had he reached for her she would have had to acknowledge that she had made one.

She didn’t want a man who wanted her, who felt desire for her… just as she didn’t want to know anything about Jake other than the fact that he suited her requirements admirably and that he disliked her enough to ensure that their relationship did not cross any of the barriers she intended to set around it.

Yes, he was ideal for her purpose, this cold, angry, embittered human being who looked at her with those hawk’s eyes that couldn’t see her, but that still held bitterness and dislike. She approved of that. She understood it and could relate to it. She needed him, and she meant to coerce him into submitting to that need.

CHAPTER TWO

SILVER waited out the twenty-four hours in her chalet. The oil sheikh had installed a Jacuzzi in a specially built extension that was raised on pillars some thirty feet above the ground.

The room was circular, one third of its wall-space taken up by specially treated glass that allowed those inside to look out, but no one to look in. From the Jacuzzi the view of the mountains was spectacular.

Low divans followed the curve of the glass wall, heaped with priceless rugs and silk cushions. The jacuzzi was large enough to hold an entire rugby team, and sometimes, when she relaxed in it, Silver wondered about the women who had shared it with the sheikh.

Had they enjoyed the experience? He was fifty-odd years old and fat, with heavy jowls and small, greedy eyes. His hands flashed with jewels and his beard smelled of perfume.

Silver had rented the chalet through an intermediary who had been instructed to describe her as a very wealthy middle-aged widow. She had not wanted any unheralded visits from the chalet’s owner while she was in residence, something which she had heard on the grapevine had happened to a beautiful, amoral socialite she knew, who had described the event with a shudder of distaste.

The socialite’s companion, a sleek, too pretty nineteen-year-old boy with homosexual tendencies, had laughed maliciously and taunted, ‘Oh, come on, you must have been tempted. They say he’s a very generous lover, and gives uncut stones as a mark of his appreciation. The more appreciative he is, the higher the carat of the diamond.’ And he had looked pointedly at the brilliantly cut stone she had been wearing on her finger.

Everyone had laughed until she had told him tartly, ‘This, my dear one, is a fake. He also punishes those who don’t please him by knocking them around or passing them on to his bodyguards.’

Silver had no real fears that he would arrive unexpectedly. She moved languidly in the warm water and then got out. The twenty-four hours were almost up, and she had heard nothing from Jake.

She dried herself, standing carelessly in front of the huge window, enjoying the room’s heat. A jungle of plants covered the back wall, turning the room into a luxurious green cavern of tropical indolence, an erotic contrast to the crisp sharpness of the snow outside.

Before she dressed she smoothed body lotion into her skin; it had the same expensive perfume as her scent. It left her skin velvet-soft and with the same lustrous gleam as expensive heavy satin.

Jake had another two hours. After that she would start packing for her return trip.

The phone rang, and she dropped the silk underwear she had just picked up, reaching for the receiver, subduing the wild dance of elation that sang through her blood.

‘Silver?’

It wasn’t Jake. She forced down her disappointment.

‘Annie. How are you?’

‘Fine. Can you make it for dinner on Friday? It will only be a fairly informal affair. Some old friends are passing through. Jake will be there…’

‘Does he know you’ve invited me?’ Silver questioned her, wondering if this was a skilful ploy of Jake’s to evade her time-limit and yet accept her terms at the same time.

‘He doesn’t even know yet that I’m going to invite him,’ Annie told her.

‘Mm… Friday… I’m afraid I won’t be able to make it. I won’t be here.’

There was a short silence, and then Annie queried almost sharply, ‘So you’re going through with it, then? I understand why you feel the way you do, but is it really wise? Wouldn’t it be better to simply leave things as they are? To put the past behind you?’

‘No,’ Silver told her with emotionless economy. They had been through this so many times before, ever since in that moment of weakness she had confessed to Annie how important it was to her that she reach the goal she had set herself—an impossible goal, some might claim; an unhealthy, even dangerous goal, others might say… especially Annie… especially if she knew the full truth. There were certain things that Silver had kept back from her, certain truths which she had suppressed because even now she could hardly accept them herself.

To have learned that the man she loved had not only betrayed her but was also involved in her father’s death, and in supplying drugs to other members of the wealthy and élite circles he moved in, had devastated her.

No, these were not things that could be told to anyone. Charles had boasted to her that he was beyond the reach of the law, that he had powerful friends who would protect him… well, she was going to show him that, though he might think himself invincible, he was vulnerable just as she had been vulnerable… just as her father had been vulnerable. She was going to bring him down… to destroy him… to…

‘Silver, think!’ Annie cautioned her. ‘If you do succeed, what then—what afterwards?’

‘I don’t care about afterwards,’ Silver told her truthfully.

In her cluttered, untidy office, Annie stared at the calendar on the wall. It depicted a paradisiacal Indian Ocean island, all pale yellow sands, emerald seas and waving palm trees. If she was truthful, she had never felt happy about doing Silver’s operation; that was why she had abandoned the lucrative field of cosmetic surgery in the first place. The puritan in her had balked at what she was doing… And yet there had been something about Silver that had called out to her for help… something in her very desolation and determination that she hadn’t been able to resist. She had felt an awareness of the extent of her suffering, of her need… she, who had thought herself armoured against emotionalism, just hadn’t been able to refuse to help her.

And then, of course, there had been the money.

Five million pounds to help finance her clinic here in Switzerland… her very special clinic where she used her skills to treat the victims of human violence and destructiveness, mending ruined faces and bodies torn, ripped apart… destroyed by human cruelty.

All her skill, though, hadn’t been enough to save Tom.

As always, the memory of her husband weakened her, pain sweeping through her, blotting out the environment of her hospital with its orderly, sane demands on her, taking her to another place… another life and the man she had shared them with.

It was no good remembering Tom. He was never going to come back, never going to bound into their flat, sweeping her off her feet and into bed. She trembled, remembering how it had been between the two of them, and knowing that it was as much because of that… because of all she had shared with Tom that Silver would never have… that she had finally been persuaded to carry out the operations which had given Silver her new face.

‘Be careful,’ she said quietly. ‘Be very careful, Silver…’

Silver smiled mirthlessly as she replaced the receiver. She had no need of Annie’s warning. She knew full well the enormity of the task she had set herself, but it would be accomplished, and without Jake Fitton’s help if necessary. There were other men.

But none quite as ideal, she acknowledged bitterly twelve hours later, standing on the platform waiting for the local train which would take her to Innsbruck. She was travelling light, the same way she had arrived: one piece of hand luggage, into which she had managed to pack everything she had brought with her.

In Paris she would buy new clothes, clothes for the woman she had made herself into. For the woman Annie had made her into, she amended grimly. She had no illusions about herself. Outwardly she now bore the physical attributes of a beautiful woman. The ability to reflect those physical attributes inwardly, to project the reality of being that woman—that task lay with her. She had the determination to do it… the motivation… she had the intelligence. And the skill? Only time would tell.

She now possessed the physical body and face of a beautiful woman; in Paris she would clothe that body as it needed to be clothed if she was to attract Charles’s attention and ensnare him. She knew exactly what kind of woman appealed to him. How he liked initially to be challenged, even dominated by the woman he desired… It was only later that his own true character surfaced and he began to need to inflict cruelty and humiliation on his lovers… to subjugate them…

She had learned a good deal about the real Charles since her father’s death… about the Charles who hid behind the mask of almost godlike physical beauty… behind the appeal of his tall, broad-shouldered body and his golden, deceitful face.

Yes, in Paris she would buy clothes: clothes from Valentino and Armani, from Chanel arid Yves St Laurent, clothes from those designers who knew all about how subtly to emphasise a woman’s sexuality without making a parody of it.

And from Paris she would go to London. To a new life… a new identity. Everything was arranged: the exclusive apartment that whispered sleekly of old money… the letters that would allow her to enter Charles’s milieu as an accepted member of that exclusive and very small world.

Everything was planned, right down to the smallest detail.

A frown touched her forehead as she acknowledged the one major obstacle still confronting her. She now had to find someone to take Jake Fitton’s place. Someone dispensable… someone who would give her what she wanted… what she had to have if her plan was to succeed.

Damn Jake Fitton. She had known he would be difficult to persuade, had known it instinctively, a gut-deep reaction rather than any logic. After all, by his own admission he needed the money… and she had counted on his needing that money too much to refuse her.

That she should have miscalculated so badly and so early on in her planning was more worrying than she wanted to admit. It spoke of an underlying lack of facts; of having made an emotional rather than a clinical decision; of having made the kind of basic error her father would have derided. He had taught her to play chess, he had taught her to gamble for the highest stakes, and he had taught her to run his business affairs, which were now hers… and she had thought she had learned those lessons well. She had thought there was nothing anyone could teach her about man’s basic greed and vulnerability; now she was having to rethink the assessments she had made… to backtrack… to look for an alternative route by which she could reach her ultimate goal.

The train arrived. She got on board without looking back, swaying easily down the carriage, knowing that people were watching her, but remaining outwardly oblivious to their interest.

She sat down and removed a magazine from her bag, coolly snubbing the attempts of the man seated opposite her to engage her in conversation.

Maybe in Paris she would find a man. She told herself it was stupid to allow herself to get so worked up over Jake’s refusal of her proposition, that there was no point in dwelling on what was after all a very minor matter, but it remained there like a small shadow, clouding her mood, growing as the miles passed. The fact that he had rejected her as a woman didn’t bother her… After all, she reasoned mirthlessly, that was something she was used to.

No, it was her own miscalculation that worried her… her own failure to correctly judge the situation, guess what his reactions would be. It showed a grave lack of judgement—a lack of judgement she could not afford. And only now did she admit that she had chosen Jake Fitton as much because he was such a challenge as because of his suitability for the role. It was that small piece of vanity that had been her downfall, and now she was furious with herself too for putting her whole plan into jeopardy simply for the unnecessary and trivial pleasure of putting Jake down, of forcing him to acknowledge her superiority.

His thinly veiled contempt of her had rankled after all… and that was a weakness she could not afford to have. After all, before she was finished, there would be people who felt far more than mere contempt for her…

She closed her eyes and leaned back in her seat, ruthlessly regimenting her thoughts, forcing herself to admit her own stupidity…

The train rattled into Innsbruck.

She was spending the night in a hotel before flying out in the morning. A porter caught sight of her and hurried towards her beaming, only to grimace when he saw she had no luggage. She walked out into the sharp winter sunlight, looking for a taxi. A car drew up alongside her, the rear door opened and from inside it Jake Fitton said quietly, ‘Two million pounds.’

She wanted to refuse, to tell him that it was too late, that the deal was off. The words trembled on her tongue, but she fought them back. She couldn’t afford to give in to emotionalism now.

Instead she smiled and said coldly, ‘You put a high price on yourself, Jake. I hope you’re worth it.’ And then she slid into the car beside him, closing the door and settling herself into her seat while he instructed the driver.

He was taking her back to his chalet, she realised, listening. Two million pounds. Well, she could afford it—easily! She closed her eyes again; her heart was thumping frantically. Until this moment she hadn’t wanted to admit to herself how important it was that it was this man who completed the final hurdle for her… that his acceptance of her terms had a symbolism that was very important to her. Far more important than the man himself.

On the drive back to Gstaad he addressed no comment to her, and she was skilled enough to make none of her own.

She had been brought up by a father whose realisation, eight years after her birth, that she would be the only child he could ever have had led him to pour into her all that he himself had learned in his determination to make her a fitting heir to his name and possessions. Car journeys, for her, were always a reminder of those times when she had sat beside him in the back of the Bentleys he had always chosen over the more status-laden Rolls-Royces, listening while he talked, answering while he questioned. So Jake’s silence was an added burden.

She wondered if such silence was habitual to him, or if he was deliberately trying to unnerve her. Apart from that afternoon in his chalet, she had never really been alone with him, having always encountered him only in Annie’s company.

On those occasions he and Annie had talked as old friends did. There had been silences, generated when he’d become aware that she was there, a silent third, an interloper on their intimacy, and then it had been Annie who had talked, sensing the atmosphere between them and trying her best to disperse it.

The road twisted and turned, offering superb views that were not designed for the nauseous or nervy. In Gstaad they had to stop to allow returning skiers to cross the road. Silver recognised Guido Bartoli among them. Even now it was not too late to change her mind.

The skiers cleared, and the car pulled away smoothly.

‘Second thoughts?’ Jake said quietly beside her, focusing on her as though he could see her.

She had known from the moment she met him that he was dangerous, ruthless—a merciless foe—but such enmity demanded a degree of involvement, of intimacy even, that would not enter their relationship.

Allowing only polite coldness to inform her face and voice, she said quietly, ‘Two million pounds is a lot of money.’

He smiled at her, a curling, taunting smile that said what they both knew: that her second thoughts had nothing to do with money.

As she looked away from him, Silver wondered why, when, since he was blind, she was completely free to look at him, to study and assess him, she found it so difficult to do so.

Where did it come from, this innate distaste for breaching his privacy even when she knew he would be unaware of it?

It was true that he was conspicuously formidable, hardened by life into something almost indestructible. You could see that in him by just looking at him, by seeing how he reacted to his blindness, how he accepted it and adapted to it, daring it to imprison him.

They had reached the chalet. Silver fumbled for the door-handle and got out, waiting for Jake to join her. He stopped to say something to the driver and then walked across to her, finding her unerringly.

He unlocked the chalet door, telling her calmly, ‘Just as a matter of interest, I’ve had the locks changed.’

Silver followed him inside. The stove was burning warmly, and from the kitchen came the mouth-watering aroma of something cooking.

‘I thought it might be as well if you moved in here for the duration of your… tuition. I’ve allocated you a bedroom—second on the left. It doesn’t have a private bathroom, but there is a shower. Since I’m sure neither of us wants to draw this out any longer than necessary, I suggest we make a start this evening. Since you specifically mentioned that seduction was your prime objective, I have to assume that where the non-sexual aspects of such a role are concerned you require no enlightenment.’

He paused, as calmly polite as a lecturer addressing a student, which of course she was.

Silver inclined her own head and replied evenly, ‘Your assumptions are correct.’

‘Mm… you sound confident, but a confident woman wouldn’t have worn that perfume you were wearing the other day. It’s too strong… too obvious. Unless, of course, your prey has a particular penchant for it.’

Silver almost gasped at his astuteness. He was so close to having guessed exactly why she had chosen that particular perfume. The perfumer who had mixed it for her had disapproved.

‘Tuberoses are not really for you,’ he had told her critically, but she had ignored his advice, insisting that he made the strong, heavy scent.

‘I’m sure I don’t need to say this, and you must forgive me for being crass, but since the object of this exercise is not to seduce me I’d prefer you not to use it…’

It took her several seconds to assimilate the subtle insult. When she did she was tempted to retaliate, but she forced herself to say mildly, ‘It costs a thousand pounds an ounce. In view of your extortionate fee, every little I can save is a bonus.’

He didn’t smile, but simply gave her a level, assessing look which she withstood only by reminding herself that he could not actually see her.

‘Next point—clothes. Since you are ultimately to play the seductress, I have no doubt you will probably want to dress for the part. Again, I would caution you against overstatement. I personally find nothing particularly erotic about a woman who has obviously dressed herself with sex in mind. However, the discovery that a woman dressed in jeans and a sweatshirt, with her face free of make-up, is wearing silk satin underwear… now, that…’

Silver was tempted to lie and say that she was allergic to silk, but controlled the childish impulse, saying curtly, ‘I’d like to go up to my room and unpack.’

He shrugged, looking at her impatiently.

‘In a moment. There are still some points we have to discuss. The first, and I should have thought one of the most important as far as you are concerned, is that I have a clean bill of health, at least as far as any sexually transmitted diseases are concerned.

‘The second is that I have assumed that you will have taken the necessary precautions to ensure that no pregnancy occurs.’

‘I have,’ agreed Silver coldly.

‘Good. Now, since I’m hungry, we may as well start the first lesson now. You can leave your unpacking until later. Right now, try imagining that you’ve invited your prospective victim round for a meal. During the course of this meal you intend to make him sexually aware of you and also of your availability. How would you accomplish that?’

Silver felt her heart thumping just a little bit too fast. This was what she wanted, but now that it was here… She tried to blank out of her mind Jake as a person and instead use her imagination to create the scenario he had just described.

She closed her eyes, summoning concentration, asking him a little huskily, ‘Two questions…’

She opened her eyes. He seemed to be watching her.

‘One: how long have we known one another? Two: what is our existing relationship? Do we work together, or…?’

‘We’ve met twice before,’ he told her immediately. ‘The first time a mutual acquaintance invited us both to dinner. The second was at a cocktail party when you discovered that my existing lover has gone to spend a fortnight with her parents. This invitation for dinner was given on the pretext of your having been asked to keep an eye on me, so to speak, by my lover.’

Silver gave him a sharp look spiked with dislike.

‘What’s wrong?’ he asked her evenly. ‘Don’t you like the character I’ve cast for you?’

She digested his silky-voiced comments in silence. Annie had obviously told him a great deal. Too much. ‘I have no feelings at all about her. I was just wondering why you accepted the invitation.’ She wasn’t going to let him guess at her disquiet. He was trained to play on people’s weaknesses. For all she knew, he might simply be assessing… guessing… He smiled at her then, a mocking, warning smile that made her muscles lock.

‘Ah, now that’s for me to know and you to gamble on, isn’t it?’ he told her softly. ‘After all, surely that’s what this is all about—knowing your victim’s vulnerabilities? You’ve got five minutes and then we begin. I’ve arrived at your front door and you’ve let me in.’

She closed her eyes, blotting out both the man and her surroundings; the latter was easy to do, the former surprisingly difficult. She tried to superimpose on his granite-tough features another man’s smoother, younger face and to hold on to that vision. She waited until she had only seconds left before saying softly, ‘Jake… you’ve made it. Marvellous,’ and wondered if he’d notice her subtle and deliberate betrayal of the fact that she had doubted that he would arrive. ‘Come on in and make yourself at home. Dinner won’t be long… It won’t be anything very special either, I’m afraid.’ She mimicked the warm gurgle of laughter she had once heard an acquaintance use to devastating effect. She had a good ear and was adept at reproducing intonations and nuances. ‘I was running late at the gallery and only had time to rush into my local delicatessen on the way back, but then I did warn you that I was no cook, didn’t I?’

She gave a slow, warm smile that promised that she was far more accomplished in other areas, which she hoped was carried through into her voice, because Jake could certainly never see the smile.

‘What should I do with my coat?’

The interruption was unexpected, as was the way Jake feigned uncertainty, looking back over his shoulder as though searching for a hallway.

‘Here… let me take it.’

Silver knew she was several seconds late in picking up her cue. She also had an odd reluctance to approach him and take the jacket he was slipping off.

‘It’s freezing outside, isn’t it?’ she improvised wildly, thrown off-key by his unexpected participation. And then, remembering something a friend had once told her, she added quickly, ‘I’ve lit a fire in the sitting-room. Come on through.’

She still hadn’t taken his coat and he checked her abruptly, saying briefly, ‘Adequate, Silver, but not good. The fire was good, but you failed to make good use of the opportunity I gave you when I asked what I should do with my coat, and the suggestion that something more exciting than dinner might be on offer was very precious… some might even say tacky. We’ll go through it again, only this time we’ll reverse the roles. Still, at least you didn’t pretend I’d arrived early and caught you in the middle of getting changed,’ he said drily. ‘I suppose that’s something. Now listen…’

Speaking as though he were she, he turned to her, matching the smile she had used.

‘First, before he even sets a foot inside the door, you’ll have prepared a mental dossier on him: what he likes and doesn’t like, his weaknesses and strong points. Let’s say this particular victim is an up-and-coming producer of television documentaries with a slant towards the political. You just happen to number among your acquaintances a politician you know he’s been keen to meet. And if you don’t, I’m sure you’ll be able to find a way to make sure that you do.

‘You open the door. He’s on edge, not sure what the evening’s going to hold. He’s aware of the signals you’ve been sending out, enjoyed the prelude to flirtation, but is now getting cold feet, wondering if the evening is going to end up heavy and problematical.

‘You surprise him, get him off guard. You pull a pretty regretful face and tell him you’ve been trapped into joining some old friends for dinner, but that he’s included in the invitation. He breathes relief. The pair of you leave for the kind of venue you know is going to impress him. Your tame politician is already there. You introduce them and discreetly pretend not to notice how impressed he is.

‘At a suitable opportunity, whenever the politician’s gone to the bar or whatever, you tell the victim how marvellous he’s being, helping you to entertain your father’s brother’s cousin’s dull friend. If you’ve done your homework well, you can even get the politician to dangle some tempting bait in front of him, by praising his work and suggesting that the two of them get together.

‘Already your victim is disarmed. He’s totally forgotten that he wasn’t sure he wanted to have dinner with you.

‘As soon as dinner’s over, you start getting a little on edge. You look at your watch… make it subtly obvious that your attention isn’t really on your victim. He’ll feel the withdrawal symptoms like a blast of Arctic air. You announce hesitantly that you really must leave. On the way home he asks you if something’s wrong. You hesitate and then admit to man-trouble. You’re expecting a phone-call or whatever. He then starts thinking he’s misunderstood the entire situation and suffers the consequent challenge to his ego. When you invite him in for a drink, he’s only too eager to accept and offer you his “brotherly” advice—–’

‘Oh, come on,’ Silver interrupted him acidly. ‘That wouldn’t deceive a five-year-old. It’s so obvious.’

‘Never underestimate the efficacy of the obvious. That is why it is obvious, after all.’

‘This is ridiculous,’ Silver told him sharply. ‘I haven’t come here to play these kind of games. What I require you to instruct me in is sexual technique. That’s all.’

‘If that’s the way you want it.’

He shrugged and seemed completely unaffected by her outburst. Silver, on the other hand, was flushed and angry. Did he think her such a fool that she hadn’t got the intelligence or the ability to be able to coax her prey into her carefully baited trap? She had seen others do it often enough.

‘I’m hungry,’ she said, aggressively now. ‘Do I get any dinner, or is that an optional extra?’

There was a small silence. She could feel him assessing her, and she cursed herself for so nearly losing her temper. He was probing her for her weaknesses as deliberately and cold-bloodedly as she had searched for his.

‘Board and lodging is inclusive,’ he told her unemotionally.

Over dinner neither of them spoke, Silver because she was still too angry, as much with herself as with him. His silence, she suspected, had a more dangerous and manipulative motive.

She didn’t offer to help afterwards as he loaded the dishwasher and deftly restored the kitchen to pristine order.

He hadn’t offered her anything to drink during dinner, or had anything himself, and he didn’t offer her anything now, saying briskly as he walked back into the room, ‘Well, we’d better make a start, hadn’t we? We’ll take all the opening stages as accomplished. Your victim has reached the stage where he’s ready to contemplate wanting to make love to you.’

She was sitting in one of the chairs in front of the fire, and as he came towards her he told her drily, ‘In order to facilitate matters, it might be advisable if I show you what’s possible, preferable—and desirable.’

He sat down on the sofa and added, ‘Come and sit here,’ and when she would have sat next to him said firmly, ‘No, not there… Here on the floor.’

Silver shot him a suspicious glance, but his face was perfectly grave and composed, as controlled and emotionless as though he were quite simply a lecturer instructing a rather dull pupil.

As she knelt ungraciously at his feet, he told her wryly, ‘In the harems of the East, the concubines used to be taught to wriggle snakelike upwards from the foot of the bed, adoring their master’s person with their hands and lips as they went.’

Silver was glad that he couldn’t see the betraying wave of colour that burned her skin. With great difficulty she managed to stop her colour from fluctuating.

‘Not that I’m suggesting you do the same thing, at least not at this stage, but it’s a point worth remembering. Now, sit in front of me, resting your back against my legs.’

Silver did as he instructed, sitting ramrod-straight as she stared into the fire.

‘Now, when I speak to you, instead of turning round to look at me you can tilt your head back so that, were I able to see, what I would see would be the undoubtedly tempting line of your exposed throat… your breasts… very temptingly within easy reach of my hand… thus.’

She wasn’t prepared for the brief, clinical touch of his hand, and her body flinched at the contact until she willed it into acquiescence. ‘I could, if I wished, lean down to kiss you, or, more probably, reach down to pull you up over my body, like so.’

His hands fitted easily beneath her armpits, and although she was so tall he turned her easily, so that for a brief, startling moment of time her face was pressed against his hard thigh. Then he was drawing her upwards, as though she were as fluid as a piece of silk.

‘At this stage if I were physically aroused you would be aware of it, and if I weren’t… Well, there are several options open to you, depending upon how much time you have and how far the relationship has already advanced.

‘If it’s still in its early stages and you think I’m drawing you up to kiss you, like so…’

He lifted her easily so that she was virtually draped across his body. One hand in the hollow of her back pressed her torso against his; the other found her nape and locked smoothly in her hair, his mouth cold and clinical on hers.

She wondered a little unkindly if he closed his eyes when he kissed her or if his perpetual darkness rendered it unnecessary.

Her own had closed instinctively, more to blot out the sight of him than to focus her awareness on his mouth, which was just as well, she acknowledged grimly, because there was certainly nothing provocative or erotic in its distant possession.

His eyes weren’t closed, but his lids were lowered so that his dark irises glittered between them. She lay totally unmoving against him, not wanting to remember how she had felt when Charles had kissed her—how joyously, frantically grateful she had been that he loved and wanted her; how eager to respond… to please…

‘You’re not concentrating.’ The harsh criticism jolted her out of her memories, her body tensing in dislike before she could stop it.

‘You’re supposed to be learning how to arouse a man to desire, not wallowing in self-pitiful memories,’ he derided her.

She stifled her rage that he should so easily have followed her thoughts.

‘Now listen and remember. You’ve gained an advantage—physical contact. Now you’ve got to make the most of it… turn a tentative embrace into an erotic enticement.’ When she said nothing, he muttered under his breath, ‘My God, what the hell happened to you when they were handing out good old-fashioned feminine instinct?’

She could have told him that she had never been encouraged to develop her femininity; that her father had treated her as the son he could never have; that plain women, ugly women, as she had heard herself described, were not given many opportunities to develop such instincts. But instead she folded her mouth into a hard line and reminded him coldly, ‘If I had those kinds of instincts, I wouldn’t need you to teach me, would I?’

He was still holding her, but there was nothing intimate about it, apart from the proximity of their bodies, his own all hard, solid, unyielding muscle, unprepared to accommodate her more vulnerable softness, so that leaning into him and being held there hurt her breasts. She tried to ease her discomfort by moving away, but the weight of his hand on her back wouldn’t allow her to put any space between them, and all she could do was move slightly sideways.

‘Let go of me,’ she complained. ‘I can hardly breathe.’

She felt his chest expand as he suddenly took a deep breath and she winced at the uncomfortable pressure against her breasts.

‘You can feel that, can you?’ he asked her.

‘Yes.’

‘Well, that’s a start, at least. Now this time, when I kiss you, I want you to move your body against mine. Here,’ he told her, the hand in her hair sliding unerringly to her waist and then upwards to the curve of her breast, touching her briefly before moving away. ‘And here…’ His other hand left the hollow of her back and traced the curve of her hip.

‘As rhythmically as you can manage. I trust I don’t have to tell you what kind of rhythm,’ he added under his breath, and Silver was glad that he couldn’t see the fierce flood of angry colour that burned her face. She wanted to wrench herself away from him and tell him that she would find someone else to help her, but the stubborn streak of hardiness that had enabled her to survive so much wouldn’t let her. There was far more than mere pride at stake here.

‘Now, just in case you haven’t already realised it, the object of this exercise is to transform what is on my part merely a light kiss into… Well, let’s see what you can turn it into, shall we?’

She hated him… Hated the cold, dismissive way he spoke to her, the way he touched her… the way he made no effort to hide his dislike and contempt. But she needed him too much to show her feelings, and so she waited as his hands moved back to her body and he held her as he had done before, pressing the same cold mouth to her own.

Instinctively she froze, while her mind screamed its impatience with her body’s ineptness and she forced her unwilling muscles to obey her mental commands, moving her body against his, trying to imagine that he was Charles, and that this situation was real.

It was harder than she had thought, her body made clumsy and bashful by the unresponsiveness of his. It was like trying to soften iron, she decided angrily, knowing even before his mouth left hers that she had failed to impress him.

It was a shock to open her eyes and find his boring into her, as though he really could see her. Her heart jerked uncomfortably and she pulled away from him, saying bitterly, ‘Is all this really necessary?’

‘You seemed to think so… Look, I’ll show you how it should be done and then we’ll give it another try. Now concentrate,’ he instructed her, taking hold of her, ignoring her body’s tense rejection as he manoeuvred her ungently on to the sofa and then kept her there with the weight of his body.

‘Now,’ he said grimly against her mouth, ‘this is what should happen.’

This time his mouth was just as clinical, but it moved slowly and subtly on hers, matching the slow tempo of his body, the subtle rotation of his hips pressing her deeper into the sofa, the movement of his chest against her breasts, his hands in her hair, as he deliberately increased the rhythm, enforcing their erotic cycles on her body. He held her head between his hands so that she couldn’t evade his mouth, making a thousand unknown pulses leap under her skin, making her breasts swell and harden and her belly turn weak. The rhythm quickened, changed and became more forceful, and then, shockingly, stopped.

‘This is what I meant when I told you to move your body against mine,’ she heard him saying calmly in her ear. ‘If he’s attracted to you, it should turn him on. Now it’s your turn.’

He levered himself away from her briskly, leaving her to stare up at him. She felt too shocked to move, her pride bruised by the inescapable knowledge of the effect he had had on her. She shuddered as she sat up, wondering why on earth she felt so weak.

As she looked at him, sitting relaxed and composed at the other end of the sofa, she knew there was simply no way she could do to him what he had just done to her.

He must have read her mind, she suspected, because suddenly his voice changed, softening slightly.

‘Forget about me. Just try imagining that I’m someone else—this all-important man that all this is for.’

The palms of her hands had gone damp. She was more scared than she had ever been in her life, even when Annie had explained to her just what the surgery she had wanted would involve… how painful it would be… how potentially dangerous. She didn’t want to touch him… didn’t want to experience his amusement and contempt when she failed to match the effortless sensuality he had just shown her. Was it just experience that brought such skill, or was there more to it than that? Did you have to be born with a facility for it? If so… If so, her plan was doomed, and she wasn’t going to allow that to happen.

Taking a deep breath, she got up.

‘We’ll take it from the top this time, when you’re sitting on the floor.’

Obediently she sat at his feet, closing her eyes and willing herself to believe that she wasn’t here in this chalet, but in the library at Rothwell, that it wasn’t Jake’s body behind her, but Charles’s. She breathed slowly and deeply, trying to relax, trying to capture the evocative scent of old leather and wood that permeated the high-ceilinged room. Trying to imagine the heat of the fire, the guttering of the candles on the desk behind the old leather chesterfield, the feel of Charles’s hands on her hands as he reached for her and twisted her round in his arms, drawing her up over his thighs.

She tried to imagine she was water, amorphous and fluid, flowing against him; her hands touched his chest, feeling the hardness of muscle that unexpectedly flexed beneath her palms. Again the touch of that cold mouth; for a second her concentration wavered and her nails dug into his shoulders as she tensed, but then she pushed Jake’s image to one side and fought to superimpose over it that of Charles.

The kiss was warm and teasing, as Charles’s had been, but instead of accepting it shyly and awkwardly she remembered what Jake had taught her. She was a powerful, seductive woman, and he was her victim. She murmured softly beneath the cold mouth and slid her fingers into his hair, frowning momentarily, conscious of its texture and thickness, knowing by some form of osmosis that Charles’s fair, fine hair would never feel like this, vibrant with male energy. For a moment her confidence faltered, the image of Charles she was fighting to fix behind the closed eyelids fracturing and the pieces reassembling into Jake’s face. She shivered and suppressed the image, telling herself fiercely that this wasn’t Jake, it was Charles… Charles, and that this was her chance to take hold of her own fate and shape it… form it. This was her chance to start exacting payment, and to do that she must seduce him away from other loyalties… other loves.

She moved her body sinuously, ignoring the unresponsive muscle and tissue that was Jake, letting her movements whisper promises of pleasure, trying to recreate the rhythms Jake had shown her, forcing her mouth to soften and linger coaxingly on the implacable, shuttered lips that refused to give her any encouragement.

When Jake took hold of her shoulders and held her away she stared at him, waiting for his judgement. This time her body had not reacted the way it had when he had kissed her, for which she was profoundly grateful. That was a complication she didn’t need or want. Nor did she want to remember that, despite all she had felt for Charles, he had never drawn that involuntary, unstoppable feeling from her.

‘You’re beginning to get the idea,’ Jake told her.

Beginning… Silver glared at him, conscious of a fierce stab of disappointment. What had she expected? she derided herself. Lavish praise? She suppressed her chagrin and said as lightly as she could, ‘I see. And how long will it be, do you suppose, before I’ve absorbed it to your satisfaction?’

‘Who knows, but until you have we don’t go any further.’

As though he heard the angry protests locked in her throat, he said evenly, ‘What do you want from this, Silver? You told me you wanted to be able to seduce a man to the point where he’d virtually kill to have you. Judging on your present performance, you wouldn’t even be a good lay; you’d be forgotten even before the bed had gone cold,’ he told her brutally, and although the words cut into her ego like thin whip-strokes she knew he was telling the truth.

‘Now… we’ll do it again, and remember, a seductress doesn’t necessarily love the man, but she does love herself and her power over him, and because of that she enjoys what she’s doing. She loves making him ache and burn… making him want…’

An hour later, her throat burning with suppressed tears of rage, her pride cut to rags and her temper burning through her like vitriol, Silver pulled back from Jake’s restraining hands and gritted, ‘Don’t tell me… I know… try again. Tell me something, Jake. What exactly do I have to do to get a pass mark?’

He wouldn’t release her, and a flash of caution warned her against trying to overcome his physical strength. She reminded herself that there was nothing personal in this; that it was idiocy to let her dislike for him prejudice her progress. After all, she had chosen him.

‘I should have thought that was obvious,’ he told her. He was beginning to sound terse, and his mouth snapped shut with uncompromising hardness. She had known all along that he wasn’t a man who would suffer incompetence easily, and now he was proving it to her. ‘When you can arouse me, you’ll get your pass.’

Arouse him? She couldn’t stop the shudder jolting through her as she snatched her hands away from his shoulders.

‘We’re talking about a physical reaction, nothing more,’ he told her drily, correctly reading her reaction. ‘A physical reaction to deliberate provocation. It isn’t impossible. It isn’t easy, either… I don’t like you, and I certainly don’t want you,’ he told her frankly, ‘but until you can draw that involuntary physical response from my flesh, we don’t go any further. There wouldn’t be any point.’ He gave her a hard look which made her catch her breath until she remembered that he couldn’t actually see her.

‘Now, let’s try it again, and this time remember: the sooner you get it right, the sooner we can move on to the next stage, and ultimately the sooner you and I can go our separate ways.’

It should have been all the encouragement she needed, but it had exactly the opposite effect. She became unbearably conscious of herself and of him, and totally unable to superimpose Charles’s image on to his features, no matter how tightly she tried to close her eyes and use her imagination. Her movements became clumsy, her body tense and awkward.

After three humiliating attempts to recapture her earlier burgeoning skill had failed, she was tempted to call the whole thing off.

She was too demoralised even to hide from him how she felt, pushing her hair back off her hot face as she protested angrily, ‘It’s no use. I’ll never get it right…’

She expected him to agree with her and was surprised when he remained silent, until she remembered that, for all his contempt, he would stand to lose two million pounds if she backed out now.

‘We’ll have a break,’ he told her equably at last, adding, ‘Think of it as mind over matter, Silver. The physical skills alone aren’t enough. You have to be confident of success… to know you have the power to arouse me… to know that you can make me want you. Without that mental strength, no matter what I teach you, you won’t succeed. The outward skills can only facilitate the effectiveness of the inner ones. Which is perhaps why they say seductresses are born and not made.’

It infuriated her that, after she had faced so much, endured so much, she was failing at this last obstacle… surely the most simple of them all?

‘I’m tired,’ she told him pettishly. ‘I’m going to bed.’

She waited for him to stop her, to make some cynical and mocking retort, and when he didn’t she walked stiff-backed over to the stairs and then up them.

A month of Jake’s time was what she had bought. Four short weeks of his time and his tuition. So why should it suddenly seem as though those short weeks were going to prove a lifetime of endurance and punishment?

CHAPTER THREE

HER bedroom was simply furnished. Rag-rugs on the polished floorboards, a large double bed with bolster pillows and two huge quilts, a solid-looking chest of drawers in an unvarnished bleached wood that felt smooth and worn to the touch, and a wardrobe to match. The small shower-room was as basic and frugally furnished as the bedroom, but there was a Tightness about the plain white sanitaryware that was pleasing to the eye.

Silver showered, dismissing her longing to soak her tense muscles in a hot bath, and then moisturised her face completely. Annie had warned her that for some time to come her skin would be vulnerable. When she had finished she brushed her hair vigorously, her mouth curling into a crooked smile.

When she’d walked into Annie’s clinic her hair had been russet-brown. It was the shock of the series of operations she had put herself through that had turned it almost pure white.

The mirror gave back to her a perfect reflection. She studied it clinically, trying to see it as others would see it… as Charles would see it. Flawless skin… she had always had that before, though no one had ever really noticed. An elegant, straight nose; not for her the cutesy girlish bobs favoured by starlets. High cheekbones slanting under widely spaced eyes, small ears, a delicate jawline, a full mouth. That too had already been hers, although in the heavy, plain setting of her old face its fullness had appeared almost grotesque.

Standing naked in front of the mirror, Silver studied her body. No surgery had been needed here. Just diet and exercise—almost an entire year of it before this svelte, high-breasted figure had emerged from the smothering layers of fat.

Now she had a narrow ribcage and a tiny waist, curving hips and long, long legs.

She looked back into the past, seeing her reflection not as it was now, but as it had been then. She had started overeating as a teenager, partly in compensation for her own deep-seated insecurities, partly out of the guilt induced within her by her aunt.

The awareness that her beloved father, much as he’d loved her, would have preferred her to be a son wasn’t something which had grown on her slowly, but had been cruelly forced upon her by her cousin.

She shivered, remembering with devastating clarity the day her cousin had relentlessly and cruelly explained to her that for her father there could never be a son… someone who would carry on the family name, its titles and burdens… That she, as a daughter, could never inherit them, and that it was through her that her father had contracted the childhood disease which had led to his inability to father any more children.

Charles would inherit… Charles would become the fourteenth Earl of Rothwell on her father’s death… Charles, who if she was lucky might condescend to marry her. And so her insecurity had begun, her awareness of her lack of worthiness to be both her father’s only child and Charles’s wife… and with it her obesity.

How assiduously and malevolently her aunt had nurtured those insecurities. She could see it all so clearly now… as she had not been able to do then.

And Charles… how cleverly Charles had used his mother’s manipulation of her, charming her one moment, spurning her the next… offering her compassion and caring one day and replacing it with coldness and disdain another. And so it had gone on, the constant see-sawing of her emotions, so that her lack of self-worth and her vulnerability had grown at the same pace as her dependence on Charles.

She had totally believed her aunt when the latter had told her that it was her father’s wish that she marry Charles, never dreaming that she might have lied, and so she had grown through her teens adoring her Adonis-like cousin… loving him… wanting him… to such an extent that, when her father had finally begun to appear antagonistic toward Charles, when he had tried to caution her, she had refused to listen, believing herself to be deeply in love with her cousin.

It had been the only thing they had ever quarrelled about… Silver bit her lip, wondering whether, if he were alive now, her father would recognise anything of the daughter he had known in her, or would pass her by in the street as one of her godmothers had done in Gstaad last week.

She had loved her father so much; and she had indirectly been responsible for his death. She shivered suddenly. It wasn’t just a desire to make Charles pay for the hurt he had inflicted on her in rejecting her that was making her put herself through this… this self-torture. Motivating her just as strongly was her deep-rooted belief that justice must be done, that Charles must pay for the crime she knew he had committed. Charles had murdered her father, and, what was more, he had murdered him because he had known that her father stood between him and Rothwell, that the information her father had about Charles would ensure that she broke her engagement to him; and so Charles had killed him. How safe and secure he must feel now… As far as Charles was concerned, both of them were dead, her father and then apparently her. But she was going to rise again from the dead… not as the girl everyone thought had committed suicide, the plain and ugly Geraldine Frances—but as Silver. And she was going to teach him what it meant to love someone, to desire them and to believe those feelings were returned, and then to face rejection.

But, over and above that, she was going to take away from Charles everything he thought he had gained by murdering her father. For that, any sacrifice, any self-torment could be endured.

Now no one would ever recognise her as Geraldine Frances…

She touched one high cheekbone with her fingertips, feeling the living skin. It frightened her sometimes to look into the mirror and see this unfamiliar mask, but she had to suppress that fear. This was what she had wanted, this porcelain perfection of feature… this almost unreal beauty…

She had been frightened this evening as well, when she’d realised how very easily she could fail this last test.

She shivered and pulled on her pyjamas. Cream satin, the fabric severely cut, almost masculinely so, flowed over her body, changing subtly so that it no longer appeared severe, but instead became subtly erotic. She had bought the pyjamas because she felt she was too tall for frilly feminine nightwear, and because she knew that the ancient flannelette nightwear she had worn since she was a teenager, comfortable though it was, could no longer be a part of her life.

Now, as she walked into her bedroom and the coolness of the satin stroked her skin, she remembered what Jake had said to her about wearing silk underwear beneath a pair of jeans and her body tensed angrily.

There had been a point this evening when she had been tempted to accuse him of deliberately drawing out her torture, but then she had remembered his cold distaste when she had first put her proposition to him and she had held back the bitter words, knowing that, no matter how much he disliked her, it wouldn’t make any sense for him to spend any longer with her than was necessary. And anyway, he had been right, she acknowledged drearily.

No matter how hard she tried to forget them, to tell herself that she was now a beautiful, desirable woman, her old inhibitions wouldn’t let go, grimly reinforcing the judgement of his hard, unyielding body, until the rhythm she was trying so desperately to maintain became the beat of painful music to the refrain that pounded over and over again through her mind. Words it would surely take many lifetimes to obliterate, words which she felt were carved upon her soul.

Charles’s words, cruel and condemning, bitter and hurtful… the words he had used to describe her to another woman.

She got into bed and lay there, knowing that she wasn’t going to be able to sleep.

She had been there just over half an hour when Jake knocked on her door and called her name, loud enough for her to hear, but not so loud that it would have woken her had she been asleep.

She was tempted to pretend that she was, but she stifled the pettish instinct, getting up instead and padding over to the door to open it.

‘What do you want?’ she asked him ungraciously.

He smiled mirthlessly. ‘Still sulking? You might be able to afford to waste your time, but I can’t.’

She turned her back on him and said curtly, ‘Save the lecture for tomorrow, would you, Jake? I want to go to sleep.’

‘And you shall. But not yet…’

She looked at him and read the inflexible purpose in the hard bones of his face. She should have anticipated this, and she berated herself mentally for believing that he would allow her to overrule him.

There were two courses open to her now: she could stand her ground and risk having him call the whole thing off, or she could give in.

Great as her desire was to defy him, she couldn’t let their personality clash come between her and the course she had set for herself.

He was looking at her, and despite his blindness the blue eyes were alive with intelligent awareness. That panicked her. She wanted to turn away from him so that he couldn’t look at her, even though she knew it was impossible for him to see her.

‘I’ll come back downstairs,’ she said woodenly.

‘A very wise decision.’ He held open the door, waiting for her. She wanted to protest that she would have to get dressed, and then thought of the intimacies she would have to endure before she was free and gave a faint sigh, preceding him through the door.

The stove was still burning, and she was glad of its warmth. The settee stood in front of her, an implacable reminder of her failure. She thought bitterly that she would never again feel quite the same about that particular piece of furniture.

‘Now,’ Jake instructed her coldly, ‘this time, try to use your intelligence. Think about what you’re doing… about the image you’re projecting. We haven’t been lovers yet, but all the signs are that we will be. The scene is set. It’s up to you to make the most of the opportunity I’m giving you. Remember, when I walk away from you tonight you want me to lie awake remembering the feel of you, the scent of you, aching for you. You want me to forget every other woman I’ve ever held…’

Silver shivered, bitterly aware of how very skilled he was, of how he was using his voice and his imagination, of how he was forcing her to confront her own failure and fears.

She wanted to scream at him that it was no use, that she couldn’t do it, but her stubbornness wouldn’t let her. She had come too far, sacrificed too much.

As she stood there, curling her fingers into tight, hard balls of tension, he said coolly, ‘Stop trying to think of me as him. That immediately sets up barriers you can’t overcome. He’s too important to you. Try instead to imagine me simply as man… all mankind… not a person with characteristics you may or may not like, but merely a symbol of maleness to your femaleness.’

She wanted to tell him that he was wrong about Charles, but she suspected he would know that he wasn’t, so instead she closed her eyes and willed herself to blank out his features, to see him simply as a body, a set of reflexes which she had to activate.

Into the darkness, he added, ‘If it’s the basic pattern of movements that worries you, try improvising slightly. Let your instincts guide you and not your brain.’

What instincts? she longed to demand bitterly. Haven’t you realised yet that I don’t have those kinds of instincts? If I did I wouldn’t need you! But she knew that to lose her temper would achieve nothing. He wasn’t responsible for the past; he was nothing in her life, simply a cipher… a necessary staging post through which she must pass on her self-selected route.

She breathed deeply and evenly, steadying her nerves, and then went over to him, dropping into the now familiar position. He reached for her, and she saw the frown touch his forehead as his fingers slid over satin, but he made no comment, simply disengaging one hand and then the other, so that he could slide his hands up her bare arms beneath the sleeves of her pyjama jacket.

She stiffened instinctively as her body touched his, forgetting for a moment the purpose of his touch—she hadn’t realised how different it would feel to lie against him without the constricting layers of clothes—and then she forced herself to ignore her own reactions and to concentrate instead on his. If she could feel his body so much more intensely through the satin of her pyjamas, then surely he must be correspondingly aware of hers: of the sleek, subtle movement of the fluid fabric as it flowed over her skin. That was what she should be like, she told herself: fluid, amorphous, clinging, silken, inviting his touch, teasing him with her very lack of substance; making him aware of her every subtle movement.

Her hands were on his chest and, as she willed her flesh and bones to mould themselves to his, she smoothed her palms over his shirt-front, levering her torso away from him, the better to allow her hips to sink into him. Think of it as a dance, she told herself, a subtle, dangerous dance which only one of us can control, and as she moved her hips a small, forgotten memory came back to her, a laughing conversation she had overheard between two girls at a party, and she broke the cold dominion of his kiss with the soft pressure of her mouth, mimicking the slow movement of her hips, her mouth open and moist.

Unexpectedly, his throat muscles clenched and then his fingers circled her wrist as though he was going to push her away.

She felt anger and disappointment, bitterness at yet another failure followed by a savage determination to force some reaction for him. She pulled her wrist free and held his face in her hands the way he had done hers, driven by her need to prove to him what she could do, opening her mouth on his, flattening her torso against him, moving her whole body against him, willing him to react, to give her the words of praise she so desperately craved, and when he didn’t she used her teeth sharply against his bottom lip, caught up in a fierce, furious rage of resentment, her hands leaving his face to curl into bitter fists which she beat frantically against his shoulders as she spat furiously, ‘It’s no good! I can’t do it. I’ll never be able to do it.’ Tears of temper and failure burned her throat and eyes.

He fended her off easily, holding her away from him and then shaking her firmly to silence her, saying calmly, ‘That’s enough. And you’re wrong.’

It didn’t penetrate at first, and then, when it did, she went rigid. ‘Wrong?’ She stared at his face, looking for signs of deception, of pity, but there were none. ‘Why didn’t you say something, then, instead of letting me…?’

‘I was about to,’ he told her, extremely drily. ‘But you didn’t seem to want to listen.’

She was almost afraid to believe it. She watched him suspiciously, half afraid he was just playing a cruel joke on her.

‘I’m not lying to you,’ he told her calmly, reading her mind, easing her on to the sofa beside him and then reaching for her hand.

When he placed it against his body and she realised why she tried to pull away, but he wouldn’t let her.

‘Stop that,’ he told her curtly. ‘You’re going to have to do far more than touch a man with such shrinking reluctance if you’re going to play the seductress.’

She had known, of course, only somehow, contemplating the intimacies she would have to endure, the skills she would have to learn, hadn’t seemed quite the same as it did now, with her hand forced to lie against the hard pulse that betrayed his arousal.

‘Now,’ he told her quietly as he released her hand, ‘having got this far, we might as well make full use of what you’ve achieved. To arouse a man is easy,’ he told her, ignoring her angry muttered protest. Easy, was it? She didn’t think so. ‘To sustain that arousal, and then to turn mere arousal into desire, and desire into obsession, is something else. So you’ve aroused your victim, shown him that you’re capable of exciting his desire. Now you’ve got to show him how much you want that desire. You’ve got to flatter him into thinking he’s the only man to arouse you to that intensity of desire…’

‘Can’t I just tell him that?’ Silver demanded truculently.

‘You can… and in fact you should, but not at this stage; we’ll get round to that later. For now you just concentrate on convincing him that he’s the ultimate in macho virility.’

He waited for a few seconds, and then said crisply, ‘Think, Silver. You’ve got what you wanted. He’s aroused but he’s vulnerable; the true seductress knows that men don’t like feeling vulnerable. Now you’ve got to restore his pride. You’ve got to convince him that you’re vulnerable. Think,’ he reiterated impatiently. ‘Think of what you’d want him to do if you did actually want him.’

His words rang warning bells in her brain.

‘I’m the one seducing him, not the other way round,’ she reminded him coldly.

‘Yes, and one of the most effective means of seduction is to appear seduced oneself. It’s a simple, basic precept. You arouse him; you pretend to be aroused in turn; you apologise and tell him that you don’t normally react like that. His ego loves the flattery, and immediately, because of your apparent desire for him, you become more desirable to him.

‘I presume you don’t know how to simulate desire. Hence your truculence? It isn’t that difficult…’ His voice was extremely dry. ‘All you have to do is to kiss me as you were doing before…’ She was glad he couldn’t see her face.

‘While you’re doing it, you can take hold of my hand and put it on your breast, or, if I’m already touching you there, you can press yourself against me and make some pretty little moaning sounds. If you can manage to tremble as well, that’s even better. If I don’t take the hint then and start undressing you, you can whisper in my ear how much you’d like to have my mouth against your breast. Think you can manage any of that?’

The question trapped her. She wanted to hurl a denial at him, and yet she sensed that he was deliberately testing her… seeing how serious, how committed she was to the course she had chosen. If she backed out now, she would only have it all to go through again with someone else. At least Jake couldn’t see her. At least he was clinical and detached from her… even in his arousal.

She thought of all the answers she could give him and opted for the one that was honest.

‘I don’t know,’ she told him.

‘Well, shall we see if we can find out?’

She paused, nodded, and then realised that he couldn’t see her and said brusquely, ‘Yes.’

‘Right, then, let’s give it a try.’

She was becoming more adept at summoning up her will-power and focusing her concentration. Perhaps the enforced constant repetition had something to do with it as well, she reflected, acknowledging as she moved towards him how familiar the sensation of Jake’s body against her own had become.

She kissed him as he had told her to, telling herself it was only like climbing a mountain, or skiing down a dangerous slope. It was only another goal she had to reach. She moved, surprised by how easily her muscles slipped into the provocative rhythm, flesh against flesh, muscle against muscle, her softness against his hardness, part and counterpart, two skilfully designed components that, once put together… and then she realised that the reason her body was moving so easily and fluently was that Jake’s was moving with it, helping her… encouraging her.

It was the first time he had done anything other than remain like solid stone, and she felt the same thrill she had that day on the ski-slopes: that surge of knowledge that she would win, that nothing could stand in her way.

Jake was helping her, not so much in accolade to her burgeoning skill, but in a silent acknowledgement that she would succeed… a subtle carrot dangled after the painful sting of the stick.

He broke the kiss and said against her mouth, ‘Stop daydreaming, Silver… My hand, remember?’

She had been so carried away by her own euphoria that she had forgotten. And now her mood was broken. Her body tensed. She felt awkward and uncertain, but she knew that Jake wouldn’t allow her to back out. If she flunked it this time he would make her go over it again and again until she got it, just as he had done earlier, and so she made her body relax, trying to envisage it as fluid satin as she had done before, trying to imagine it as settling smoothly over Jake’s body, remembering that it was her task to arouse him as she closed her eyes and kissed him, curling her fingers round his wrist as she lifted his hand to her breast.

Charles had never touched her body, and she had learned why. He had found her too repulsive. Just for a second she saw herself as she had been then: ungainly, overweight, insecure, and painfully shy.

She was none of these things now. She had a body now that was sleek and streamlined, her flesh smooth and silky.

She now had the kind of body that any man would want to touch.

As she registered the contact of Jake’s hand on her body, long, lean fingers splayed out across her satin pyjama jacket, radiating heat through the fabric and on to her skin, she wondered if she would ever totally manage to vanquish the past and the woman she had been then.

Against her ear Jake’s voice warned, ‘Remember, you’re supposed to want this. You’re supposed to be making me feel I’m driving you wild.’

Driving her wild. He was—wild with anger and tension and insecurity and a dozen or more other negative emotions she thought she had already put behind her.

There was no pressure in the touch of his hand, no more intimacy or awareness than if he had simply been touching her arm to help her across a street.

But she was aware of him; aware of the heat and alienness of him where his hand covered her; aware of the softness of her own body, of the curve of her breasts and the sensitivity of her nipples where the satin touched them.

She shuddered as she felt Jake’s chest expand with impatience.

‘Don’t think about me,’ he commanded her harshly, withdrawing his hand. ‘Don’t think about me… don’t think about anyone; think only of yourself, of what you’re projecting… of what you want to achieve. You’re so goal-orientated; think of this as a goal you have to achieve, let your senses monitor the degree of your success or lack of it… Let them tell you how the man touching you is feeling. Desire is a very sensitive emotion; only by understanding that will you be able to truly control and manipulate a man’s sexual reaction to you.’

Silver had stopped listening to him; he was pressing her too hard, demanding too much of her too soon, and she thought she knew the reason why. He was so anxious to be rid of her and get his money that he was trying to set a pace it was impossible for her to match.

‘Listen to me, damn you!’ he swore at her suddenly.

Suddenly her control snapped.

‘I’m not like you,’ she told him angrily. ‘I’m not so used to casual sexual intimacy that it doesn’t matter to me who…’

She gasped with pain as his fingers bit deeply into the soft flesh of her upper arms.

‘You know nothing about me,’ he told her tersely. ‘Nothing. If you’ve changed your mind and want to bring this whole thing to an end, then say so, and stop trying to manufacture an excuse.’ His mouth twisted and he released her, adding unexpectedly, ‘And, for your information, I do not use and never have used sex indiscriminately. Nor have I ever used it as a weapon,’ he told her devastatingly. ‘What is it you really want from this man, Silver? You told Annie you wanted revenge—–’

Her mouth tightening, Silver interrupted angrily, ‘She had no right to tell you that.’

‘She was concerned about you. Annie’s like that. She can’t stop herself from caring, from becoming involved. A human weakness I doubt you’d understand.’

Almost she told him, and then she stopped herself just in time, sensing the cleverly baited trap. It would be madness to allow this man to know too much about her… to witness her vulnerabilities.

‘Why?’ he probed, ignoring her tension. ‘Why all this…?’ His hand touched her face fleetingly.

‘I have my reasons,’ she told him freezingly.

‘A woman spurned,’ he mocked. ‘What really motivates you, do you know? Anger… hatred… love…?’

Silver shuddered, the fine hairs on her arms rising warningly. He was too aware, too sensitive in some way to her most private thoughts and feelings. It was almost as though he himself knew what it was to be driven… to be possessed… obsessed almost. And as for that last softly spoken challenge… Please God she no longer felt any love for Charles. Hatred, anger, yes… she needed them just as much as she needed her driving hunger for retribution…

‘What is it exactly you hope to achieve?’ Jake pressed, and then added, ‘Oh, I know what your physical goal is, but what satisfaction do you expect to gain from achieving it?’

Silver almost wished she hadn’t allowed him to see that shudder of sensation which had made him take his hands from her body. In its own way this was an almost equally painful form of torture—this probing into her mind, her feelings. Physically, at least most of the time, she could hide her reactions from him, but mentally, emotionally… he was far too good at finding her weak points and playing on them.

Holding up her head, she said coolly, ‘The Chinese have a saying: “There is nothing so amusing as to see an enemy fall from a high roof.” I intend to make sure Charles falls from a very high roof indeed.’

‘You intend to see that he falls… or do you mean that you intend to make sure he does, by giving him a push? Be careful,’ he warned her firmly. ‘The Chinese have another saying: “He who seeks revenge must dig two graves”…’ He paused deliberately, and Silver had the uncanny sensation of feeling her resolve waver. It was like discovering that what she had thought to be absolutely solid ground had suddenly turned to something treacherous, without substance, and she fought against it in panic almost as though she was in fact losing her balance and being sucked into something dangerous and unstable.

‘Oh, and by the way,’ Jake told her softly, ‘you got your quotation wrong. In actual fact it goes: “There is nothing so amusing as to see a friend fall from a high roof.” A very cynical race, the Chinese, but perhaps the mistake was Freudian in origin and you aren’t sure whether he is your enemy or your friend. Is it revenge you want, Silver, or is it something else?’

‘What are you trying to say?’ she demanded, fighting back her panic. This was worse, much worse than the physical intimacy which had sent her flying headlong down this perilous path.

‘I’m just trying to warn you about the pitfalls you’re going to encounter…’

She laughed then, a too high, too sharp sound that grated warningly against her own ears, betraying her panic and her fear; and if her laughter betrayed those emotions to her, how much more must it betray to Jake’s far more astute ears?

‘Why?’ she demanded acidly. ‘I’ve hired you to teach me about seduction, Jake, not morality. Anyway, what makes you such an expert? You don’t know how I feel or why…’

‘Wrong.’

He said it so blandly, so emotionlessly that it was a few seconds before she realised just what the word meant.

She blinked, and then focused on him. His face was stern in repose, unyielding, his mouth controlled, everything about him so diametrically opposed to all that the word cloaked that she thought for a moment that he was lying to her.

‘I know exactly what motivates you, Silver, exactly what you’re feeling, and I can tell you this: you’re going to have to be far more resolute, far more determined, far more single-minded if you want to succeed. Revenge, just like any other human emotion, is a two-edged sword, as dangerous to the person who wields it as the person it is wielded against. This man you’re so determined to destroy… do you really think he’s going to calmly allow you to destroy him… that he won’t try to destroy you in turn?’

‘I’m not a fool, Jake.’

‘No, you’re a spoilt and wealthy young woman, who obviously believes that her wealth can buy her anything and everything she wants,’ he responded equably.

The unfairness of his allegation momentarily robbed Silver of her ability to retaliate.

‘You’re wrong,’ she told him emotionally, forgetting the warnings she had already given herself about lowering her defences with him. ‘I may be rich, but as for being spoilt… Materially, perhaps, but emotionally… apart from my father, I doubt that anyone has ever given a thought to my emotional needs… love—–’

‘Love?’ Jake interrupted, taunting her. ‘I thought it was revenge you wanted.’

‘It is!’ She realised that her hands were balled into fists and that her temper was dangerously close to breaching her self-control. Taking a steadying breath, she demanded less emotively, ‘What are you trying to do, Jake?’

There was a small pause and then he said quietly, ‘What I’m trying to do is to make you face up to reality. You think you’re invulnerable, but you’re not… you’re far too easily swayed by your emotions.’

‘I’ve had enough of this,’ she told him abruptly. She turned away from him dismissively, but he forestalled her, taking hold of her in a grip she couldn’t break.

‘No,’ he told her quietly, ‘that isn’t the way it’s done, sulking like a child when things don’t go as you want them to. You’ve got to learn to make your own weaknesses work for you… to use them and to conceal them—and conceal them well—but first you’ve got to learn to recognise and acknowledge them. Now, if you’ve got over your little tantrum, we’ll start again.’

He felt the tiny shudder that rippled across her skin and was momentarily caught off guard by an unexpected twist of fellow feeling, of sympathy almost… sympathy for this woman…

Moralising, he taunted himself. Was what she was doing so very different from what he himself was doing? Both of them were motivated by the same need… but that was the only similarity between them. She wanted to hurt and destroy a man who had rejected her, while he… As he felt the floodgates to his memories tremble beneath the force of his own pain he clamped back on his thoughts…

He had come so close to achieving his goal, only to discover that while he turned his back his entire world had been destroyed. Now he sought vengeance against those who had wrought that destruction. One of the men was dead already, murdered by a rival drug baron, in a bomb blast before Jake could intervene. Two of the others were in American gaols, awaiting sentence. It was the fourth and so far unknown member of the quartet, who had been responsible for the destruction of the one person who had mattered to him, whom he now sought… All he knew was that the man was based in London, but where and who he was were things he still needed to discover, and the only way he was going to discover them was with Silver’s money, which was why…

Which was why he could not afford to allow himself the luxury of feeling anything for her… especially not sympathy.

‘Now, if you’re ready, we’ll start again,’ he told her curtly.

That betraying shudder had left her feeling cold and afraid.

It seemed to Silver that it was a long, long time before she heard Jake saying coolly, ‘That’s better, but there’s still a lot of mileage left for improvement. Remember, you’re seducing me while allowing me to think you’re out of your mind with wanting me. Try and co-ordinate everything now,’ he instructed her. ‘Here.’ He tapped her bottom briefly. ‘And here.’ He repeated the brief instructive gesture alongside her ribcage. ‘Another little theatrical shudder, a soft moan or two, and then we’ll call it quits for tonight.’

Silver wondered what he’d say if she told him the truth—that the shudder hadn’t been faked and that it hadn’t been caused by desire. She thanked God he couldn’t read minds.

She felt physically and mentally exhausted, drained of the desire to do anything other than match his exacting standards as quickly as she could so that she could be released from this purgatory to go back to bed.

She moved automatically, mentally registering surprise at how easy the rhythm was now becoming. He moved against her, helping her. He was probably as eager to get the whole thing over as she was herself. She didn’t kiss him; it was too much of an effort to concentrate on everything else. She wasn’t sure she could manage to fake a shudder, and tried thinking about walking barefoot on ice or something equally shiver-inducing, but Jake’s free hand touched the base of her spine, pressing her against his body and moving her so that as she automatically moved her hips in the rhythm he had taught her she felt his arousal, and the shudder she had been fighting for came naturally. Like a perfectly synchronised pattern of actions, his hand tightened fractionally on her breast, his thumb rubbing over the nipple so that her throat-muscles contracted in shock, and without even knowing she was doing it she produced the requisite moan… of protest, not desire… but that didn’t seem to matter because Jake turned his head and said into her ear, ‘Good, that’s better.’ And then to her shock he nipped ungently at her soft earlobe and transferred his hand from her spine to her nape, covering her mouth with his own. When she stiffened, he didn’t release her, but moved his hand from her breast to her hip, tapping the bone almost painfully smartly and then gripping it, reminding her that she had stopped moving. Holding her immobile, he moved his own body against her, forcing her to follow its movements and not letting go until he was satisfied with the way she matched its rhythm.

Against her mouth, he said grimly, ‘Now, this time, let’s try and get it all together, shall we?’

And then he bit sharply at her bottom lip so that she opened her mouth in protest.

His tongue thrust sinuously against her own, matching the movement of his body; his hand returned to her breast, cupping it and then stroking it, the intimacy catching her off guard so that for a moment she panicked and started to freeze, until her mind cancelled the warning signals from her body and told it that it had nothing to fear, and that this was simply a necessary part of what she must endure.

She tried to recapture the sense of power she had known earlier—the sense of her own infinite superiority as a woman, of being able to control and arouse this man—but the powerful movements of his body were beginning to intimidate her. She mustn’t let that happen. She must remember that she was the one in control. His thumb touched her nipple, his nail slowly drawing a circle against its satin-covered areola. She shuddered and remembered in time her instructions, dragging her mouth from his to press it against his throat as she made a whimpering sound into his skin.

The pressure of his hand increased, something she hadn’t expected. The movement of his thumb against the satin and the satin against her breast was abrasive in a way that made her skin tauten and swell. His hips lifted and thrust against her, his legs parting so that she slid between them. His hand slid down her back to the base of her spine, pressing her into his body.

Against her ear, he reminded her, ‘You haven’t finished yet. Tell me you want me, remember?’

For a moment her mind was blank. She couldn’t think for her awareness of his arousal, and then, when she did remember what she still had to do, her control faltered.

Think of him as Charles, she told herself fiercely. Think of Charles wanting you… Think of triumph. And before that image could fade she slid her hands over the strong column of his neck and into his hair, and arched her body upwards while she pushed his head down.

‘The words… remember the words…’

The words. I mustn’t forget the words, she thought frantically, otherwise it will all have to be done again, and as she moved she pressed her lips against his ear and said quickly, ‘T-t-touch me. I—I want to feel your mouth against my—my skin…’

She felt the heat of his breath in the V of her pyjama jacket and for a moment she thought he was actually going to prolong the lesson and take it a stage further, but to her relief he didn’t. He lifted his head as he eased her away from him so that she could sink on to the floor and gather her knees up protectively against her body, wrapping her arms round them as she waited for his verdict.

‘Not totally convincing,’ he told her drily, ‘but not a total disaster either. Now we both know just how much work we have to do, on a scale of nought to ten.

‘Tomorrow we’ll take a different look at what being seductive involves. A woman can be just as alluring fully dressed as she can in a situation like this evening’s, but that involves knowing a lot more about the male body and its responses than you know at the moment.

‘Starting from tomorrow, we’ll go through what turns a man on. As an example, just now, instead of asking me to touch you, you could have opened my shirt and teased my nipples with your mouth…’ He got up, stretching his body until Silver heard the bones crack, and then, as he walked towards the kitchen, added unemotionally, ‘Licking, sucking, even biting would have been an extremely seductive way of showing me exactly what you wanted, and of course it would have had the added benefit from your point of view of increasing my arousal.’

He stopped by the door to the kitchen and added, ‘I’m not going to offer you any supper. You’ve got some homework to do.’

He reached down to the wooden dresser set into the wall and removed a pile of books.

‘Sex manuals,’ he told her drily. ‘Read them.’

‘I already have,’ Silver told him flatly.

‘Well, now you can read them again,’ he told her inexorably. ‘You’ve got a week to read them in, and at the end of that week I’ll be giving you a set of questions to answer on them.’

‘What?’ Silver couldn’t believe it. ‘I’ve already told you, sex manuals can’t give me the expertise I need. If they could, I wouldn’t be here with you,’ she added bitterly.

‘Maybe not, but you’re still going to read them.’

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

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.

‘If you want to walk out of here, Silver, I’m not going to stop you,’ Jake told her quietly.

There was no recognition of her insult, her cruelty… her immaturity… Nothing other than the weary patience of an adult for a recalcitrant, awkward child. His reaction, so mild and restrained, bit into her soul like a tempered steel whip, lacerating her pride until it was raw with pain.

‘You aren’t the only one wishing this were over, you know,’ he told her calmly. ‘It would be the easiest thing in the world right now for me to let you walk away from here—as you just said, I can’t stop you.’

Her face burned with guilt and self-contempt. His very acceptance where she had expected anger, his calmness where she had expected ferocity, made her feel far worse than if he had lost his temper with her.

The trouble was… the trouble was, she ached for him to make some betrayal of vulnerability—of humanity. At the moment she felt like a stupid child confronted by a particularly intelligent and mature adult.

She wanted to bring him down to her own level, she admitted wearily. She wanted to weaken him for the sake of her own conceit.

She closed her eyes, feeling her stomach muscles knot. When had it happened, this dangerous desire to shift the entire axis of their relationship… this need to make him respond to her on a personal level, even if that response came only from anger?

As she opened her eyes, she tensed, realising that he had moved and was now standing within inches of her.

‘And it’s not true that just because I can’t see you, I can’t find you,’ he told her softly. His hand touched her face and he said quietly, ‘It isn’t very pleasant when we make discoveries about ourselves that we don’t like, is it?’

And Silver knew, immediately and shockingly, that he was as fully aware of her most private thoughts as if they had been his own.

She tried to step back from him, but he wouldn’t let her.

‘Acknowledging that we aren’t perfect and then learning to make our vices work as well for us as our virtues is an important step on the road to maturity.’

And then, before she could speak, he added almost ruefully, ‘I do know what it’s like, you know. I have been there myself… which is why I cautioned you against this goal you’ve set for yourself. All right, so you loved the guy and you lost him… He hurt you, and now you want to hurt him back…’

‘There’s more to it than that,’ Silver told him stiffly. ‘A lot more…’

His hand left her face and she discovered that she was free to move away, but for some reason she no longer felt the need to.

It was an odd sensation to be talking with him like this… to be communicating with him as one human being to another.

‘Such as?’

Later, questioning the wisdom of having confided in him, she had been forced to admit that he had applied a startlingly skilful degree of emotional pressure on her, and in such a way that she had had no idea how she was being manipulated until it was too late and she had told him far more about herself than she had ever intended he should know.

‘He—my cousin—wanted to marry me—he didn’t love me—he told me that, and laughed at me for thinking he might. How could he love me? I was plain, fat, ugly.’

‘You mean you thought he wanted to marry you?’

Silver shook her head, angry that he wouldn’t believe her.

‘No, I know it. He told me… boasted about it… said he would make me do it. That I had no choice. That our engagement—he said that he had to have Roth—–’ She broke off, biting her lip. No one, except Annie, knew who she really was… what she had originally been. And Annie might have told Jake everything else, but she wouldn’t tell him that—she had promised.

‘You were engaged to him?’

She could see Jake frowning, and felt a sudden shaft of pleasure that she had at last managed to surprise him after all.

‘Yes, unofficially. But not because he loved me. He made that plain enough. And to think I’d been stupid enough to believe that he actually could.’ She laughed bitterly. ‘God, I was such a fool!’

‘And then he found someone else and dumped you…’

Silver gave a bitter laugh. ‘Oh, no… There was someone else, but he still intended to marry me. He gave me a choice: marriage or destruction; there was nothing I could do about it, nothing at all… at least not as Ger—–’

Again she froze, realising she had once more nearly said too much, but Jake didn’t appear to be listening. He was frowning, and then he raised his hand and touched her face, lightly tracing its shape with his fingers.

‘So this was not merely done out of vanity, but out of necessity, as well. Out of self-protection and self-defence.’

His astuteness shocked her. Not even Annie had guessed at that second part of her need to change her appearance so totally that no one would ever recognise what she had once been… who she had once been.

‘Partly,’ she acknowledged, and then honesty forced her to admit, ‘Of course I could have chosen to have a plainer face… I can’t pretend that vanity didn’t come into it. You see, Charles has a weakness for beautiful women… that and his greed are perhaps the only weaknesses he does have.’

She pulled away from him and said tiredly, ‘There’s no point in trying to dissuade me, Jake. This is something I have to do.’

She felt him weighing her up, considering, thinking, and then he said, almost reluctantly, ‘It won’t be easy. And I do know what I’m talking about. I have a score to settle of my own…’

‘Which is why you need my money.’

‘Which is why I need your money,’ he agreed.

It was on the tip of her tongue to ask him what had happened, but already she could feel him withdrawing from her, his face becoming stern and remote.

‘Speaking of which, unless I want you to accuse me of wasting your time, I think perhaps we ought to get back to work.’

‘Work!’ The man was practically inhuman. He had cleverly trapped her into confiding in him, but when it came to his own past… How many other men in this position could continue to treat her as he did, as though he was completely unaffected by her, by the intimacy of what they were doing, as though he found her flesh as coldly uninviting as if it belonged, not to another human being, but to a robot.

He kept himself completely divorced from her emotionally, and mentally, and yet he seemed to possess a diabolical awareness of her every thought and mood, as though he had some deep inner awareness of her most complicated emotional response that not even she herself was privy to. And she hated that… Hated it… resented it… defied it, and constantly tried to transfer those feelings to him, to blame him for those aspects of her own inner vulnerabilities that she couldn’t bear to face.

‘Thank God there’s only another week to go,’ she hissed at him bitterly. What would it take to break his self-control, to reduce him to need and despair? She looked at him assessingly and tried to judge him dispassionately… to single out one small chink of vulnerability in the wall of implacable indifference which he had thrown up around himself.

She studied him directly, studying each feature of his face in turn, trying to ignore the wild thumping of her heart when her scrutiny was faultlessly returned, so faultlessly and so steadfastly that it was almost as though he could see her. Her heart jolted with unease and an almost superstitious fear that he was after all deceiving her, that he and Annie had lied to her and that he could in fact see, and she recognised what she had known all along: that in his blindness she had hidden herself from him, so that everything she had to do and say, every intimacy she had to perform was mercifully made less intimate, less dangerous by the fact that once she had gone from this place she could, if she so wished, come face to face with him across a dinner table and not be betrayed by his knowledge of her.

Not that she ever expected to encounter him across any of the dinner tables she was likely to sit down at.

Her disappearance, her faked death might mean that temporarily the doors of her old acquaintances and peers were closed to her, but they would open once more, and very soon. The pedigree she had concocted for herself was impeccable… the background, the wealth, the tiny details of the persona she was creating meticulously researched… so meticulously that no one would be able to find fault with them.

She would have an immediate entree into Charles’s world; she would be able to fascinate and then ensnare him, and ultimately she would be able to destroy him.

‘Stop daydreaming,’ Jake told her crisply. ‘You can fantasise all you like about the future in your own time… Unless, of course,’ he added silkily, ‘you believe I’ve taught you as much as you need to know…’

He was doing it again, looking straight at her with those cool, too knowing eyes, making her squirm both mentally and physically, making her want to hide herself from him. Making her flush like a child as she remembered this morning’s brutally pointed object lesson in male sexuality.

It was over two weeks now since he had first questioned her like an examiner on the facts she had gleaned from the manuals he had insisted she read; questions that had turned her face fiery red, and made her clench her teeth and bite the inside of her mouth to prevent herself from stammering the answers; questions so intimate, and yet delivered in so flat, matter-of-fact a voice, that somehow or other the awful intimacy of what was happening was heightened rather than lessened.

What had followed was still a nightmare to her: a relentless period of hours which had seemed to become days, of questions and answers… questions designed to underline her ignorance and to defeat her determination not to give in to the mastery she sensed he intended to have over her, over their situation. Questions which had laid bare the paucity of her knowledge, of her awareness, of her inner essence of herself as a woman.

And not until he was satisfied that she knew by heart every last nuance of male sexuality and male anatomy had he allowed her to touch him.

Allowed her! She shuddered at the very word chosen by her mind. Were it not for the fact that she was here by her own will, he would have had to drag her screaming and kicking to within a foot of his body, never mind make her touch it! It made no difference telling herself that it was he who should feel embarrassed, he who should feel diminished by their bargain. He did not and she did, and even now it seemed he wasn’t satisfied.

Her performance, while technically fair, lacked spontaneity and enthusiasm, he had told her.

Now, with her nerves stretched to breaking-point, her whole sense of purpose undermined to such an extent that she was no longer sure if she had the stamina to endure any more, she knew suddenly and bitterly that she couldn’t go on.

She moved savagely, hating herself, hating him, but most of all hating Charles for making all of this necessary.

Outside the window the snow whirled and boiled, the storm as tempestuous as her emotions. As she stared into the snow she had a momentary vision of her father the last time they had skied together, and the ache of pain inside her intensified. She mustn’t let him down… she must make Charles pay.

‘Face it,’ said Jake grimly behind her. ‘You’re never going to make it. You just don’t have what it takes.’

The moment the jibe was spoken he regretted it, but she had been driving him to the edge of his self-control for days, whether she knew it or not, and he suspected that she did. He felt her pain as though it were a physical link between them, felt the swift stirring of air that told him what she was feeling.

Part of him wanted to take hold of her and either physically shake her or punish her with the kind of kiss that he knew full well, once given, would change their relationship for ever. And the worst of it all was that, even knowing the folly of such an action, he was still unbearably tempted to do it—to drown out all the loneliness, the frustration… the sheer heaviness of the burdens he carried by opening up that sealed well of emotion she kept so well guarded.

He knew that within them both was the capacity to destroy the privacy each of them guarded so fiercely. Fortunately for him, Silver didn’t know it… not yet. She was too obsessed with keeping control of herself to worry about what he was feeling.

‘I’ve had enough of this,’ he heard her say unevenly. ‘I’m going up to my room.’

‘No!’

Even as he said it he knew he ought to let her go, for both their sakes. He was feeling too raw, too vulnerable to detach himself as he knew he must, and yet still he reached for her, still he touched her face and felt the warm dampness of tears he had known would be there, even though she hadn’t made a single betraying sound.

When he kissed her he told himself he was doing it for Beth… that everything was for Beth… for his guilt, for her pain, for her death, and ultimately for the destruction of whoever it was in London who had ordered the taking of her life.

Drug dealing was an ugly business, he had known that from the start… had known the dangers and ignored them. That arrogance on his part had cost Beth her life.

A life for a life… but so far three men had been made to pay. Not directly by Jake; it was the information he had given the FBI which had led to the gaoling of two members of the quartet. And José Ortuga was dead, killed in a bomb blast by a rival Colombian drug baron just before Jake could trap him. That explosion had also cost him his sight. Now there was one final member of the quartet to track down and destroy: the one in charge of the London arm of the operation… the one who had ordered Beth’s death… the one who had realised exactly who he was and who he was working for… the one who had so far eluded the skills of the experts he had paid to track him down.

Without his sight there was only so much he could do himself… but he would use Silver’s money to pay for men to find the final member of that unholy quartet.

Beneath the hard assault of his mouth he felt Silver’s soften, felt the frisson of shock run through her, felt her bewilderment and distress as though they were his own, and still he used them ruthlessly to expiate his own anger, his own pain. Used her in a way which he knew damned well was neither detached nor remote, refusing to release her mouth until she was quiescent with shock beneath his.

The moment he relaxed his hold she wrenched away from him, as he had known she would, and he knew quite well that if he could see her he would find her mouth swollen and her eyes full of tears.

The anger left him as quickly as it had come.

He ought to apologise, but if he did that he would be inviting an intimacy into their relationship which was dangerous to them both.

Instead he said coolly, ‘Now maybe we can make some progress. Now that you know at first hand what desire feels like.’

Colour scorched Silver’s skin. What she had just endured was surely the most humiliating episode in her whole life… worse in some ways than finding Charles making love to someone else. That she had actually for one brief second of time felt desire… that Jake had known it… She shuddered.

It was time for a break, Jake acknowledged as she fled. Both of them needed it.

It caused him a certain amount of wry self-mockery to acknowledge that increasingly there were times when he physically desired her to the point where he had difficulty with his self-control. He, who hadn’t once, in the years since Beth had died, truly, instinctively desired a woman with that gut-deep, mindless male ache that owed nothing to intelligence, compassion or indeed any other emotion other than the most basic one of intense physical hunger. And very infrequently before that.

His life had been far from celibate, but he was a man who prided himself on relating to the women who shared his life and his bed as fellow human beings, who had ranked sex well down on the list of what was essential in a man-to-woman relationship. And yet here he was, his body and his mind drawn tight with an aching need that he wanted to put down to the mere intimacy of their situation, but which he knew damn well he could not.

He linked his arms behind his head and tried to ease the tension from his neck. Only another few days. Already, even if she didn’t know it herself, she had learned almost all she needed to know. That jibe he had thrown at her had been without foundation, and he ought to tell her as much.

He was a trained observer who, now that the sense of sight was lost to him, made full use of those senses left to him to absorb and catalogue information about others; he wondered if she was as aware as he was of how much she suppressed her natural sexuality, even while claiming that she wanted to use it.

He knew enough about the human race and its behavioural patterns to know that it would be quite easy for him to destroy that suppression and make her respond to him personally, as she had done this afternoon.

He had told himself that he wasn’t going to do it because he didn’t want the complications which would inevitably ensue… because he didn’t want that kind of involvement, especially not with a woman so obviously hung up on another man… Charles, she had called him… And there had been pain as well as anger in her voice when she’d said he had never loved her.

He wondered who she really was. It wouldn’t be impossible for him to find out… Quickly he shut himself off from the temptation. He had other things to do with his life, things that were far more important. He had a murder to avenge. He frowned. How well he understood what motivated Silver… none better. He didn’t want to allow himself to feel sympathy for her. In so many ways she was everything he despised in her sex, but that was only on the surface. Beneath that surface was a woman every bit as vulnerable as Beth had been…

Beth… why was he linking the two of them together? He shifted uncomfortably, dropping his hands and then getting up.

Force of habit drove him over to the window. He knew it was there by some complicated alteration within his inner darkness, by the difference in the scent of the air… almost by instinct… even though, standing in front of it and looking outwards, he could see nothing of the storm raging outside. His mind was on other things.

Ultimately he was going to have to fulfil the final clause of their contract and free her from the unwanted burden of her physical virginity.

His mouth curled in a humourless smile. Originally when she had made that stipulation, although he hadn’t allowed her to see it, he had wondered cynically if, when the time came, he would be physically capable of entering her, whether he had the physical strength, the stamina, the mental will-power to overcome all the mental and emotional pitfalls of making love to a woman he neither liked nor desired. Now he was more concerned with making sure she didn’t goad him to the point where his physical possession of her was no longer something he could mentally distance himself from—no longer merely a set task to be accomplished with clinical detachment and as much physical finesse as he could manage.

It couldn’t be put off any longer. With every day they spent together now, the tension grew between them. Hers was infiltrated with fear, even though she fought hard not to show it.

He turned away from the source of light and stretched. His blindness was in its way his punishment for thinking himself invincible. He had been careless, and that carelessness had cost other men their freedom and himself his sight. It didn’t matter that he hadn’t been the one in charge… he should have been. He had been guilty of an error of judgement and he would pay for that error all through his life. The doctors had been brutally frank with him. There was no hope of his ever regaining his sight.

He touched his face, his fingers instinctively finding the small ridges of scars that were all that was left of the patchwork of plastic surgery Annie had done to repair the horrendous damage the bomb had inflicted.

When the eye surgeon had first recommended plastic surgery, he had told him to go to hell. What did it matter to him what he looked like? The man had persisted, though, patiently pointing out that, while he didn’t have to look at himself, others did…

Unable to endure the thought of more surgery, he had come instinctively here to Annie and had eventually given in to her persuasion that he should have the operations. She had performed them herself. He had wondered, in one bleak moment of self-acknowledgement before the anaesthetic had claimed him, if God would punish him for Beth’s death by letting him die.

Or would that have been a punishment? Life held no savour for him now. No savour, perhaps, but it did hold a purpose… a purpose that only Silver’s money could help him to achieve. His mouth twisted again, a long-ago scrap of conversation floating to the surface of his mind—Beth saying awkwardly, ‘She wanted you to want her…’

They had been talking about her mother. They had been lying in bed together in the apartment in Paris he had rented for their honeymoon. She had been so insecure, so young, not quite nineteen to his twenty-eight… too young, an inner voice told him as he forced himself to confront the knowledge that had been with him for a long time, but which somehow or other Silver had brought to the surface of his consciousness, adding to his already heavy burden of guilt.

He had loved Beth, had cherished her, but in so many ways she had still been a child. Would there ultimately have come a time when her immaturity, her dependence, even her love might have become burdensome to him? When he might have longed for a woman capable of meeting him on his own ground; a woman such as…? He blocked off the thought.

Beth… why did he find it so difficult to conjure up a mental picture of her face… to remember what it had felt like to hold her in his arms, to love her? He could remember how she had made his heart ache with tenderness… how he had wanted to protect her… but he couldn’t remember what it had felt like to desire her the way he had desired Silver. They were so very different, and yet… and yet there were moments when he sensed such an intensity of vulnerability about Silver that it set off a corresponding echo deep within himself.

She had been injured, hurt, her life destroyed by the treachery of the man she loved, and now she was going to hit back at him. To destroy him in turn. Revenge, one of the most powerful human emotions there could be. And one of the most self-destructive; he should know. Yet, though he tried to warn her against taking up those burdens, he knew quite well that she would not listen to him. This need in him to warn her, to protect her almost, irked him; she was no real concern of his, but old habits died hard, and far too long he had carried the burden of being responsible for others, Beth and, before her, Justin…

Anyway, did he really have the right to tell Silver how to run her life, he who had never allowed anyone to dictate to him how he lived his life? Already in his thoughts he was betraying the fact that he was losing his emotional distance from her, that he was aware of her in ways that threatened both of them. It had to stop. Now, before things got completely out of control.

He moved restlessly around the room, acknowledging a deep inner truth he had been fighting for days.

It was time to bring things to an end…

One final lesson and they would both be free to go their own separate ways.

Silver sensed the purposefulness in him when she came down to prepare dinner. Supplies of food were delivered regularly twice a week from the town and they took it in turns to prepare the meals.

Tonight it was her turn.

Despite her father’s wealth and upbringing, she could cook, a strange, eclectic collection of dishes prepared with an expertise she had garnered from her father’s households throughout the world.

Tonight it was Irish stew, made in the traditional way, and served with soda bread.

As she lifted the casserole out of the oven and prepared to serve it, she commented briskly to Jake, ‘It’s Irish stew; that’s—–’

‘You don’t need to tell me what it is. I know.’

The vehemence in his voice startled her. She stopped what she was doing and looked at him, stunned to see a muscle twitch fiercely in his jaw. His mouth was drawn into a tight line of pain, and for the first time she saw the brilliant eyes unfocused as they stared not at her but past her, as though he were looking at something no one else could see.

He had been sitting down, since she had told him she was about to serve dinner, but now he got up abruptly, awkwardly almost, half stumbling against the table so that she reached out automatically to catch him and then withdrew her hand as she heard him swear.

He was halfway towards the door when she realised that he wasn’t going to have dinner with her. Without thinking what she was doing, she asked protestingly where he was going.

‘Somewhere I can’t smell that,’ he told her savagely, gesturing towards the steaming casserole, and then he added softly, ‘The last time I had Irish stew, my wife made it for me. It was her favourite dish and our last meal together before I went away on business. She was dead before I returned… murdered in cold blood.’

Silver let him go in silence, too shocked to say anything. It was the first time he had ever made any kind of reference to his own personal life, and the horror of the small picture he had drawn for her remained with her long after he had gone. She found that she couldn’t eat the stew herself and, picking up the casserole, she took it outside and threw it away.

When she came back in her stomach was still heaving, but there was nothing she could do. There were a thousand questions she wanted to ask… a thousand things she wanted to know…

It was unnerving and unwanted, this glimpse into the raw pain of someone else’s life; this knowledge that he was after all human and vulnerable.

She had wanted that vulnerability in him, hungering for it as a weapon she could use against him, but now she realised she didn’t want it after all… She was like a child suddenly discovering that a parent was frightened of the dark, and cravenly wishing she did not have to know about that fear.

She made herself go back into the kitchen, and turned on the extractor fan. She opened the fridge, and took out some fresh chicken breasts.

Half an hour later she went up to his room, knocked briefly on the door and without opening it said quietly, ‘Dinner’s ready. It’s Chicken Maryland,’ and without waiting for a response, for all the world as though the entire incident with the stew had never happened, she went back downstairs and calmly started serving the chicken.

He arrived just as she was filling her own wine glass, sitting down at the table and saying quietly, ‘I’ve decided that you’ve learned as much from me as you’re going to learn. That being the case, there’s just one small formality left…’

Silver’s hand shook. She spilt a drop of wine on the table and watched it with fixed attention, unable to bring herself to face him. Was he doing this as a reward because she had thrown away the stew, or as a punishment because she had made it in the first place?

Without appearing to notice her tension, he added coolly, ‘I made up my mind this afternoon. My decision has nothing to do with any personal motivation.’

That wasn’t strictly true, but he had realised from her tension exactly what she was thinking and his own pride would not allow him to let her go on thinking it.

That had been an idiotic thing to do. There was no reason why he shouldn’t have eaten the damn stew… But the smell of it had reminded him too sharply of Beth, of their lives together, of her death and his own feelings afterwards.

Revenge; he knew it all, every last nuance of what it felt like.

Desperate to conceal her tension from him, Silver said the first thing that came into her head.

‘Your wife… You said she was murdered…’ She shivered suddenly, thinking of her father, of Charles, who would surely destroy her as ruthlessly and as cold-bloodedly as he had threatened if he should ever penetrate her disguise. But that was impossible. To all intents and purposes she was dead, and had been reborn in a different image.

‘What is it you want to know?’ Jake asked her bitterly. ‘How Beth was killed, or why?’

Inwardly he was shocked at his own response to her question.

Silently Silver watched him, sensing his withdrawal, his anger. She had known quite well that mentioning his wife would anger him, but she had been desperate to divert his attention from her own tension. She half expected him to get up and walk out as he had done earlier, but to her astonishment he said grimly, ‘Well, why not? It might even serve as an object lesson to you, but somehow I doubt it. I was working as a government agent, tracking down a drug-trafficking syndicate. I was close enough to exposing the ringleaders to receive threats against my life when my cover was blown. I should have stopped then, should have insisted on sending Beth away somewhere safe, but she didn’t want to leave me and, God help me, I didn’t want her to go.

‘In my arrogance I thought they’d target any violence against me. I got a lead that some of the stuff was being shipped in from South America… a deliberate ruse to get me out of the way, but I was stupid enough and vain enough to fall for it.

‘While I was out of the country Beth was killed by a hit-and-run driver. An accident—that was how it looked, only it was no accident. Beth had been deliberately and cold-bloodedly murdered. You want to know how I can be so sure? Easy… her murderers took the trouble to let me know what they had done.

‘I only found out later that there’d been additional threats to the ones I’d received, threats that Beth hadn’t told me about… you see, she knew how important my work was to me…’

He wasn’t looking at her, and Silver had the feeling that he had almost forgotten she was there. It was as though the words were drawn from him like splinters of steel from a wound, and that with every word the pain increased, so that when he said under his breath, ‘But, dear God, it was never more important to me than her life,’ she felt a dull, paralysing ache close her own throat.

Sympathy… compassion… for Jake Fitton? Why? He had had none to spare for her.

‘Since Beth’s death I’ve spent my time tracking down the four people responsible for planning her murder…’

He had recovered with awesome speed and was once again apparently in full control of himself and his emotions.

‘Two of them are in American gaols under sentence of death; one of them died in the same bomb blast that cost me my sight… So far I’ve been robbed of the pleasure of making those responsible for Beth’s death pay personally and with compound interest for her suffering.

‘There’s only one member of the quartet left. No doubt he’s forgotten that Beth ever existed. Once I find him I intend to make him remember.’

The icy coldness of his voice sent shivers running down Silver’s spine.

‘And you dare to caution me against revenge?’ she demanded bitterly.

He smiled then, a humourless, chilling smile. ‘Revenge demands a high price: total dedication, total commitment.’

‘And you think I can’t meet those demands?’

He felt drained to the point of exhaustion. He never discussed Beth with anyone, and it stunned him that he should have chosen this woman out of everyone he knew to unburden himself to… And it had been an unburdening, even if she herself was unaware of that fact. It had been an admission to himself and to her of his guilt, his pain, his need to pay whatever price was demanded of him so that Beth’s death might be avenged.

And yet there was still one small, sane part of him that urged him to turn away from the past and to face forward into the future.

Was that why he was doing this? Was that why he was trying to make Silver recognise…? But why? She meant nothing to him…

Nothing other than the fact that she was a fellow human being and vulnerable. Far more vulnerable than she herself recognised.

Tiredly he told her, ‘Whatever you might say to the contrary, I remain unconvinced that you do actually hate this man. Has it occurred to you yet that you could all too easily fall into your own trap?’

Yes, it had occurred to her. Charles was a powerfully charismatic personality. Far more sophisticated women than she was had fallen under his spell. But she knew things about him that they did not… she had a far stronger motive for hating him than Jake Fitton knew.

It gave her an odd sense of awareness about him to recognise that both of them were linked together by their desire to avenge the death of someone they had loved; and more than that. Charles was heavily involved in the London drugs scene as a pusher. Something she hadn’t told Jake for reasons of her own.

Another thought struck her.

‘Is that why you’re doing this?’ she asked him curtly. ‘Because you need the money to track down the fourth man?’

‘Yes,’ he told her, equally briefly. ‘I know he’s based in London…’

Silver found she was holding her breath. Surely the fourth man couldn’t be Charles? And then she released it as Jake added, ‘He also does a lot of travelling, legitimately of course, using it as a means of contacting his suppliers.’

‘But if he’s smuggling drugs into the country—–’ Silver began.

Jake stopped her with a cold smile. ‘This isn’t someone who smuggles the stuff. He’s way, way above that part of the organisation. This is someone who plans and recruits… who deals direct with the drug barons and who is trusted by them. This is someone who runs a countrywide network of pushers… if you like, the drug barons’ ambassador to England.’

So it couldn’t be Charles. He had rarely left England. She was relieved, and recognised that part of the reason she had said nothing to Jake about Charles’s involvement with drugs was because she had been afraid that he might somehow snatch her prey away from her.

Out of some protective instinct Jake had thought he had long ago exhausted, he heard himself saying as he put down his knife and fork, ‘It’s not too late, you know. You can always change your mind. Revenge isn’t sweet… it’s acid, corrosive, bitter, and finally destructive. It will eat into your soul until there’s nothing left of you…’

Silver smiled at him, an animal baring of her teeth, her eyes glittering with resolve. Everything he had said to her had only strengthened her determination.

‘Who wants sweetness?’ she said evenly. ‘Unless, of course, you’re trying to tell me that eating Irish stew isn’t the only thing you’re incapable of doing.’

He picked up his knife and fork and ate some of his chicken slowly and deliberately, while she watched him with fascinated horror, wondering, as she always did, how he managed to cope so well with his blindness. Apart from a momentary hesitation as he searched for the chicken, no one would ever have guessed that he couldn’t see what was on his plate, and then, when he had finished chewing… when he must have known that her nerves were stretched to breaking-point by her own mindless, reckless idiocy, he said evenly, ‘In that case, you’d have an excellent opportunity to show us both how well you’ve learned everything I’ve attempted to teach you, wouldn’t you? The supreme test, so to speak.’

The moment of intimacy, of allowing her into his private thoughts and feelings was gone, Silver recognised, and she shivered in a return of her earlier tension.

It might have been better if Jake had not chosen to give her advance warning of what was to happen. And then she admitted, with the percipient intelligence that had been honed to such sharpness under her father’s tutelage, that whichever route he had chosen to take towards the final culmination to her studies with him she would have criticised it, and moreover that it was not for her to criticise or accuse, since it was by her own demand that it was to take place.

There could be no shielding herself from the reality of her own decisions by trying to hide behind Jake’s apparent authority.

Nevertheless… a tiny, uncomfortably sharp corner of her mind acknowledged that she would have felt happier had she been the one to dictate the timing of their final passage of arms.

Although she hadn’t said a word, Jake was alert to every single one of the emotional vibrations she was giving off. He wondered what it was that gave rise to that specific and, to him at least, very obvious mingling of fear, anger and resentment. The anger and resentment were directed at and caused by him, he knew, but the fear… Was she frightened of him? He had given her no cause to be. But the fear was there, no matter how much she tried to disguise it, and for some unack-nowledgeable reason that irked him. All through dinner he was sharply aware of it, like a piece of uncomfortable cloth rubbing against tender flesh, and that in itself was an annoyance. Why should he give a damn how she felt? Theirs was a financial bargain… an act of sale and an act of purchase… a necessary intimacy of the flesh without any involvement of either the emotions or the mind.

And yet, as he realised as clearly as though he could see her that she was toying with her food, he pushed his own plate to one side and said quietly, ‘Well, if you’re sure you don’t want to change your mind, we might as well get it over and done with.’

His words, gruffly delivered, almost stiltedly so—which in itself was out of character because normally he allowed no emotion to cloud the ice-clear coldness of his voice—only increased her tension. He was almost on the brink of feeling sorry for her. Just as so many others had already felt sorry for her. Their pity… his pity were the last things she wanted. She got up jerkily and started to clear the table, saying unevenly, ‘Not yet, if you don’t mind… I haven’t had my coffee.’

He was standing up himself and she half expected him to clear the distance between them and manhandle her out of the kitchen, but instead he shrugged and said calmly, ‘Just as you like. I’ll load the dishwasher, then you can make the coffee.’

As he moved efficiently and quietly between the dining area and the kitchen, Silver had the feeling that his very presence threatened her in some illogical way; that as he carefully loaded the machine and then closed the door he was just as effectively sealing off all her routes of escape from a situation she herself had deliberately engineered; and yet what, after all, was there in the slightest degree dangerous about a blind man who had already made it abundantly clear that the last person he desired was her?

As she stood in a corner of the kitchen with the percolator bubbling behind her, surrounded by the sounds and scents of the most mundane sort, she wondered why she should know instinctively that for the rest of her life she would remember them as a backdrop to the most horrible and all-encompassing sense of terror she had ever experienced.

It began in her stomach like a cold chill that slowly turned to ice and then burned as the chill itself spread through her veins; it made her head feel physically tight with tension, made her throat muscles lock and a thrill of pure fear spiral through her body so that she shuddered visibly.

And yet some stubborn, implacable hereditary awareness within her made her acknowledge that even if she could simply will herself out of this place and into another… if she could simply make Jake disappear in a thin cloud of smoke as one of her ancestresses had been reputed to be able to do, she would not have done it.

This dread… this terror… this acknowledgement that she was voluntarily stepping into a situation in which she was not going to be in control, in which she was going to be acutely vulnerable to both physical and mental abuse and mockery, in which she was voluntarily giving over her most intimate flesh into the possession of another… these were part of the price she had to pay.

Despite her education and her intelligence, Silver had a deeply atavistic awareness of darker forces running beneath the surface of her life… of currents and tides… a knowledge that went far back beyond anything that could be learned from the written word and which owed itself to the Celtic blood that ran through her veins, carrying with it hereditary memories of the magical powers of her race. It was as though that inner knowledge was telling her that this was the sacrifice she must make, this the magic talisman that would buy her success, this a very necessary crossing of her own private river of fate, and that to turn back now would mean that the whole flow of her life would have to be redirected into new channels.

Behind her the coffee still bubbled, but she no longer heard it, and her eyes no longer saw the cheerfulness of the small kitchen.

‘Silver.’

The crispness of Jake’s curt demand brought her back to reality. She turned and focused on him, blinking a little.

For a moment she trembled between advancing or retreating, and then, like a sleep-walker, she heard herself saying emotionlessly, ‘Yes. I’m ready.’

As he listened to her, Jake smothered his own awareness of her fear. What was it that caused that fear? He could only think of the obvious reason, and the panic he had felt emanating from her before she’d brought it under control had been far stronger than that would have merited. Beth had been a virgin and he her first lover, but she had come to him with joy and trust… Beth… He pushed his own emotions aside and said coolly, ‘You haven’t had your coffee.’

Her coffee. Silver had forgotten all about it. She looked at it with a pinched face and haunted eyes, not wanting to think about what she was about to go through.

‘We’re going to be more comfortable upstairs, and since my room has the larger bed I suggest we use that. You go up. I’ll bring the coffee,’ Jake told her.

He had another reason for suggesting they use his room, and it had nothing to do with the size of its bed, but rather its position. His own room was familiar to him, each object as clearly known as though he could actually see it. Every sense he possessed, and some he had never known before that he had, were warning him of impending trauma. His training, his knowledge of himself, everything he had ever learned about the human race warned him that should something go wrong, should something happen for which he was not prepared, he would be better able to deal with it from the relative familiarity of his own room.

However, as he made the coffee and took it upstairs, he told himself firmly that nothing was going to go wrong. This final act between them would be effected quickly and efficiently, and hopefully with sufficient finesse to make it endurable for both of them.

CHAPTER FIVE

NOTHING had changed in Jake’s room since the first time Silver had walked into it. Then she had undressed without any outward qualms… Then she had gone to lie on his bed to wait for him without any fear other than that he would reject her proposition.

Now it was different. Now she was a mass of nerves… trembling with rejection and apprehension.

She willed herself to regain her self-control. What would she do if she reacted like this when she was with Charles? She wondered frantically if Jake had been serious when he had suggested this would be a good test for her—if he genuinely expected her to seduce him into taking her—because if so, she decided grimly…

The door opened while she was still thinking about it, and for a moment as he looked at her she could almost believe that Jake could actually see her cowering in the corner of the room. It still baffled and infuriated her, this ability of his to focus so directly on her as though he actually knew where she was. And then she realised that he did, because he had put the tray of coffee down and was walking firmly towards her. When he was within arm’s reach of her, he stopped and said unequivocally, ‘Before you do anything else you can have a shower. You’re wearing that damned perfume again, and I have no desire to wake up in the morning with my sheets reeking of it…’

Silver had worn the perfume in a mood of angry defiance, thinking she was going to eat dinner alone. She had forgotten about it, but now suddenly she could actually smell it: the sweet, cloying scent of the tuberoses suffocating her senses, making her almost feel nauseous; and although the last thing she wanted to do was to obey any instruction he gave her, she found herself actually mentally imagining the relief of soaping her skin clean of its too-sweet scent.

‘Do it, Silver,’ he told her grimly. ‘Otherwise I’ll do it for you, and I assure you that if I do it will be something that neither of us enjoys.’

His relentlessness seemed to restore her courage. She marched away from him and into the bathroom, slamming the door behind her, stripping off her clothes and standing behind the stinging spray of the shower before she could change her mind.

The vapour of the hot water seemed to intensify the scent, so that when she closed her eyes she could actually see Charles and his lover entwined in bed… as she had seen them that time, Charles’s hand caressing the silky thigh of the blonde-haired woman, his mouth feeding greedily on her breast while he moaned and twisted against her in semi-tortured ecstasy… An ecstasy that made Silver feel physically sick.

She cried out without realising she had done so, causing Jake to frown and head for the bathroom door and then stop.

Tuberoses. God, how he hated that scent… And she, with that Machiavellian instinct of hers, seemed to know it instinctively. He moved uncomfortably, conscious of a certain ache in his thigh where it had been pierced by a piece of flying debris from the bomb.

He realised from the silence that the shower had stopped running, and started to undress, methodically removing his clothes, folding them neatly, so that when Silver emerged from the bathroom wrapped in a towel, her hair a damp, tangled mass on her shoulders, he was standing naked beside the bed, removing the quilt.

For some reason her heart jolted physically at the sight of him. She was no stranger to his nudity, or indeed to any part of his body, not any more, and yet she felt shaken each time she was confronted by its power.

He had taught her with admirably clinical detachment how to appreciate and stimulate every part of it, instructing her in acts of intimacy that seemed impossible to believe when later, fully dressed, he would matter-of-factly cross-question her about what she had learned.

His total indifference to her flesh and his own had helped her then to apply herself to what she wanted to learn with a detachment that almost matched his own, but suddenly she felt far from detached, and her face burned with memories she would rather not have had surface.

As she looked at him and knew that he was waiting for her to shed her towel and get on the bed, she wanted to protest that she needed to dry her hair and drink her coffee, to tell him that she wasn’t ready… that she needed more time. But what would such delaying tactics achieve other than an increase in her fear? So, trying not to think about what she was doing, she removed her towel, folding it as neatly as he had folded his clothes, although her fingers trembled dreadfully over the task. Then she skirted the bed, going to the opposite side from where he was standing.

For a moment they stood facing one another across its width: two adversaries in a duel, each acknowledging the strength and power of the other in a silent exchange that encompassed more than any amount of words; and beneath the covert testing of one another’s will, beneath the subtle shifting and weighing of strengths and judging of weaknesses, like a current felt but unseen, ran the secret flow of Silver’s fears.

In one clear, sharp second of time before she fought them down, as she looked at Jake, challenging him with the only power she had that he did not—that of her sight—she almost felt the silence around them pulse with her fear, and, as though she had said the words out loud, her mind received from his an assurance so clear that her mouth dropped open, her brain unable to comprehend that neither of them had actually spoken. Like a child in the dark, she had cried out her dread and, like an ever-watchful parent, he had heard it and comforted her.

The shock of that mental intimacy, so unexpected and so dangerous, drove away her fear. The sheets felt cold, making her shiver, and she told herself she had imagined the intense inner reassurance… that it could not have existed. Must not have existed.

As she felt him move On to the bed beside her, without looking at him she said tautly, ‘I’d like to get it over with as quickly as possible.’

For one mind-destroying, bitter moment she thought he was actually going to laugh, but then she saw that the faint twitch of his mouth was caused, not by amusement, but by tension.

‘My feelings exactly,’ he told her drily. ‘But unfortunately it isn’t going to be as easy as that. While it might be possible for your body to accept mine merely at your command, mine, I’m afraid, is not quite so accommodating.’

Silver felt her face burn, as much with indignation as with irritation, but what had she expected? she derided herself: that just because it was convenient for her, despite his having shown her beyond any shadow of a doubt that he felt no desire for her, his flesh should suddenly and miraculously pulse and swell with excitement at her proximity?

Or was this simply his way of testing her, of making her prove that she had learned her lessons well? She reminded herself that if this were Charles she was with, she would not be able to have any qualms about her course of action.

But if she had been with Charles she would want to arouse him, to excite him, to overwhelm him with the intensity of his desire for her, and there could be no Charles until this final hurdle was cleared. So she turned to him and asked distastefully, ‘What exactly do you want me to do?’

‘Don’t for God’s sake speak to your potential victim like that, will you?’ he murmured drily. ‘You’ll terrify him into a state of permanent impotence. Actually I don’t want you to do anything other than come and lie here beside me… and on this occasion I think we can dispense with these,’ he added, reaching out and switching off the lights.

How had he known they were on? Silver wondered. In the past, while he was teaching her, he had refused her initial attempts to persuade him that she would prove a more apt pupil if she didn’t have to see what she was doing, and he had taunted her so unmercifully with her squeamishness that she had stopped asking.

So why now, of all times, did he offer her the panacea he had withheld from her before? Not for his own sake… his darkness was permanent.

For hers? Never! More likely because he sensed her tension and wanted to ease it, for his own sake as much as hers.

As she moved closer to him, the unexpectedness of his arm curling round her and drawing her down against his side until her flesh touched his startled her. Before, there had been no physical contact between them other than that which he had deemed necessary as part of her sexual education, no casual, almost comfortable embrace of the type they were sharing now, and it bewildered her, sending out conflicting messages which her brain couldn’t unravel.

There was the silky brush of skin against skin, sensually pleasing, as her own flesh already recognised, vaguely dangerous and forbidden in a way that was slightly exhilarating, and yet the casualness of his attitude towards her was the opposite of sensual; deprived of any sensuality or hint of desire, the firm pressure of his arm around her was more comradely than anything else, somehow or other defusing the situation of some of its terror. His hand rested against her waist, not caressing her or stroking her, simply touching her, so that her skin absorbed the sensation of it, noting the hardness of his fingers, their relaxed strength, their knowledge and experience.

Even though he was silent, there was no tension in his silence; rather, it was almost as though he was in some subtle way inviting her to share it, coaxing her to relax into it, although why she should have felt that she had no idea. She had the most peculiar urge to ask him what he was thinking about, something she had never done before nor ever imagined doing. She moved restlessly, and his hand slid to her hip, turning her with some slight pressure so that almost half the length of her body rested on him.

His hand still sat lightly on her, but now the pressure of his silent demand that she open her mind to him was so strong that she had to use all her own strength to resist it. His assault on her body she had expected… but this assault on her mind… She lay against him angrily, using all her concentration to fight free of the subtle lure he was throwing out to her, unaware of the slow drift of his hand against her skin as it stroked the warm flesh of her hip and the round curve of her buttock, slowly easing her into his own flesh so that each fierce beat of her angry heart and every quick, impassioned breath from her lungs reinforced for him the physical reality of her femininity.

If all else failed, Jake told himself cynically, he could always try blocking everything else out and remembering how it had been with Beth, but he didn’t want to do that. Partly because it would desecrate what had been, and partly… He swore explosively under his breath, at the same moment as Silver chose to wriggle protestingly against his touch, and, by some alchemy he wasn’t going to bother to even think about trying to analyse, the angry, resentful movement aroused him with unexpected intensity.

Silver gasped and then choked on her protest as he rolled her over on to her back, only just managing to stop herself from curling her body into an angry foetal ball of rejection and instead opening it to accommodate the unexpectedly heavy weight of him.

She wanted to scream at him to hurry and get it over with, and at the same time acknowledged that she could hardly behave in such an irrational way.

Intelligence told her that it would all be much easier if she could instruct her tense muscles to relax, but some instincts were too ingrained for intelligence, and when Jake withdrew slightly from her she realised he was as aware of her tension as she was herself.

‘All this would be a lot easier if you let me help you to relax first,’ he told her calmly.

Silver stared up into his eyes, marvelling at his ability to remain so calm. She knew exactly what he meant; he had already told her, in explicit and sometimes pithy detail that warned her that in some way he enjoyed her mental and emotional shrinking from what he was saying, that everything he was teaching her to do to him could be reversed to exactly the same effect, and that she would have a much deeper and more instinctive awareness of how to manipulate male arousal if she had experienced her own female arousal first.

But she had told him it wasn’t necessary. And she still considered that it wasn’t.

Because she was afraid of that experience… Even more afraid than she was of his physical possession?

The answer was there in the sharp, shrill denial that came instinctively to her lips.

‘No!’ she spat at him. ‘I don’t want you to do anything other than get this whole damned thing over with.’

For the first time, she sensed his self-control slip. One brief burn of anger beneath the cold clarity of his eyes, one hard tensing of muscles as her frailer flesh took the weight of his body, and she almost gave in and told him she’d changed her mind.

Only pride stopped her. Pride and a certain desperate awareness that if she once allowed him to arouse her to desire, she would somehow have lost a very important part of herself to him… A part of herself that could never be recovered… Her emotional virginity, perhaps? She scorned herself for the thought, and then heard him say grimly, ‘Very well, then, if that’s the way you want it.’

And then she felt his hands on her body, moving her, positioning her as he loomed over her, suddenly dark and alien. She held her breath and forgot to tense her muscles against him, so that his first thrust carried him into her and caused her only to gasp a little at the unexpected ease of it, only to discover as he moved again and then again that she had been too confident too soon, and that the pain that now shot through her was everything she had imagined it would be and more: sharp, tearing, inescapable, filling her so that she cried out and twisted beneath him, dragging her nails against his skin as she fought for release and wasn’t granted it.

The pain went on and on as he drove further into her, ignoring her cries… ignoring her demands, ignoring everything but the goal he had set himself.

And then, miraculously, when she had thought it would last forever, it was over and she was free to curl herself into a ball of fading scalding agony, sick and dizzy with relief, so that she was barely aware of him leaving the bed and going into the bathroom until he came back wearing his bathrobe, holding a glass of water and a small white tablet.

‘I’m sorry it was so bad,’ he told her coolly. ‘But it’s over now and it won’t ever bother you again. Sit up and take this…’

‘What is it?’ she asked him, eyeing the tablet warily, but for some reason she couldn’t understand obeying his command to uncurl her body and crawl into a sitting position. She winced as she did so, still sore and tender inside, even though the pain had abated.

‘Pain-killer,’ he told her. ‘I need them sometimes. It won’t harm you. You’re going to bleed for a while, I suspect. If you’re still bleeding in the morning…’ He frowned and Silver looked away from him, even though he couldn’t see her flush of embarrassment.

She looked at him and for the first time said quietly, ‘Thank you…’

An odd expression crossed his face. One she couldn’t define at all.

He looked down at her almost broodingly, and she wondered what was going on behind the implacable hardness of his face… what thoughts were locked away in that over-alert and too perceptive mind. He had known her fear, felt it, touched it, tasted it; she had given him a unique weapon against herself and yet he had not used it.

And now, when another man might have experienced discomfort, impatience, embarrassment or just the sheer plain desire to turn his back on the whole incident and on her, he was still standing beside her, his fingers resting lightly against her inner wrist, monitoring the feverish race of her pulse.

The deep understanding which had led him not to betray either surprise or anger, the compassion which had given her the pain-killer, his calm, matter-of-fact awareness of the possible physical consequence of the tearing of that too-protective unwanted veil of flesh, betrayed a much deeper awareness of her than she had known.

‘You’ll want to sleep alone,’ he commented now, and then, when she started to move, his fingers curled round her wrist, making her yield to their pressure.

‘No… you stay here. I’ll sleep in your bed tonight.’ His mouth curled and then softened into an incredibly illuminating smile, one she had never seen curve his mouth before, and for a heart-stopping moment she was breathless and motionless beneath its potency, dazzled by its lure and promise. And then it vanished and his mouth was the cynical curl of contempt with which she was so familiar as he added drily, ‘I trust that you don’t go to bed wearing that appalling perfume.’

‘It isn’t appalling. It’s very expensive, and I happen to like it,’ she told him fiercely, hating herself for the odd sensations she had just experienced, wanting to push them out of her mind and bury them deep where she would never have to face them again. They were too disturbing, too distressing, especially now, when not just her body but her mind as well felt drained of all energy and will to combat anything.

‘Liar,’ he derided her softly. ‘It isn’t you at all. You should wear something sharp and fresh, something that smells of young fresh grass after spring rain… something subtle and tormenting—–’ He broke off suddenly, and Silver knew instinctively that he had spoken words he had not intended to say.

‘We both need to get some sleep,’ he told her curtly. ‘But if you need me for… anything during the night…’

She shot up in bed, simultaneously reaching for the sheet to cover her body—a wasted gesture since he couldn’t see it—and wincing sharply with the pain that splintered inside her, so that he heard her sharp indrawn breath. Then she realised that he had not been taunting her with sexual innuendo, as she had thought, but had simply meant if she was in any physical discomfort.

She had spent enough dreary hours recovering from the pain of her own operations to know why he should be so aware of how long and dark those nights could be when the physical body was tormented by its ills and the pain stretched out tentacle-like fingers, which it hooked into vulnerable flesh and raked it into an agony that never seemed to subside.

‘This tablet should do the trick if it’s one of Annie’s wonder pills,’ she told him gruffly, not knowing why now, after all that had happened, she should feel awkward and embarrassed by his detached concern… why the mere thought of having to ask him for comfort and relief of any kind should make her skin go hot and cold and her mind shudder back from the edge of some unsuspected chasm which lured her to its edge even while she cringed back from it.

She wanted him to leave so that she could go into the bathroom and clean her body, not of his touch, which at all times had been minimal and clinical, but of the evidence of her own humanity and weakness. But he stayed where he was, hovering over her like a dark eagle while she swallowed the pill and drank the water, and even after that, until the pain started to subside and her eyes started to close.

They parted the next morning, outside the bank, where Silver formally handed over to him his money and where they faced one another gravely, still two antagonists. Her body felt stiff and slightly sore, but there was no bleeding and she knew with inner conviction that she would soon heal.

As he took the money he said firmly, ‘I won’t wish you good luck. I know you believe you’re right in what you’re doing, but I can tell you that you’re not. Unfortunately, by the time you come to that realisation yourself, it will be too late. It’s one of life’s more bitter truisms that we can’t learn from the experience of others.

‘I, too, have had my time of black despair, my thirst for destruction, my need to reach out and contaminate with my hatred those who contaminated me and mine with theirs; I, too, have known what it means to set myself above the law and consider myself justified in doing so.

‘Revenge is a drug; once it gets hold of you it doesn’t let go, it pervades your whole life.’

He couldn’t have said anything more calculated to strengthen her hand.

‘That might be your experience, it won’t necessarily be mine. My father taught me to shoot when I was twelve years old,’ Silver told him thinly, angry with him that he should choose now of all times to give her an unwanted moral lecture. ‘Always shoot to kill, he told me. And always kill cleanly…’

He smiled at her then, mocking her with his soul-deep awareness of her thoughts as he said softly, ‘Yes, but mutilation has such a subtle appeal, doesn’t it? What point is there in inflicting a wound if the victim doesn’t feel it… and it is mutilation you thirst for, isn’t it, Silver? Mutilation and destruction…’

‘What I plan to do has nothing to do with you,’ she told him distantly, dismissing him with the ice that ran through her voice like the chill of northern snows. ‘I did what I had to do, and now it’s over.’

She turned her back on him and swung down the street, a tall, silver-haired woman whose arresting beauty drew glances from everyone she passed. But for once she was unconcerned with the effect of her looks, and for the first time, although she herself didn’t know it, her face was that of a woman real and alive, full of emotion and character, and not simply a mask of beauty almost unreal in its perfection.

She had two more days before she left Switzerland and returned to London. She took a taxi back to her rented chalet, dismissing the maid, who was so well trained that she exhibited no surprise either at Silver’s command or at her reappearance in the middle of the day, after an unexplained absence of several weeks.

From the chalet she rang Annie, who expressed pleasure at hearing from her.

‘Where have you been?’ she scolded. ‘I’ve been worried about you.’

‘Oh, I had things to do,’ Silver told her vaguely, quickly changing the subject. ‘Annie, I’m leaving in a couple of days… How about dinner this evening?’

‘I’d have loved to, but Jake beat you to it. Unless of course you want to join us…’

Silver paused for a moment, her heartbeat quickening. Would Jake tell Annie what had happened? Somehow she doubted it, and anyway, what would it matter if he did? There was no point in joining them for dinner simply to sit in torment all evening waiting for Jake to mock her by revealing their arrangement. Despite the fact that she felt that Jake and Annie were not lovers, she wondered if perhaps tonight they would be together… if Jake would want to wipe from his memory any record of her by superimposing another woman’s essence over hers.

What did it matter who the hell he slept with? she derided herself as she refused the invitation and hung up.

She had things to do… phone-calls to make…

In London she had an agent who would be expecting to hear from her. The apartment she had purchased through that agent and handed over to a very up-market and expensive interior designer should be ready for her by now. It was time to start psyching herself up to her new image. From now on she was leaving the past behind her.

When she returned to London it would be as a completely different person. A person who was already in some ways familiar to her, and yet in very many others still a stranger.

She walked into her bedroom and removed from her case a thick file. In it were all the details she had assembled for her new life… for her new image, right down to her name. From the moment she left this chalet behind her, she would be playing that new role. Silver Montaine, that was who she was now, widow of a Swiss, but wholly an Anglophile.

One more night and then she would be on her way home. She looked around the large, impersonal bedroom, shivering despite its almost sub-tropical temperature, conscious of a sensation of loss which crept up on her, taking her unawares, making her frown and glance over her shoulder as though half expecting to see Jake walk through the door.

Jake! She tried to dismiss him from her mind and found she could not. Last night the bed had carried his scent; she had woken with it all around her. She shuddered at the memory. Tonight was going to be a very long night indeed. Then she remembered the mild sedatives Annie had prescribed for her just after she had first left hospital.

She found them at the bottom of her leather handbag and took one, grimacing as she swallowed it, trying not to remember last night and the way Jake had watched her while she took his pain-killer; the medical palliative offered to her after she had refused the physical one.

An early night, a sound sleep, the ability to switch herself off from Switzerland and Jake… These were the things she needed now… And then Paris and her new wardrobe, and then home with her new face… her new personality… her new name and past…

She had a bath, experimentally stretching her muscles and discovering that last night’s pain had completely gone. That pleased her. It seemed a good omen for the future. She was reaching for the perfumed body lotion to stroke into her skin when she stopped and instead lifted the jar to her nose, sniffing it delicately and then hesitating.

She had chosen that particular perfume for a specific reason and yet now she felt reluctant to wear it. Impatient with herself, she recapped the jar and pulled on the ancient brushed cotton nightdress that was a legacy from her past, grimacing at her own reflection as she did so. How disparate the two images of herself looked. Her face was all perfect, stunning beauty, her eyes as they had always been, in colour at least, although in the past they had not been so almond-tipped and mystically slumberous… and her mouth no longer over-large for her face, but instead sensually full.

She studied the silver tangle of her hair, curling slightly in the steam from her bath, and then switched her attention to the homeliness of her nightdress, subduing the faint bubble of laughter. From the neck down she looked like an unawakened adolescent, the curves of her breasts barely discernible, her nipples unaroused and flat against the fabric, her wrists and ankles betraying the fact that the nightdress was something she had outgrown.

But from the throat up… She threw back her head, studying the arch of her throat with concentration, pouting slightly, trying to imagine how a man would visualise her… how Charles would react to the sight of her. On impulse she tugged off the nightdress and studied the lines of her body. That at least was her own, she reflected acidly, far thinner and more shapely than it had been, perhaps, but still untouched by the surgeon’s knife. The fullness of her breasts, the glowing coral of her nipples, the narrow indentation of her waist, the smooth flatness of her belly, the unexpectedness of the triangle of russet hair at the apex of her thighs, and then her thighs themselves, slender, sleek, fluidly muscled, an athlete’s body, softening into femininity but hinting at sensual strength… that at least was her own…

Suddenly her head had begun to ache and her mouth felt dry. The sedative was making her drowsy, and she left the nightdress where it lay and padded into the bedroom, switching off the lamps as she went and flipping back the silk sheets, grimacing a little at their almost vulgar opulence, trying not to think of the cool crispness of the cotton sheets on Jake’s bed… Sheets that had reminded her of Ireland, and of her childhood and the lavender-scented sheets on her bed there. Sheets embroidered with her family’s crest, and a little worn in places. Sheets which had been ordered by a bride who had married into the family while Victoria was still on the throne.

The bed was vast, and Silver moved restlessly in it, disliking the over-softness of the mattress, instinctively trying to resist the pull of the drug, but ultimately giving in to it.

On the other side of the valley Jake and Annie had finished dinner and were sitting in her small private sitting-room in her quarters at the back of the Institute.

Jake stood up. ‘Thanks for dinner, Annie.’

She got up too. ‘There are some letters for you. Do you want me to read them?’

When he nodded, she did so, her own expression growing grave when she had finished.

‘So… confirmation that your fourth man is in London, but your tracing agents haven’t been able to discover where or who he is…’

‘No… I’m going to have to go over there myself.’

‘Jake, isn’t it time that you let it rest? That you let Beth rest?’ Annie suggested gently. She knew that she was taking a risk, that Jake hated any mention of his wife’s death, and she could sympathise with him.

She had felt much the same way when her own husband had died.

Tom and Jake had been in the same regiment and had become good friends, a friendship which had continued when they had both left the army to join the government department of special agents fighting against the growing menace of the drug traffickers.

After Tom had been killed in the bomb blast which had taken Jake’s sight, Annie had insisted on removing her husband’s friend from the overcrowded hospital where she had found him, and bringing him here to Switzerland.

After his recovery physically, he had spent several months at a special rehabilitation centre run for the blind.

It had been during the early days of his recuperation that he had told her what he was doing.

Initially the government had turned a blind eye to the personal vendetta he was carrying out against Beth’s killers—after all, as drug dealers they were his legitimate quarry—but once he had lost his sight he was no longer employable as a government agent, and so he had to pursue his one remaining quarry at second hand.

Several times Annie had tried to counsel him to forget the past, even while she knew he wouldn’t listen to her.

She had known and liked Beth, but she suspected that had she not been killed there would have come a time when Jake might have tired of carrying the burden of a wife who would never really have been able to match him in either intelligence or maturity. Beth had been a young man’s love, and Jake was a young man no longer.

He was also intelligent enough to recognise for himself what she herself had seen, and she suspected that it was this knowledge that added to his guilt and reinforced his determination to hunt down Beth’s killers.

After his return from the rehabilitation centre she had offered him the use of the chalet which had been given to her by the parents of one of her young patients. She suspected he would have liked to refuse her offer, but both of them knew he had nowhere else to go. He wasn’t a rich man; government agents did not receive pensions, and he had used what money he had in trying to track down the final member of the quartet.

‘I can’t let it rest, Annie,’ he told her quietly. ‘You know that. Not yet.’

She wondered if he knew how much he betrayed in those two final words. This was the first time she had ever heard him express any desire to be free of his self-imposed task.

He moved away from her and, sensing his withdrawal, she guessed that he was thinking of Beth.

If she had only known it, she was wrong. It was an entirely different woman who was occupying his thoughts as he said his goodnights and left.

He had already made all his arrangements. His driver was waiting and took him in silence to his destination, dropping him at a pre-arranged point and then driving away, the big car crunching heavily over the snow.

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