Silver

скачать книгу бесплатно


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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

‘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.