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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.’
