Silver

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

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…’