Silver

‘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.’