Silver

‘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.