Silver

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.