Silver

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.’