Silver

Now she had a narrow ribcage and a tiny waist, curving hips and long, long legs.

She looked back into the past, seeing her reflection not as it was now, but as it had been then. She had started overeating as a teenager, partly in compensation for her own deep-seated insecurities, partly out of the guilt induced within her by her aunt.

The awareness that her beloved father, much as he’d loved her, would have preferred her to be a son wasn’t something which had grown on her slowly, but had been cruelly forced upon her by her cousin.

She shivered, remembering with devastating clarity the day her cousin had relentlessly and cruelly explained to her that for her father there could never be a son… someone who would carry on the family name, its titles and burdens… That she, as a daughter, could never inherit them, and that it was through her that her father had contracted the childhood disease which had led to his inability to father any more children.

Charles would inherit… Charles would become the fourteenth Earl of Rothwell on her father’s death… Charles, who if she was lucky might condescend to marry her. And so her insecurity had begun, her awareness of her lack of worthiness to be both her father’s only child and Charles’s wife… and with it her obesity.

How assiduously and malevolently her aunt had nurtured those insecurities. She could see it all so clearly now… as she had not been able to do then.

And Charles… how cleverly Charles had used his mother’s manipulation of her, charming her one moment, spurning her the next… offering her compassion and caring one day and replacing it with coldness and disdain another. And so it had gone on, the constant see-sawing of her emotions, so that her lack of self-worth and her vulnerability had grown at the same pace as her dependence on Charles.

She had totally believed her aunt when the latter had told her that it was her father’s wish that she marry Charles, never dreaming that she might have lied, and so she had grown through her teens adoring her Adonis-like cousin… loving him… wanting him… to such an extent that, when her father had finally begun to appear antagonistic toward Charles, when he had tried to caution her, she had refused to listen, believing herself to be deeply in love with her cousin.

It had been the only thing they had ever quarrelled about… Silver bit her lip, wondering whether, if he were alive now, her father would recognise anything of the daughter he had known in her, or would pass her by in the street as one of her godmothers had done in Gstaad last week.

She had loved her father so much; and she had indirectly been responsible for his death. She shivered suddenly. It wasn’t just a desire to make Charles pay for the hurt he had inflicted on her in rejecting her that was making her put herself through this… this self-torture. Motivating her just as strongly was her deep-rooted belief that justice must be done, that Charles must pay for the crime she knew he had committed. Charles had murdered her father, and, what was more, he had murdered him because he had known that her father stood between him and Rothwell, that the information her father had about Charles would ensure that she broke her engagement to him; and so Charles had killed him. How safe and secure he must feel now… As far as Charles was concerned, both of them were dead, her father and then apparently her. But she was going to rise again from the dead… not as the girl everyone thought had committed suicide, the plain and ugly Geraldine Frances—but as Silver. And she was going to teach him what it meant to love someone, to desire them and to believe those feelings were returned, and then to face rejection.

But, over and above that, she was going to take away from Charles everything he thought he had gained by murdering her father. For that, any sacrifice, any self-torment could be endured.

Now no one would ever recognise her as Geraldine Frances…

She touched one high cheekbone with her fingertips, feeling the living skin. It frightened her sometimes to look into the mirror and see this unfamiliar mask, but she had to suppress that fear. This was what she had wanted, this porcelain perfection of feature… this almost unreal beauty…

She had been frightened this evening as well, when she’d realised how very easily she could fail this last test.

She shivered and pulled on her pyjamas. Cream satin, the fabric severely cut, almost masculinely so, flowed over her body, changing subtly so that it no longer appeared severe, but instead became subtly erotic. She had bought the pyjamas because she felt she was too tall for frilly feminine nightwear, and because she knew that the ancient flannelette nightwear she had worn since she was a teenager, comfortable though it was, could no longer be a part of her life.

Now, as she walked into her bedroom and the coolness of the satin stroked her skin, she remembered what Jake had said to her about wearing silk underwear beneath a pair of jeans and her body tensed angrily.

There had been a point this evening when she had been tempted to accuse him of deliberately drawing out her torture, but then she had remembered his cold distaste when she had first put her proposition to him and she had held back the bitter words, knowing that, no matter how much he disliked her, it wouldn’t make any sense for him to spend any longer with her than was necessary. And anyway, he had been right, she acknowledged drearily.

No matter how hard she tried to forget them, to tell herself that she was now a beautiful, desirable woman, her old inhibitions wouldn’t let go, grimly reinforcing the judgement of his hard, unyielding body, until the rhythm she was trying so desperately to maintain became the beat of painful music to the refrain that pounded over and over again through her mind. Words it would surely take many lifetimes to obliterate, words which she felt were carved upon her soul.

Charles’s words, cruel and condemning, bitter and hurtful… the words he had used to describe her to another woman.

She got into bed and lay there, knowing that she wasn’t going to be able to sleep.

She had been there just over half an hour when Jake knocked on her door and called her name, loud enough for her to hear, but not so loud that it would have woken her had she been asleep.

She was tempted to pretend that she was, but she stifled the pettish instinct, getting up instead and padding over to the door to open it.

‘What do you want?’ she asked him ungraciously.

He smiled mirthlessly. ‘Still sulking? You might be able to afford to waste your time, but I can’t.’

She turned her back on him and said curtly, ‘Save the lecture for tomorrow, would you, Jake? I want to go to sleep.’

‘And you shall. But not yet…’

She looked at him and read the inflexible purpose in the hard bones of his face. She should have anticipated this, and she berated herself mentally for believing that he would allow her to overrule him.

There were two courses open to her now: she could stand her ground and risk having him call the whole thing off, or she could give in.

Great as her desire was to defy him, she couldn’t let their personality clash come between her and the course she had set for herself.

He was looking at her, and despite his blindness the blue eyes were alive with intelligent awareness. That panicked her. She wanted to turn away from him so that he couldn’t look at her, even though she knew it was impossible for him to see her.

‘I’ll come back downstairs,’ she said woodenly.

‘A very wise decision.’ He held open the door, waiting for her. She wanted to protest that she would have to get dressed, and then thought of the intimacies she would have to endure before she was free and gave a faint sigh, preceding him through the door.

The stove was still burning, and she was glad of its warmth. The settee stood in front of her, an implacable reminder of her failure. She thought bitterly that she would never again feel quite the same about that particular piece of furniture.

‘Now,’ Jake instructed her coldly, ‘this time, try to use your intelligence. Think about what you’re doing… about the image you’re projecting. We haven’t been lovers yet, but all the signs are that we will be. The scene is set. It’s up to you to make the most of the opportunity I’m giving you. Remember, when I walk away from you tonight you want me to lie awake remembering the feel of you, the scent of you, aching for you. You want me to forget every other woman I’ve ever held…’

Silver shivered, bitterly aware of how very skilled he was, of how he was using his voice and his imagination, of how he was forcing her to confront her own failure and fears.

She wanted to scream at him that it was no use, that she couldn’t do it, but her stubbornness wouldn’t let her. She had come too far, sacrificed too much.

As she stood there, curling her fingers into tight, hard balls of tension, he said coolly, ‘Stop trying to think of me as him. That immediately sets up barriers you can’t overcome. He’s too important to you. Try instead to imagine me simply as man… all mankind… not a person with characteristics you may or may not like, but merely a symbol of maleness to your femaleness.’

She wanted to tell him that he was wrong about Charles, but she suspected he would know that he wasn’t, so instead she closed her eyes and willed herself to blank out his features, to see him simply as a body, a set of reflexes which she had to activate.

Into the darkness, he added, ‘If it’s the basic pattern of movements that worries you, try improvising slightly. Let your instincts guide you and not your brain.’

What instincts? she longed to demand bitterly. Haven’t you realised yet that I don’t have those kinds of instincts? If I did I wouldn’t need you! But she knew that to lose her temper would achieve nothing. He wasn’t responsible for the past; he was nothing in her life, simply a cipher… a necessary staging post through which she must pass on her self-selected route.

She breathed deeply and evenly, steadying her nerves, and then went over to him, dropping into the now familiar position. He reached for her, and she saw the frown touch his forehead as his fingers slid over satin, but he made no comment, simply disengaging one hand and then the other, so that he could slide his hands up her bare arms beneath the sleeves of her pyjama jacket.

She stiffened instinctively as her body touched his, forgetting for a moment the purpose of his touch—she hadn’t realised how different it would feel to lie against him without the constricting layers of clothes—and then she forced herself to ignore her own reactions and to concentrate instead on his. If she could feel his body so much more intensely through the satin of her pyjamas, then surely he must be correspondingly aware of hers: of the sleek, subtle movement of the fluid fabric as it flowed over her skin. That was what she should be like, she told herself: fluid, amorphous, clinging, silken, inviting his touch, teasing him with her very lack of substance; making him aware of her every subtle movement.

Her hands were on his chest and, as she willed her flesh and bones to mould themselves to his, she smoothed her palms over his shirt-front, levering her torso away from him, the better to allow her hips to sink into him. Think of it as a dance, she told herself, a subtle, dangerous dance which only one of us can control, and as she moved her hips a small, forgotten memory came back to her, a laughing conversation she had overheard between two girls at a party, and she broke the cold dominion of his kiss with the soft pressure of her mouth, mimicking the slow movement of her hips, her mouth open and moist.

Unexpectedly, his throat muscles clenched and then his fingers circled her wrist as though he was going to push her away.

She felt anger and disappointment, bitterness at yet another failure followed by a savage determination to force some reaction for him. She pulled her wrist free and held his face in her hands the way he had done hers, driven by her need to prove to him what she could do, opening her mouth on his, flattening her torso against him, moving her whole body against him, willing him to react, to give her the words of praise she so desperately craved, and when he didn’t she used her teeth sharply against his bottom lip, caught up in a fierce, furious rage of resentment, her hands leaving his face to curl into bitter fists which she beat frantically against his shoulders as she spat furiously, ‘It’s no good! I can’t do it. I’ll never be able to do it.’ Tears of temper and failure burned her throat and eyes.

He fended her off easily, holding her away from him and then shaking her firmly to silence her, saying calmly, ‘That’s enough. And you’re wrong.’

It didn’t penetrate at first, and then, when it did, she went rigid. ‘Wrong?’ She stared at his face, looking for signs of deception, of pity, but there were none. ‘Why didn’t you say something, then, instead of letting me…?’

‘I was about to,’ he told her, extremely drily. ‘But you didn’t seem to want to listen.’

She was almost afraid to believe it. She watched him suspiciously, half afraid he was just playing a cruel joke on her.

‘I’m not lying to you,’ he told her calmly, reading her mind, easing her on to the sofa beside him and then reaching for her hand.