Silver

‘Not that I’m suggesting you do the same thing, at least not at this stage, but it’s a point worth remembering. Now, sit in front of me, resting your back against my legs.’

Silver did as he instructed, sitting ramrod-straight as she stared into the fire.

‘Now, when I speak to you, instead of turning round to look at me you can tilt your head back so that, were I able to see, what I would see would be the undoubtedly tempting line of your exposed throat… your breasts… very temptingly within easy reach of my hand… thus.’

She wasn’t prepared for the brief, clinical touch of his hand, and her body flinched at the contact until she willed it into acquiescence. ‘I could, if I wished, lean down to kiss you, or, more probably, reach down to pull you up over my body, like so.’

His hands fitted easily beneath her armpits, and although she was so tall he turned her easily, so that for a brief, startling moment of time her face was pressed against his hard thigh. Then he was drawing her upwards, as though she were as fluid as a piece of silk.

‘At this stage if I were physically aroused you would be aware of it, and if I weren’t… Well, there are several options open to you, depending upon how much time you have and how far the relationship has already advanced.

‘If it’s still in its early stages and you think I’m drawing you up to kiss you, like so…’

He lifted her easily so that she was virtually draped across his body. One hand in the hollow of her back pressed her torso against his; the other found her nape and locked smoothly in her hair, his mouth cold and clinical on hers.

She wondered a little unkindly if he closed his eyes when he kissed her or if his perpetual darkness rendered it unnecessary.

Her own had closed instinctively, more to blot out the sight of him than to focus her awareness on his mouth, which was just as well, she acknowledged grimly, because there was certainly nothing provocative or erotic in its distant possession.

His eyes weren’t closed, but his lids were lowered so that his dark irises glittered between them. She lay totally unmoving against him, not wanting to remember how she had felt when Charles had kissed her—how joyously, frantically grateful she had been that he loved and wanted her; how eager to respond… to please…

‘You’re not concentrating.’ The harsh criticism jolted her out of her memories, her body tensing in dislike before she could stop it.

‘You’re supposed to be learning how to arouse a man to desire, not wallowing in self-pitiful memories,’ he derided her.

She stifled her rage that he should so easily have followed her thoughts.

‘Now listen and remember. You’ve gained an advantage—physical contact. Now you’ve got to make the most of it… turn a tentative embrace into an erotic enticement.’ When she said nothing, he muttered under his breath, ‘My God, what the hell happened to you when they were handing out good old-fashioned feminine instinct?’

She could have told him that she had never been encouraged to develop her femininity; that her father had treated her as the son he could never have; that plain women, ugly women, as she had heard herself described, were not given many opportunities to develop such instincts. But instead she folded her mouth into a hard line and reminded him coldly, ‘If I had those kinds of instincts, I wouldn’t need you to teach me, would I?’

He was still holding her, but there was nothing intimate about it, apart from the proximity of their bodies, his own all hard, solid, unyielding muscle, unprepared to accommodate her more vulnerable softness, so that leaning into him and being held there hurt her breasts. She tried to ease her discomfort by moving away, but the weight of his hand on her back wouldn’t allow her to put any space between them, and all she could do was move slightly sideways.

‘Let go of me,’ she complained. ‘I can hardly breathe.’

She felt his chest expand as he suddenly took a deep breath and she winced at the uncomfortable pressure against her breasts.

‘You can feel that, can you?’ he asked her.

‘Yes.’

‘Well, that’s a start, at least. Now this time, when I kiss you, I want you to move your body against mine. Here,’ he told her, the hand in her hair sliding unerringly to her waist and then upwards to the curve of her breast, touching her briefly before moving away. ‘And here…’ His other hand left the hollow of her back and traced the curve of her hip.

‘As rhythmically as you can manage. I trust I don’t have to tell you what kind of rhythm,’ he added under his breath, and Silver was glad that he couldn’t see the fierce flood of angry colour that burned her face. She wanted to wrench herself away from him and tell him that she would find someone else to help her, but the stubborn streak of hardiness that had enabled her to survive so much wouldn’t let her. There was far more than mere pride at stake here.

‘Now, just in case you haven’t already realised it, the object of this exercise is to transform what is on my part merely a light kiss into… Well, let’s see what you can turn it into, shall we?’

She hated him… Hated the cold, dismissive way he spoke to her, the way he touched her… the way he made no effort to hide his dislike and contempt. But she needed him too much to show her feelings, and so she waited as his hands moved back to her body and he held her as he had done before, pressing the same cold mouth to her own.

Instinctively she froze, while her mind screamed its impatience with her body’s ineptness and she forced her unwilling muscles to obey her mental commands, moving her body against his, trying to imagine that he was Charles, and that this situation was real.

It was harder than she had thought, her body made clumsy and bashful by the unresponsiveness of his. It was like trying to soften iron, she decided angrily, knowing even before his mouth left hers that she had failed to impress him.

It was a shock to open her eyes and find his boring into her, as though he really could see her. Her heart jerked uncomfortably and she pulled away from him, saying bitterly, ‘Is all this really necessary?’

‘You seemed to think so… Look, I’ll show you how it should be done and then we’ll give it another try. Now concentrate,’ he instructed her, taking hold of her, ignoring her body’s tense rejection as he manoeuvred her ungently on to the sofa and then kept her there with the weight of his body.

‘Now,’ he said grimly against her mouth, ‘this is what should happen.’

This time his mouth was just as clinical, but it moved slowly and subtly on hers, matching the slow tempo of his body, the subtle rotation of his hips pressing her deeper into the sofa, the movement of his chest against her breasts, his hands in her hair, as he deliberately increased the rhythm, enforcing their erotic cycles on her body. He held her head between his hands so that she couldn’t evade his mouth, making a thousand unknown pulses leap under her skin, making her breasts swell and harden and her belly turn weak. The rhythm quickened, changed and became more forceful, and then, shockingly, stopped.

‘This is what I meant when I told you to move your body against mine,’ she heard him saying calmly in her ear. ‘If he’s attracted to you, it should turn him on. Now it’s your turn.’

He levered himself away from her briskly, leaving her to stare up at him. She felt too shocked to move, her pride bruised by the inescapable knowledge of the effect he had had on her. She shuddered as she sat up, wondering why on earth she felt so weak.

As she looked at him, sitting relaxed and composed at the other end of the sofa, she knew there was simply no way she could do to him what he had just done to her.

He must have read her mind, she suspected, because suddenly his voice changed, softening slightly.

‘Forget about me. Just try imagining that I’m someone else—this all-important man that all this is for.’

The palms of her hands had gone damp. She was more scared than she had ever been in her life, even when Annie had explained to her just what the surgery she had wanted would involve… how painful it would be… how potentially dangerous. She didn’t want to touch him… didn’t want to experience his amusement and contempt when she failed to match the effortless sensuality he had just shown her. Was it just experience that brought such skill, or was there more to it than that? Did you have to be born with a facility for it? If so… If so, her plan was doomed, and she wasn’t going to allow that to happen.

Taking a deep breath, she got up.

‘We’ll take it from the top this time, when you’re sitting on the floor.’

Obediently she sat at his feet, closing her eyes and willing herself to believe that she wasn’t here in this chalet, but in the library at Rothwell, that it wasn’t Jake’s body behind her, but Charles’s. She breathed slowly and deeply, trying to relax, trying to capture the evocative scent of old leather and wood that permeated the high-ceilinged room. Trying to imagine the heat of the fire, the guttering of the candles on the desk behind the old leather chesterfield, the feel of Charles’s hands on her hands as he reached for her and twisted her round in his arms, drawing her up over his thighs.

She tried to imagine she was water, amorphous and fluid, flowing against him; her hands touched his chest, feeling the hardness of muscle that unexpectedly flexed beneath her palms. Again the touch of that cold mouth; for a second her concentration wavered and her nails dug into his shoulders as she tensed, but then she pushed Jake’s image to one side and fought to superimpose over it that of Charles.

The kiss was warm and teasing, as Charles’s had been, but instead of accepting it shyly and awkwardly she remembered what Jake had taught her. She was a powerful, seductive woman, and he was her victim. She murmured softly beneath the cold mouth and slid her fingers into his hair, frowning momentarily, conscious of its texture and thickness, knowing by some form of osmosis that Charles’s fair, fine hair would never feel like this, vibrant with male energy. For a moment her confidence faltered, the image of Charles she was fighting to fix behind the closed eyelids fracturing and the pieces reassembling into Jake’s face. She shivered and suppressed the image, telling herself fiercely that this wasn’t Jake, it was Charles… Charles, and that this was her chance to take hold of her own fate and shape it… form it. This was her chance to start exacting payment, and to do that she must seduce him away from other loyalties… other loves.

She moved her body sinuously, ignoring the unresponsive muscle and tissue that was Jake, letting her movements whisper promises of pleasure, trying to recreate the rhythms Jake had shown her, forcing her mouth to soften and linger coaxingly on the implacable, shuttered lips that refused to give her any encouragement.

When Jake took hold of her shoulders and held her away she stared at him, waiting for his judgement. This time her body had not reacted the way it had when he had kissed her, for which she was profoundly grateful. That was a complication she didn’t need or want. Nor did she want to remember that, despite all she had felt for Charles, he had never drawn that involuntary, unstoppable feeling from her.

‘You’re beginning to get the idea,’ Jake told her.

Beginning… Silver glared at him, conscious of a fierce stab of disappointment. What had she expected? she derided herself. Lavish praise? She suppressed her chagrin and said as lightly as she could, ‘I see. And how long will it be, do you suppose, before I’ve absorbed it to your satisfaction?’

‘Who knows, but until you have we don’t go any further.’

As though he heard the angry protests locked in her throat, he said evenly, ‘What do you want from this, Silver? You told me you wanted to be able to seduce a man to the point where he’d virtually kill to have you. Judging on your present performance, you wouldn’t even be a good lay; you’d be forgotten even before the bed had gone cold,’ he told her brutally, and although the words cut into her ego like thin whip-strokes she knew he was telling the truth.

‘Now… we’ll do it again, and remember, a seductress doesn’t necessarily love the man, but she does love herself and her power over him, and because of that she enjoys what she’s doing. She loves making him ache and burn… making him want…’

An hour later, her throat burning with suppressed tears of rage, her pride cut to rags and her temper burning through her like vitriol, Silver pulled back from Jake’s restraining hands and gritted, ‘Don’t tell me… I know… try again. Tell me something, Jake. What exactly do I have to do to get a pass mark?’

He wouldn’t release her, and a flash of caution warned her against trying to overcome his physical strength. She reminded herself that there was nothing personal in this; that it was idiocy to let her dislike for him prejudice her progress. After all, she had chosen him.

‘I should have thought that was obvious,’ he told her. He was beginning to sound terse, and his mouth snapped shut with uncompromising hardness. She had known all along that he wasn’t a man who would suffer incompetence easily, and now he was proving it to her. ‘When you can arouse me, you’ll get your pass.’

Arouse him? She couldn’t stop the shudder jolting through her as she snatched her hands away from his shoulders.

‘We’re talking about a physical reaction, nothing more,’ he told her drily, correctly reading her reaction. ‘A physical reaction to deliberate provocation. It isn’t impossible. It isn’t easy, either… I don’t like you, and I certainly don’t want you,’ he told her frankly, ‘but until you can draw that involuntary physical response from my flesh, we don’t go any further. There wouldn’t be any point.’ He gave her a hard look which made her catch her breath until she remembered that he couldn’t actually see her.

‘Now, let’s try it again, and this time remember: the sooner you get it right, the sooner we can move on to the next stage, and ultimately the sooner you and I can go our separate ways.’

It should have been all the encouragement she needed, but it had exactly the opposite effect. She became unbearably conscious of herself and of him, and totally unable to superimpose Charles’s image on to his features, no matter how tightly she tried to close her eyes and use her imagination. Her movements became clumsy, her body tense and awkward.

After three humiliating attempts to recapture her earlier burgeoning skill had failed, she was tempted to call the whole thing off.

She was too demoralised even to hide from him how she felt, pushing her hair back off her hot face as she protested angrily, ‘It’s no use. I’ll never get it right…’

She expected him to agree with her and was surprised when he remained silent, until she remembered that, for all his contempt, he would stand to lose two million pounds if she backed out now.

‘We’ll have a break,’ he told her equably at last, adding, ‘Think of it as mind over matter, Silver. The physical skills alone aren’t enough. You have to be confident of success… to know you have the power to arouse me… to know that you can make me want you. Without that mental strength, no matter what I teach you, you won’t succeed. The outward skills can only facilitate the effectiveness of the inner ones. Which is perhaps why they say seductresses are born and not made.’

It infuriated her that, after she had faced so much, endured so much, she was failing at this last obstacle… surely the most simple of them all?

‘I’m tired,’ she told him pettishly. ‘I’m going to bed.’

She waited for him to stop her, to make some cynical and mocking retort, and when he didn’t she walked stiff-backed over to the stairs and then up them.

A month of Jake’s time was what she had bought. Four short weeks of his time and his tuition. So why should it suddenly seem as though those short weeks were going to prove a lifetime of endurance and punishment?

CHAPTER THREE

HER bedroom was simply furnished. Rag-rugs on the polished floorboards, a large double bed with bolster pillows and two huge quilts, a solid-looking chest of drawers in an unvarnished bleached wood that felt smooth and worn to the touch, and a wardrobe to match. The small shower-room was as basic and frugally furnished as the bedroom, but there was a Tightness about the plain white sanitaryware that was pleasing to the eye.

Silver showered, dismissing her longing to soak her tense muscles in a hot bath, and then moisturised her face completely. Annie had warned her that for some time to come her skin would be vulnerable. When she had finished she brushed her hair vigorously, her mouth curling into a crooked smile.

When she’d walked into Annie’s clinic her hair had been russet-brown. It was the shock of the series of operations she had put herself through that had turned it almost pure white.

The mirror gave back to her a perfect reflection. She studied it clinically, trying to see it as others would see it… as Charles would see it. Flawless skin… she had always had that before, though no one had ever really noticed. An elegant, straight nose; not for her the cutesy girlish bobs favoured by starlets. High cheekbones slanting under widely spaced eyes, small ears, a delicate jawline, a full mouth. That too had already been hers, although in the heavy, plain setting of her old face its fullness had appeared almost grotesque.

Standing naked in front of the mirror, Silver studied her body. No surgery had been needed here. Just diet and exercise—almost an entire year of it before this svelte, high-breasted figure had emerged from the smothering layers of fat.

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.