Silver. PENNY JORDAN

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СКАЧАТЬ arouse him in desire—and not just to touch him, but to look at him, smile at him, speak to him. And now, if she managed to get through today’s lesson without telling him to go to hell, she would know how to argue with him and still challenge him to desire.

      The lessons… the supply of information seemed inexhaustible, like a ceaseless stream pouring relentlessly into her, so that there were times when she wanted to scream at him, ‘Stop… enough!’ Times when she felt as though her spirit would break in two beneath the weight of his accumulated cynicism and knowledge… when she wasn’t sure which of them despised the other the more… when for some odd, uncomfortable reason, instead of screaming defiance at him, she wanted to break down and cry, without having an atom of understanding of why she should feel that way.

      And harder to bear than everything he had taught her about his own sexuality had been the knowledge he had forced on her about her own… not as a woman, but as an individual… She had learned for instance that the mere pressure of his fingers against the inner flesh of her arm could make her jerk back from him in fierce tension… that the sensation of his mouth against her throat, his hand against her breast could evoke responses that had to be frozen at birth; although he said nothing, did nothing to show that he was aware of what was happening to her, instincts as ancient as the race she herself had sprung from warned her that he had known… Had known and yet hadn’t used that knowledge against her… and that confused her.

      She closed her eyes, blotting out the blinding whiteness of the blizzard and thinking instead of Ireland… of the ancient castle of stone, facing out across the Atlantic, guardian of the land beyond which had been the stronghold of a race of Irish princes until one of her ancestors had seduced and married one of the noble daughters. If she closed her eyes, she could see the castle now, rising up out of the mist that blew in off the sea… Rugged, dauntless, austere, swept by gales and storms in winter and in no way to be compared with Rothwell, that jewel of Palladian splendour and richness set in its lush green English farmlands. And yet… and yet it was to Kilrayne that she ached to return now… It was Kilrayne that had been her refuge, Kilrayne that offered her surcease and comfort.

      Kilrayne… If she kept her eyes closed she could almost imagine she was there, standing in front of the huge fireplace in the great hall, warming herself on the heat of the massive logs needed to fill the enormous grate. The room would smell of oak-smoke and soot, the draughts lifting the faded banners and tapestries from the walls, and outside the Atlantic gale would hurl the rain against the narrow, leaded window-slits.

      Kilrayne, a dark grey fortress, built for defence and not pleasure; Kilrayne, whose stone walls had more than once run red with the blood of its enemies. Charles hated it… He shivered in the draughts, complained about the smoking fires, loathed the narrow passages and huge stone-walled rooms.

      Silver, on the other hand, loved it… loved the sharp contrast between the dull grey stone and the richness of its tapestries and embroidered bed-hangings… its stone-flagged floors and glowing Oriental carpets, the massive heaviness of its furniture and the pewter dullness of its silver; commissioned in France and smuggled back from that country, so the story went, by an Irish Jacobite younger son of the family banished to Ireland to keep him out of the way of Hanover George’s revenge.

      She and her father had spent every spring there. He had always said that there was nowhere quite like Ireland in the spring, when the sky was washed clean and soft by the wind from the Atlantic and the hedgerows and fields of the south turned a green that could not be rivalled anywhere in the world.

      He would arrive there at the same time as the season’s first crop of foals. He used to take her with him when he visited the stables, carefully instructing her in the good points to look for, pointing out to her which foals they would keep and which they would sell, and why.

      Later in the year he would go to Argentina, where he bought his polo ponies, and here again he would instruct her, tutoring her so that she learned without ever knowing that she did so.

      It was only in the winter, when he always returned to Rothwell so that he could hunt with the Belvoir, that she refused to accompany him. Much as she enjoyed the spectacle and pageant of the hunt, she had never been able to endure being in at the kill, and her father rode to hounds at the very forefront of the chase.

      Sometimes Charles had accompanied him, both of them looking in their different ways intensely male and virile… very much the epitome of the traditional image of upper-class manhood.

      Her father had loved to hunt—had been a first-class rider… Other men sustained falls, broken limbs, the jocular teasing of their peers, but her father had never been unseated once. He had always shrugged his skill aside, claiming modestly that it was his mounts who deserved the credit and not him.

      And yet he had died on the hunting field, thrown by a young and untried mount, who had panicked and bolted, dragging his unconscious rider so that by the time they were able to stop him her father was dead.

      An accident… or was it? Her father’s doctor had told her gently that there was a possibility that her father might have committed suicide. Suicide… It had come as a shock to her to discover that there were areas of her father’s life about which she knew nothing… shadows darkening it which might have led to his taking his own life…

      An accident… suicide… or murder…? Her mouth twisted bitterly. She knew which it was. Charles had murdered her father; she was sure of it. And she knew why. Charles, upon whom she had looked as near perfect; believing that his outer, golden perfection mirrored an equally golden heart. How wrong she had been… how naïve… But she was naïve no longer, and she intended to make Charles pay—and not just for what he had done to her, for his cruelty, his cynical callousness towards her, for the threats he had used to show her how defenceless she was without her father to protect her—for who would believe the hysterical claims of a fat, plain young woman who it was known was speaking out of jealousy and spite, against the assured sophistication of a man like Charles? No, it was more for her father’s sake that she was determined to hunt him down, to stalk him, and finally to trap him, exposing him to himself and to the world for the person that he really was. Her father… God, how she missed him even now. He was the only person who had ever really loved her, who had ever really cared…

      Her throat closed on a surge of deep emotion, and then, like a knife ripping into a tender, unhealed wound, she heard Jake saying coldly, ‘It’s your time we’re wasting, Silver, not mine. I promised you a month… after that…’

      ‘You’ll what…?’ she demanded savagely. He couldn’t see her face, couldn’t see the suspicious glitter of the tears she was fighting to suppress, but even so she lashed out at him verbally, hating him for being present at her moment of betrayal. ‘Double the price? I haven’t paid you yet, Jake,’ she reminded him, driven by her own demons to taunt softly, ‘What would you do if I walked out of here and refused to pay you a penny?’

      That she was punishing him for Charles’s faults and for her own weakness she knew quite well, but the fierce pace he was setting her, the gruelling insistence on perfection, which was like nothing she had ever undergone before, was undermining her self-control, making her want to draw retaliatory blood, making her hate herself for the way he pierced her defences and pushed her from her sanctuary of icy remoteness into the painful world of feelings and emotions. She had turned her back on that world when she had turned her back on herself, totally destroying the woman she had once been. And she hated him for making her bitterly conscious of the fact that that woman and some of her vulnerabilities still remained; that she had not, as she had thought, completely obliterated and buried her.

      Jake was silent for so long that she actually began to think with relief that he hadn’t heard her, and then he said quietly, and very pleasantly, ‘How you do like to flirt with fire. СКАЧАТЬ