Silver. PENNY JORDAN

Чтение книги онлайн.

СКАЧАТЬ then he found someone else and dumped you…’

      Silver gave a bitter laugh. ‘Oh, no… There was someone else, but he still intended to marry me. He gave me a choice: marriage or destruction; there was nothing I could do about it, nothing at all… at least not as Ger—–’

      Again she froze, realising she had once more nearly said too much, but Jake didn’t appear to be listening. He was frowning, and then he raised his hand and touched her face, lightly tracing its shape with his fingers.

      ‘So this was not merely done out of vanity, but out of necessity, as well. Out of self-protection and self-defence.’

      His astuteness shocked her. Not even Annie had guessed at that second part of her need to change her appearance so totally that no one would ever recognise what she had once been… who she had once been.

      ‘Partly,’ she acknowledged, and then honesty forced her to admit, ‘Of course I could have chosen to have a plainer face… I can’t pretend that vanity didn’t come into it. You see, Charles has a weakness for beautiful women… that and his greed are perhaps the only weaknesses he does have.’

      She pulled away from him and said tiredly, ‘There’s no point in trying to dissuade me, Jake. This is something I have to do.’

      She felt him weighing her up, considering, thinking, and then he said, almost reluctantly, ‘It won’t be easy. And I do know what I’m talking about. I have a score to settle of my own…’

      ‘Which is why you need my money.’

      ‘Which is why I need your money,’ he agreed.

      It was on the tip of her tongue to ask him what had happened, but already she could feel him withdrawing from her, his face becoming stern and remote.

      ‘Speaking of which, unless I want you to accuse me of wasting your time, I think perhaps we ought to get back to work.’

      ‘Work!’ The man was practically inhuman. He had cleverly trapped her into confiding in him, but when it came to his own past… How many other men in this position could continue to treat her as he did, as though he was completely unaffected by her, by the intimacy of what they were doing, as though he found her flesh as coldly uninviting as if it belonged, not to another human being, but to a robot.

      He kept himself completely divorced from her emotionally, and mentally, and yet he seemed to possess a diabolical awareness of her every thought and mood, as though he had some deep inner awareness of her most complicated emotional response that not even she herself was privy to. And she hated that… Hated it… resented it… defied it, and constantly tried to transfer those feelings to him, to blame him for those aspects of her own inner vulnerabilities that she couldn’t bear to face.

      ‘Thank God there’s only another week to go,’ she hissed at him bitterly. What would it take to break his self-control, to reduce him to need and despair? She looked at him assessingly and tried to judge him dispassionately… to single out one small chink of vulnerability in the wall of implacable indifference which he had thrown up around himself.

      She studied him directly, studying each feature of his face in turn, trying to ignore the wild thumping of her heart when her scrutiny was faultlessly returned, so faultlessly and so steadfastly that it was almost as though he could see her. Her heart jolted with unease and an almost superstitious fear that he was after all deceiving her, that he and Annie had lied to her and that he could in fact see, and she recognised what she had known all along: that in his blindness she had hidden herself from him, so that everything she had to do and say, every intimacy she had to perform was mercifully made less intimate, less dangerous by the fact that once she had gone from this place she could, if she so wished, come face to face with him across a dinner table and not be betrayed by his knowledge of her.

      Not that she ever expected to encounter him across any of the dinner tables she was likely to sit down at.

      Her disappearance, her faked death might mean that temporarily the doors of her old acquaintances and peers were closed to her, but they would open once more, and very soon. The pedigree she had concocted for herself was impeccable… the background, the wealth, the tiny details of the persona she was creating meticulously researched… so meticulously that no one would be able to find fault with them.

      She would have an immediate entree into Charles’s world; she would be able to fascinate and then ensnare him, and ultimately she would be able to destroy him.

      ‘Stop daydreaming,’ Jake told her crisply. ‘You can fantasise all you like about the future in your own time… Unless, of course,’ he added silkily, ‘you believe I’ve taught you as much as you need to know…’

      He was doing it again, looking straight at her with those cool, too knowing eyes, making her squirm both mentally and physically, making her want to hide herself from him. Making her flush like a child as she remembered this morning’s brutally pointed object lesson in male sexuality.

      It was over two weeks now since he had first questioned her like an examiner on the facts she had gleaned from the manuals he had insisted she read; questions that had turned her face fiery red, and made her clench her teeth and bite the inside of her mouth to prevent herself from stammering the answers; questions so intimate, and yet delivered in so flat, matter-of-fact a voice, that somehow or other the awful intimacy of what was happening was heightened rather than lessened.

      What had followed was still a nightmare to her: a relentless period of hours which had seemed to become days, of questions and answers… questions designed to underline her ignorance and to defeat her determination not to give in to the mastery she sensed he intended to have over her, over their situation. Questions which had laid bare the paucity of her knowledge, of her awareness, of her inner essence of herself as a woman.

      And not until he was satisfied that she knew by heart every last nuance of male sexuality and male anatomy had he allowed her to touch him.

      Allowed her! She shuddered at the very word chosen by her mind. Were it not for the fact that she was here by her own will, he would have had to drag her screaming and kicking to within a foot of his body, never mind make her touch it! It made no difference telling herself that it was he who should feel embarrassed, he who should feel diminished by their bargain. He did not and she did, and even now it seemed he wasn’t satisfied.

      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 СКАЧАТЬ