Silver. PENNY JORDAN

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СКАЧАТЬ of him wanted to take hold of her and either physically shake her or punish her with the kind of kiss that he knew full well, once given, would change their relationship for ever. And the worst of it all was that, even knowing the folly of such an action, he was still unbearably tempted to do it—to drown out all the loneliness, the frustration… the sheer heaviness of the burdens he carried by opening up that sealed well of emotion she kept so well guarded.

      He knew that within them both was the capacity to destroy the privacy each of them guarded so fiercely. Fortunately for him, Silver didn’t know it… not yet. She was too obsessed with keeping control of herself to worry about what he was feeling.

      ‘I’ve had enough of this,’ he heard her say unevenly. ‘I’m going up to my room.’

      ‘No!’

      Even as he said it he knew he ought to let her go, for both their sakes. He was feeling too raw, too vulnerable to detach himself as he knew he must, and yet still he reached for her, still he touched her face and felt the warm dampness of tears he had known would be there, even though she hadn’t made a single betraying sound.

      When he kissed her he told himself he was doing it for Beth… that everything was for Beth… for his guilt, for her pain, for her death, and ultimately for the destruction of whoever it was in London who had ordered the taking of her life.

      Drug dealing was an ugly business, he had known that from the start… had known the dangers and ignored them. That arrogance on his part had cost Beth her life.

      A life for a life… but so far three men had been made to pay. Not directly by Jake; it was the information he had given the FBI which had led to the gaoling of two members of the quartet. And José Ortuga was dead, killed in a bomb blast by a rival Colombian drug baron just before Jake could trap him. That explosion had also cost him his sight. Now there was one final member of the quartet to track down and destroy: the one in charge of the London arm of the operation… the one who had ordered Beth’s death… the one who had realised exactly who he was and who he was working for… the one who had so far eluded the skills of the experts he had paid to track him down.

      Without his sight there was only so much he could do himself… but he would use Silver’s money to pay for men to find the final member of that unholy quartet.

      Beneath the hard assault of his mouth he felt Silver’s soften, felt the frisson of shock run through her, felt her bewilderment and distress as though they were his own, and still he used them ruthlessly to expiate his own anger, his own pain. Used her in a way which he knew damned well was neither detached nor remote, refusing to release her mouth until she was quiescent with shock beneath his.

      The moment he relaxed his hold she wrenched away from him, as he had known she would, and he knew quite well that if he could see her he would find her mouth swollen and her eyes full of tears.

      The anger left him as quickly as it had come.

      He ought to apologise, but if he did that he would be inviting an intimacy into their relationship which was dangerous to them both.

      Instead he said coolly, ‘Now maybe we can make some progress. Now that you know at first hand what desire feels like.’

      Colour scorched Silver’s skin. What she had just endured was surely the most humiliating episode in her whole life… worse in some ways than finding Charles making love to someone else. That she had actually for one brief second of time felt desire… that Jake had known it… She shuddered.

      It was time for a break, Jake acknowledged as she fled. Both of them needed it.

      It caused him a certain amount of wry self-mockery to acknowledge that increasingly there were times when he physically desired her to the point where he had difficulty with his self-control. He, who hadn’t once, in the years since Beth had died, truly, instinctively desired a woman with that gut-deep, mindless male ache that owed nothing to intelligence, compassion or indeed any other emotion other than the most basic one of intense physical hunger. And very infrequently before that.

      His life had been far from celibate, but he was a man who prided himself on relating to the women who shared his life and his bed as fellow human beings, who had ranked sex well down on the list of what was essential in a man-to-woman relationship. And yet here he was, his body and his mind drawn tight with an aching need that he wanted to put down to the mere intimacy of their situation, but which he knew damn well he could not.

      He linked his arms behind his head and tried to ease the tension from his neck. Only another few days. Already, even if she didn’t know it herself, she had learned almost all she needed to know. That jibe he had thrown at her had been without foundation, and he ought to tell her as much.

      He was a trained observer who, now that the sense of sight was lost to him, made full use of those senses left to him to absorb and catalogue information about others; he wondered if she was as aware as he was of how much she suppressed her natural sexuality, even while claiming that she wanted to use it.

      He knew enough about the human race and its behavioural patterns to know that it would be quite easy for him to destroy that suppression and make her respond to him personally, as she had done this afternoon.

      He had told himself that he wasn’t going to do it because he didn’t want the complications which would inevitably ensue… because he didn’t want that kind of involvement, especially not with a woman so obviously hung up on another man… Charles, she had called him… And there had been pain as well as anger in her voice when she’d said he had never loved her.

      He wondered who she really was. It wouldn’t be impossible for him to find out… Quickly he shut himself off from the temptation. He had other things to do with his life, things that were far more important. He had a murder to avenge. He frowned. How well he understood what motivated Silver… none better. He didn’t want to allow himself to feel sympathy for her. In so many ways she was everything he despised in her sex, but that was only on the surface. Beneath that surface was a woman every bit as vulnerable as Beth had been…

      Beth… why was he linking the two of them together? He shifted uncomfortably, dropping his hands and then getting up.

      Force of habit drove him over to the window. He knew it was there by some complicated alteration within his inner darkness, by the difference in the scent of the air… almost by instinct… even though, standing in front of it and looking outwards, he could see nothing of the storm raging outside. His mind was on other things.

      Ultimately he was going to have to fulfil the final clause of their contract and free her from the unwanted burden of her physical virginity.

      His mouth curled in a humourless smile. Originally when she had made that stipulation, although he hadn’t allowed her to see it, he had wondered cynically if, when the time came, he would be physically capable of entering her, whether he had the physical strength, the stamina, the mental will-power to overcome all the mental and emotional pitfalls of making love to a woman he neither liked nor desired. Now he was more concerned with making sure she didn’t goad him to the point where his physical possession of her was no longer something he could mentally distance himself from—no longer merely a set task to be accomplished with clinical detachment and as much physical finesse as he could manage.

      It couldn’t be put off any longer. With every day they spent together now, the tension grew between them. Hers was infiltrated with fear, even though she fought hard not to show it.

      He turned away from the source of light and stretched. His blindness was in its way his СКАЧАТЬ