Silver. PENNY JORDAN

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СКАЧАТЬ and himself his sight. It didn’t matter that he hadn’t been the one in charge… he should have been. He had been guilty of an error of judgement and he would pay for that error all through his life. The doctors had been brutally frank with him. There was no hope of his ever regaining his sight.

      He touched his face, his fingers instinctively finding the small ridges of scars that were all that was left of the patchwork of plastic surgery Annie had done to repair the horrendous damage the bomb had inflicted.

      When the eye surgeon had first recommended plastic surgery, he had told him to go to hell. What did it matter to him what he looked like? The man had persisted, though, patiently pointing out that, while he didn’t have to look at himself, others did…

      Unable to endure the thought of more surgery, he had come instinctively here to Annie and had eventually given in to her persuasion that he should have the operations. She had performed them herself. He had wondered, in one bleak moment of self-acknowledgement before the anaesthetic had claimed him, if God would punish him for Beth’s death by letting him die.

      Or would that have been a punishment? Life held no savour for him now. No savour, perhaps, but it did hold a purpose… a purpose that only Silver’s money could help him to achieve. His mouth twisted again, a long-ago scrap of conversation floating to the surface of his mind—Beth saying awkwardly, ‘She wanted you to want her…’

      They had been talking about her mother. They had been lying in bed together in the apartment in Paris he had rented for their honeymoon. She had been so insecure, so young, not quite nineteen to his twenty-eight… too young, an inner voice told him as he forced himself to confront the knowledge that had been with him for a long time, but which somehow or other Silver had brought to the surface of his consciousness, adding to his already heavy burden of guilt.

      He had loved Beth, had cherished her, but in so many ways she had still been a child. Would there ultimately have come a time when her immaturity, her dependence, even her love might have become burdensome to him? When he might have longed for a woman capable of meeting him on his own ground; a woman such as…? He blocked off the thought.

      Beth… why did he find it so difficult to conjure up a mental picture of her face… to remember what it had felt like to hold her in his arms, to love her? He could remember how she had made his heart ache with tenderness… how he had wanted to protect her… but he couldn’t remember what it had felt like to desire her the way he had desired Silver. They were so very different, and yet… and yet there were moments when he sensed such an intensity of vulnerability about Silver that it set off a corresponding echo deep within himself.

      She had been injured, hurt, her life destroyed by the treachery of the man she loved, and now she was going to hit back at him. To destroy him in turn. Revenge, one of the most powerful human emotions there could be. And one of the most self-destructive; he should know. Yet, though he tried to warn her against taking up those burdens, he knew quite well that she would not listen to him. This need in him to warn her, to protect her almost, irked him; she was no real concern of his, but old habits died hard, and far too long he had carried the burden of being responsible for others, Beth and, before her, Justin…

      Anyway, did he really have the right to tell Silver how to run her life, he who had never allowed anyone to dictate to him how he lived his life? Already in his thoughts he was betraying the fact that he was losing his emotional distance from her, that he was aware of her in ways that threatened both of them. It had to stop. Now, before things got completely out of control.

      He moved restlessly around the room, acknowledging a deep inner truth he had been fighting for days.

      It was time to bring things to an end…

      One final lesson and they would both be free to go their own separate ways.

      Silver sensed the purposefulness in him when she came down to prepare dinner. Supplies of food were delivered regularly twice a week from the town and they took it in turns to prepare the meals.

      Tonight it was her turn.

      Despite her father’s wealth and upbringing, she could cook, a strange, eclectic collection of dishes prepared with an expertise she had garnered from her father’s households throughout the world.

      Tonight it was Irish stew, made in the traditional way, and served with soda bread.

      As she lifted the casserole out of the oven and prepared to serve it, she commented briskly to Jake, ‘It’s Irish stew; that’s—–’

      ‘You don’t need to tell me what it is. I know.’

      The vehemence in his voice startled her. She stopped what she was doing and looked at him, stunned to see a muscle twitch fiercely in his jaw. His mouth was drawn into a tight line of pain, and for the first time she saw the brilliant eyes unfocused as they stared not at her but past her, as though he were looking at something no one else could see.

      He had been sitting down, since she had told him she was about to serve dinner, but now he got up abruptly, awkwardly almost, half stumbling against the table so that she reached out automatically to catch him and then withdrew her hand as she heard him swear.

      He was halfway towards the door when she realised that he wasn’t going to have dinner with her. Without thinking what she was doing, she asked protestingly where he was going.

      ‘Somewhere I can’t smell that,’ he told her savagely, gesturing towards the steaming casserole, and then he added softly, ‘The last time I had Irish stew, my wife made it for me. It was her favourite dish and our last meal together before I went away on business. She was dead before I returned… murdered in cold blood.’

      Silver let him go in silence, too shocked to say anything. It was the first time he had ever made any kind of reference to his own personal life, and the horror of the small picture he had drawn for her remained with her long after he had gone. She found that she couldn’t eat the stew herself and, picking up the casserole, she took it outside and threw it away.

      When she came back in her stomach was still heaving, but there was nothing she could do. There were a thousand questions she wanted to ask… a thousand things she wanted to know…

      It was unnerving and unwanted, this glimpse into the raw pain of someone else’s life; this knowledge that he was after all human and vulnerable.

      She had wanted that vulnerability in him, hungering for it as a weapon she could use against him, but now she realised she didn’t want it after all… She was like a child suddenly discovering that a parent was frightened of the dark, and cravenly wishing she did not have to know about that fear.

      She made herself go back into the kitchen, and turned on the extractor fan. She opened the fridge, and took out some fresh chicken breasts.

      Half an hour later she went up to his room, knocked briefly on the door and without opening it said quietly, ‘Dinner’s ready. It’s Chicken Maryland,’ and without waiting for a response, for all the world as though the entire incident with the stew had never happened, she went back downstairs and calmly started serving the chicken.

      He arrived just as she was filling her own wine glass, sitting down at the table and saying quietly, ‘I’ve decided that you’ve learned as much from me as you’re going to learn. That being the case, there’s just one small formality left…’

      Silver’s hand shook. She spilt a drop of wine on the table and watched it with fixed attention, unable to bring herself СКАЧАТЬ