Silver. PENNY JORDAN

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СКАЧАТЬ he would be better able to deal with it from the relative familiarity of his own room.

      However, as he made the coffee and took it upstairs, he told himself firmly that nothing was going to go wrong. This final act between them would be effected quickly and efficiently, and hopefully with sufficient finesse to make it endurable for both of them.

       CHAPTER FIVE

      NOTHING had changed in Jake’s room since the first time Silver had walked into it. Then she had undressed without any outward qualms… Then she had gone to lie on his bed to wait for him without any fear other than that he would reject her proposition.

      Now it was different. Now she was a mass of nerves… trembling with rejection and apprehension.

      She willed herself to regain her self-control. What would she do if she reacted like this when she was with Charles? She wondered frantically if Jake had been serious when he had suggested this would be a good test for her—if he genuinely expected her to seduce him into taking her—because if so, she decided grimly…

      The door opened while she was still thinking about it, and for a moment as he looked at her she could almost believe that Jake could actually see her cowering in the corner of the room. It still baffled and infuriated her, this ability of his to focus so directly on her as though he actually knew where she was. And then she realised that he did, because he had put the tray of coffee down and was walking firmly towards her. When he was within arm’s reach of her, he stopped and said unequivocally, ‘Before you do anything else you can have a shower. You’re wearing that damned perfume again, and I have no desire to wake up in the morning with my sheets reeking of it…’

      Silver had worn the perfume in a mood of angry defiance, thinking she was going to eat dinner alone. She had forgotten about it, but now suddenly she could actually smell it: the sweet, cloying scent of the tuberoses suffocating her senses, making her almost feel nauseous; and although the last thing she wanted to do was to obey any instruction he gave her, she found herself actually mentally imagining the relief of soaping her skin clean of its too-sweet scent.

      ‘Do it, Silver,’ he told her grimly. ‘Otherwise I’ll do it for you, and I assure you that if I do it will be something that neither of us enjoys.’

      His relentlessness seemed to restore her courage. She marched away from him and into the bathroom, slamming the door behind her, stripping off her clothes and standing behind the stinging spray of the shower before she could change her mind.

      The vapour of the hot water seemed to intensify the scent, so that when she closed her eyes she could actually see Charles and his lover entwined in bed… as she had seen them that time, Charles’s hand caressing the silky thigh of the blonde-haired woman, his mouth feeding greedily on her breast while he moaned and twisted against her in semi-tortured ecstasy… An ecstasy that made Silver feel physically sick.

      She cried out without realising she had done so, causing Jake to frown and head for the bathroom door and then stop.

      Tuberoses. God, how he hated that scent… And she, with that Machiavellian instinct of hers, seemed to know it instinctively. He moved uncomfortably, conscious of a certain ache in his thigh where it had been pierced by a piece of flying debris from the bomb.

      He realised from the silence that the shower had stopped running, and started to undress, methodically removing his clothes, folding them neatly, so that when Silver emerged from the bathroom wrapped in a towel, her hair a damp, tangled mass on her shoulders, he was standing naked beside the bed, removing the quilt.

      For some reason her heart jolted physically at the sight of him. She was no stranger to his nudity, or indeed to any part of his body, not any more, and yet she felt shaken each time she was confronted by its power.

      He had taught her with admirably clinical detachment how to appreciate and stimulate every part of it, instructing her in acts of intimacy that seemed impossible to believe when later, fully dressed, he would matter-of-factly cross-question her about what she had learned.

      His total indifference to her flesh and his own had helped her then to apply herself to what she wanted to learn with a detachment that almost matched his own, but suddenly she felt far from detached, and her face burned with memories she would rather not have had surface.

      As she looked at him and knew that he was waiting for her to shed her towel and get on the bed, she wanted to protest that she needed to dry her hair and drink her coffee, to tell him that she wasn’t ready… that she needed more time. But what would such delaying tactics achieve other than an increase in her fear? So, trying not to think about what she was doing, she removed her towel, folding it as neatly as he had folded his clothes, although her fingers trembled dreadfully over the task. Then she skirted the bed, going to the opposite side from where he was standing.

      For a moment they stood facing one another across its width: two adversaries in a duel, each acknowledging the strength and power of the other in a silent exchange that encompassed more than any amount of words; and beneath the covert testing of one another’s will, beneath the subtle shifting and weighing of strengths and judging of weaknesses, like a current felt but unseen, ran the secret flow of Silver’s fears.

      In one clear, sharp second of time before she fought them down, as she looked at Jake, challenging him with the only power she had that he did not—that of her sight—she almost felt the silence around them pulse with her fear, and, as though she had said the words out loud, her mind received from his an assurance so clear that her mouth dropped open, her brain unable to comprehend that neither of them had actually spoken. Like a child in the dark, she had cried out her dread and, like an ever-watchful parent, he had heard it and comforted her.

      The shock of that mental intimacy, so unexpected and so dangerous, drove away her fear. The sheets felt cold, making her shiver, and she told herself she had imagined the intense inner reassurance… that it could not have existed. Must not have existed.

      As she felt him move On to the bed beside her, without looking at him she said tautly, ‘I’d like to get it over with as quickly as possible.’

      For one mind-destroying, bitter moment she thought he was actually going to laugh, but then she saw that the faint twitch of his mouth was caused, not by amusement, but by tension.

      ‘My feelings exactly,’ he told her drily. ‘But unfortunately it isn’t going to be as easy as that. While it might be possible for your body to accept mine merely at your command, mine, I’m afraid, is not quite so accommodating.’

      Silver felt her face burn, as much with indignation as with irritation, but what had she expected? she derided herself: that just because it was convenient for her, despite his having shown her beyond any shadow of a doubt that he felt no desire for her, his flesh should suddenly and miraculously pulse and swell with excitement at her proximity?

      Or was this simply his way of testing her, of making her prove that she had learned her lessons well? She reminded herself that if this were Charles she was with, she would not be able to have any qualms about her course of action.

      But if she had been with Charles she would want to arouse him, to excite him, to overwhelm him with the intensity of his desire for her, and there could be no Charles until this final hurdle was cleared. So she turned to him and asked distastefully, ‘What exactly do you want me to do?’

      ‘Don’t for God’s sake speak to your potential victim like that, will you?’ he murmured drily. ‘You’ll terrify him into a СКАЧАТЬ