Silver

by Penny Jordan

  It was a pity he knew so much about her. She had been angry when she’d discovered how much Annie had told him, but in the long run it was probably for the best. It would make any explanations so much less tedious and messy. And there would have had to be explanations, no matter whom she had chosen.

  The car drove away and the door to the chalet opened. She had left the bedroom door open, but she still couldn’t hear him moving. She had noticed that about him before: that silent, menacing tread that Annie had once told her was a legacy of his early army training.

  Annie had never told her why he had left the army and joined the special anti-drugs squad of carefully chosen operatives, working alone and in secret, reporting only to their superior in Whitehall. Whatever the reason, it was unimportant as far as her plans were concerned.

  ‘What are you doing here, Silver?’

  Silver was glad he wasn’t able to see her as her eyes widened fractionally. She hadn’t heard him come upstairs, and the sight of him standing in the doorway, looking directly at her, made her muscles clench.

  She forced her body to relax, curling her mouth in the lazy, teasing smile she had been practising, knowing that it would be reflected in her voice.

  ‘Why don’t you come over here and find out?’

  She made no comment on the fact that he had recognised her. It simply confirmed her view that she had chosen correctly… made the right decision.

  She watched as the mobile eyebrows rose. It was odd, after all he had been through, that his black hair should remain untinged by any grey at all, while she…

  ‘Silver, I’m not in the mood to play games. Simply say what you’ve come to say and then get on your way.’

  No compromise there, simply a harsh, flat statement that indicated very clearly what he thought of her. That was good…

  ‘I want you to be my lover,’ she told him equably. She had been practising this for over a week now, mentally rehearsing every question he would ask and every answer she would give, and now, with all the poise she could muster, which was considerable, she added coolly, ‘Or rather, should I say, I want you to teach me how to make love to a man so that he won’t be able to resist me?’

  She smiled as she caught the betraying indrawn breath. Much as Annie knew about her, there was one thing she did not know.

  ‘You see, Jake,’ she went on, taking firm hold of her advantage, ‘I need that expertise, and I need it very badly.’

  ‘What the hell kind of game is this?’ he asked her angrily, and she knew that she had broken through the tough armour of his self-assurance because he swore at her, something she had never heard him do before. An odd conceit in a man who lived the way he did.

  ‘No game,’ she assured him smoothly. ‘Annie’s told you a lot about me, hasn’t she? About why I’m here? About what I intend to do…?’

  She saw from his face that she was right, and went on as though he had invited her to do so.

  ‘Unfortunately, there’s one major stumbling block. As a virgin, I’m afraid that I rather lack the—er—expertise necessary for my plans…’

  ‘A virgin…?’

  She gave him a cold smile which showed in her voice as she bit off the words. ‘Amazed? You needn’t be. As my ex-fiancé once commented, a woman as ugly as me in both face and body is hardly likely to attract lovers. Of course,’ she added pleasantly, ‘you can’t see me… and I understand that physically you might find it impossible to become my lover, but I’m sure if you were to imagine I were someone else…’

  Now she had broken through his guard.

  ‘My God,’ he swore, ‘what kind of woman are you?’

  ‘The kind who generally gets what she wants and pays generously for it,’ she told him sweetly.

  ‘Pay?’

  For the first time in the months she had known him she saw him make an awkward movement. He stepped forward automatically, as though he intended to reach out, grab hold of her, and inflict a physical punishment on her; but she had deliberately moved the chair from beside the bed to the open doorway, and as he walked into it he tensed and swore savagely under his breath. Her father would have described what she had done as cheating. She tried not to admit that knowledge. She couldn’t afford that kind of weakness… not now… not ever again.

  ‘Please don’t be foolish about this, Jake,’ she said with composure. ‘Obviously I should wish to pay for the skills you can teach me, just as I would pay for any other commodity.’

  ‘Just the way you paid for your new face,’ he jeered unkindly, but she didn’t wince. Why should she? Once she had been sensitive, vulnerable, easily hurt by others, but not any more.

  ‘At least I have a genuine reason for being here,’ she told him sardonically, unable to resist the temptation to punish him just a little. She saw that her barb had found its mark. He tensed momentarily, his whole stance betraying wariness, and then it was gone and he had himself under control.

  ‘Well, you’ve come to the wrong man, Silver,’ he told her curtly. ‘I don’t need your money. Now get the hell out of my bed before I throw you out…’

  Now she had him cornered, and the fierce thrill of triumph that ran through her was visible in the brilliant glitter of her eyes.

  ‘You’re lying, Jake,’ she countered softly, and then, before he could speak, added coolly, ‘I could allow you to continue to lie to me, but I don’t have that kind of time to waste. You see, I happened to be standing outside Annie’s sitting-room when you were telling her how desperately you did need money.’

  What she hadn’t heard was why. Annie, it seemed, knew far more about Jake than she was prepared to admit. It had been obvious to Silver from the quality of their conversation that they were two people who knew one another well—as friends, not as lovers—and, intrigued as she was by the mystery that seemed to enshroud Jake, she was pretty sure that his presence at the clinic had nothing at all to do with any supposed reaction to his surgery, as Annie had originally intimated to her in the days when she’d had far too much to accomplish herself to worry about other people’s affairs.

  Lost in her own thoughts, Silver took several seconds to become alive to the deep aura of menace emanating from Jake. It washed over her in an icy cold blast, activating her own instinct for self-preservation.

  ‘What you want the money for, what you do with it—that’s your concern and not mine, but don’t waste both our time by lying about not needing it,’ she told him, ignoring his anger.

  She waited, feeling the tension ease out of her body a little as the menace evaporated.

  ‘Hasn’t anyone ever told you that it’s dangerous to listen outside other people’s doors?’ he asked her.

  Silver shrugged the question aside and said firmly, ‘I’m prepared to pay you a million pounds—–’

  She didn’t get any further; Jake interrupted her with a smothered curse.

  ‘God! If it’s just your virginity you want to lose, you could lose it for free any night of the week just by picking up someone—–’

  ‘It isn’t,’ she interrupted him flatly. ‘If you’d listened to what I said originally, you’d realise that. My virginity isn’t of any importance. I simply mentioned it to illustrate why I need the expertise you can teach me. It isn’t pleasure I want from you, Jake. It’s simply knowledge. A crash course in what turns a man on, in what sends him out of his mind with desire… In what makes him forget everything else in the driving need to possess one particular woman.’

  ‘Go and buy yourself a sex manual,’ he jeered. ‘It will come much cheaper than a million pounds.’

  But Silver could see where the tiny betraying nerve pulsed in his jaw as his mouth compressed, and she felt a corresponding savage kick of triumph in her own stomach. She was going to win… whether he knew it or not, she was going to win.

  She didn’t make the mistake of letting him sense her triumph. He might be blind, but his other senses, already honed by the years he had spent staying alive in one after another of the world’s
danger zones, had been hardened by the accident, compulsively perfected by what Annie had once, in an unguarded moment, described to her as the strongest will she had ever come across. His perception was a hundred times greater than that of the majority of sighted human beings.

  ‘I’ll give you twenty-four hours to think over my proposition,’ she told him coolly. ‘After that, the deal’s off.’

  As she spoke, her voice was cold and brisk, formidably like that of her father, a man who had single-handedly run one of the world’s most successful private business empires. It had none of the deliberate sensuality she had injected into it before. She was a clever woman, who for the first time in her life was learning to direct that intelligence into promoting for herself a false image—which in time she was determined would become herself—and she had already learned the power of projecting conflicting messages. She did it now, contrasting the frozen chill of her voice with the deliberately erotic movements of her body. She slipped off the bed and walked slowly up to and then past him, holding herself tall, using her powerful imagination to create the role she needed.

  She was a high priestess of an ancient religion, sure of her strength and her power, knowing that her body was one of her strongest tools, unconcerned by her nudity. Her hair rippled down her back, a silver cloud, her skin warmed by the room’s heat.

  She didn’t touch him—that would have been a beginner’s mistake—but she walked close enough to him to be quite sure he would be aware of her nudity… of her body, with its woman’s scents and allure.

  Annie had told her that he was generally an abstemious man who didn’t indulge in any of life’s pleasures greedily. It was an admission Silver had rather trapped the other woman into giving.

  A dulcet comment about the anomaly of the fact that he was a man in his early thirties apparently without any intimate relationship in his life had provoked Annie into defending him, and had also elicited the information that he had once been married and that his wife was now dead.

  Silver had sensed that Annie was torn between protecting Jake’s privacy and telling her more. She had been curious to know how his wife had died, but not curious enough to push Annie too hard.

  She had other ways of finding out all there could possibly be to find out about him if she so chose… there were those admirable men of business in Switzerland who had looked after her father’s affairs so discreetly and who now looked after hers. But Jake Fitton’s past held no interest for her, and neither did his future. She had a use for him, that was all—a use that, once finished, would cease to be of any importance.

  He let her walk past him without moving, looking stoically towards the window as though unaware of the tormenting, warm human presence of her.

  Her clothes were in his bathroom. She opened the door, wondering what she would have done if he had given way and reached for her.

  She didn’t like admitting that she could make mistakes, and had he reached for her she would have had to acknowledge that she had made one.

  She didn’t want a man who wanted her, who felt desire for her… just as she didn’t want to know anything about Jake other than the fact that he suited her requirements admirably and that he disliked her enough to ensure that their relationship did not cross any of the barriers she intended to set around it.

  Yes, he was ideal for her purpose, this cold, angry, embittered human being who looked at her with those hawk’s eyes that couldn’t see her, but that still held bitterness and dislike. She approved of that. She understood it and could relate to it. She needed him, and she meant to coerce him into submitting to that need.

  CHAPTER TWO

  SILVER waited out the twenty-four hours in her chalet. The oil sheikh had installed a Jacuzzi in a specially built extension that was raised on pillars some thirty feet above the ground.

  The room was circular, one third of its wall-space taken up by specially treated glass that allowed those inside to look out, but no one to look in. From the Jacuzzi the view of the mountains was spectacular.

  Low divans followed the curve of the glass wall, heaped with priceless rugs and silk cushions. The jacuzzi was large enough to hold an entire rugby team, and sometimes, when she relaxed in it, Silver wondered about the women who had shared it with the sheikh.

  Had they enjoyed the experience? He was fifty-odd years old and fat, with heavy jowls and small, greedy eyes. His hands flashed with jewels and his beard smelled of perfume.

  Silver had rented the chalet through an intermediary who had been instructed to describe her as a very wealthy middle-aged widow. She had not wanted any unheralded visits from the chalet’s owner while she was in residence, something which she had heard on the grapevine had happened to a beautiful, amoral socialite she knew, who had described the event with a shudder of distaste.

  The socialite’s companion, a sleek, too pretty nineteen-year-old boy with homosexual tendencies, had laughed maliciously and taunted, ‘Oh, come on, you must have been tempted. They say he’s a very generous lover, and gives uncut stones as a mark of his appreciation. The more appreciative he is, the higher the carat of the diamond.’ And he had looked pointedly at the brilliantly cut stone she had been wearing on her finger.

  Everyone had laughed until she had told him tartly, ‘This, my dear one, is a fake. He also punishes those who don’t please him by knocking them around or passing them on to his bodyguards.’

  Silver had no real fears that he would arrive unexpectedly. She moved languidly in the warm water and then got out. The twenty-four hours were almost up, and she had heard nothing from Jake.

  She dried herself, standing carelessly in front of the huge window, enjoying the room’s heat. A jungle of plants covered the back wall, turning the room into a luxurious green cavern of tropical indolence, an erotic contrast to the crisp sharpness of the snow outside.

  Before she dressed she smoothed body lotion into her skin; it had the same expensive perfume as her scent. It left her skin velvet-soft and with the same lustrous gleam as expensive heavy satin.

  Jake had another two hours. After that she would start packing for her return trip.

  The phone rang, and she dropped the silk underwear she had just picked up, reaching for the receiver, subduing the wild dance of elation that sang through her blood.

  ‘Silver?’

  It wasn’t Jake. She forced down her disappointment.

  ‘Annie. How are you?’

  ‘Fine. Can you make it for dinner on Friday? It will only be a fairly informal affair. Some old friends are passing through. Jake will be there…’

  ‘Does he know you’ve invited me?’ Silver questioned her, wondering if this was a skilful ploy of Jake’s to evade her time-limit and yet accept her terms at the same time.

  ‘He doesn’t even know yet that I’m going to invite him,’ Annie told her.

  ‘Mm… Friday… I’m afraid I won’t be able to make it. I won’t be here.’

  There was a short silence, and then Annie queried almost sharply, ‘So you’re going through with it, then? I understand why you feel the way you do, but is it really wise? Wouldn’t it be better to simply leave things as they are? To put the past behind you?’

  ‘No,’ Silver told her with emotionless economy. They had been through this so many times before, ever since in that moment of weakness she had confessed to Annie how important it was to her that she reach the goal she had set herself—an impossible goal, some might claim; an unhealthy, even dangerous goal, others might say… especially Annie… especially if she knew the full truth. There were certain things that Silver had kept back from her, certain truths which she had suppressed because even now she could hardly accept them herself.

  To have learned that the man she loved had not only betrayed her but was also involved in her father’s death, and in supplying drugs to other members of the wealthy and élite circles he moved in, had devastated her.

  No, these were not things that could be told to anyone. Charles had boasted to her that he was be
yond the reach of the law, that he had powerful friends who would protect him… well, she was going to show him that, though he might think himself invincible, he was vulnerable just as she had been vulnerable… just as her father had been vulnerable. She was going to bring him down… to destroy him… to…

  ‘Silver, think!’ Annie cautioned her. ‘If you do succeed, what then—what afterwards?’

  ‘I don’t care about afterwards,’ Silver told her truthfully.

  In her cluttered, untidy office, Annie stared at the calendar on the wall. It depicted a paradisiacal Indian Ocean island, all pale yellow sands, emerald seas and waving palm trees. If she was truthful, she had never felt happy about doing Silver’s operation; that was why she had abandoned the lucrative field of cosmetic surgery in the first place. The puritan in her had balked at what she was doing… And yet there had been something about Silver that had called out to her for help… something in her very desolation and determination that she hadn’t been able to resist. She had felt an awareness of the extent of her suffering, of her need… she, who had thought herself armoured against emotionalism, just hadn’t been able to refuse to help her.

  And then, of course, there had been the money.

  Five million pounds to help finance her clinic here in Switzerland… her very special clinic where she used her skills to treat the victims of human violence and destructiveness, mending ruined faces and bodies torn, ripped apart… destroyed by human cruelty.

  All her skill, though, hadn’t been enough to save Tom.

  As always, the memory of her husband weakened her, pain sweeping through her, blotting out the environment of her hospital with its orderly, sane demands on her, taking her to another place… another life and the man she had shared them with.

  It was no good remembering Tom. He was never going to come back, never going to bound into their flat, sweeping her off her feet and into bed. She trembled, remembering how it had been between the two of them, and knowing that it was as much because of that… because of all she had shared with Tom that Silver would never have… that she had finally been persuaded to carry out the operations which had given Silver her new face.