by Penny Jordan
‘Which is your room?’ he persisted, and dizzily she told him, allowing him to draw her towards it.
It was a dream… a fantasy… it had to be, and yet there was nothing dreamlike about the way he undressed and then waited for her to come to him, smoothing his hands over her body, making her shudder in eager delight.
It had been so long since she had held him… touched him; she couldn’t contain what she was feeling, crying out his name when he touched her, twisting frantically beneath him as he entered her, crying out to him how much she wanted him as the earth fell away beneath her.
He stopped then and she came crashing back to reality, vulnerable and afraid.
‘At last. Say it again,’ he commanded, and she shivered and shook her head, sickened and ashamed.
‘Why?’ she asked him, as the tears thickened in her throat and the pain knifed sharply inside her. ‘Why are you doing this?’
‘Why?’ His voice was harsh, almost bitter. ‘Perhaps because I’m sick of waiting for you to come to me, of aching for you at night, of wondering when the hell you’re going to stop running and start living…’
‘Waiting for me to come to you—but—–?’
‘Don’t tell me you haven’t wanted to,’ he interrupted roughly. ‘Don’t try to pretend that you haven’t wanted me… needed me. I might be blind, but I’m not stupid… you love me.’
He said it challengingly, almost desperately, and suddenly she knew.
‘Yes,’ she told him simply. ‘I do.’
He reached out to shape her face, his touch almost anguished.
‘You little fool,’ he said roughly. ‘Why did you go away like that?’
‘I thought you didn’t want me, and I knew if I stayed I’d end up begging you.’
‘You, begging? You’ve got pride like the walls of that damned castle of yours… impenetrable…’
‘Those walls crumbled,’ she reminded him, and then, sliding her hands into his hair, said against his mouth, ‘Jake… please love me. I love you so much.’ She faltered and looked at him, drawing away. ‘Or is all this to punish me, to—–?’
He took hold of her and held her gently. ‘No. I’m not a sadist. Hurting people doesn’t give me any pleasure. I fought against loving you, yes… but I’d have fought against loving anyone.’
‘Because of Beth?’
‘Partly… it was my fault she died. If I hadn’t married her… She was such a child… in many ways she reminded me of my brother Justin. She needed me… unlike you. You’ve never needed me, have you?’
She laughed. ‘Is that what you think? I need you all the time, Jake, in more ways than you can possibly know; I need you so much that if you asked it of me I’d turn my back on Rothwell and walk away from it without a second thought.’
‘Gloria’s death has made me a wealthy man,’ he told her obliquely. ‘Wealthy enough to marry and settle down… to raise a family…’
Her heart was beating far too fast, and even as she tried to control her breathing she knew he was aware of what she was feeling. His thumb was on the pulse in her wrist, monitoring its frantic race.
‘Would you care for a husband, Silver?’
‘Only if that husband is you.’
She saw him reach for her through the blur of her tears. She found his mouth eagerly with her own, letting down all her barriers, letting him feel what the touch and taste of him was doing to her.
Later, when they were lying curled together in the middle of her bed, she whispered to him, ‘In a way I’m glad that you’ve never seen me; this face I have now is beautiful, but it’s only outward beauty…’
‘I have seen you,’ Jake contradicted her gently. ‘I’ve seen the woman you are inside, and it’s her that I love. A beautiful woman marrying a blind man; the Press will have a field day. They won’t know that to us neither of those things is important. It’s you I love, Silver, not your face, nor even your highly desirable body… It’s you, the woman, and I started loving her a long time ago in a chalet in Switzerland, when I listened to the pain in her voice and recognised its shadowing of my own pain, when I realised that here was a woman who had suffered as I had suffered; a woman who was real.
‘Beauty is, after all, in the eye of the beholder, and my eyes see the inner woman, not the outer.’
Silver waited a while, absorbing the wonder and the promise of all that he was saying to her, and then, after they had kissed, deliberately lightened their mood by saying teasingly, ‘My perfume… I never did find out how you managed to get it into my room.’
He laughed. ‘That was the easy bit… I simply used a courier service. I dared not risk delivering it myself.’
‘But you wanted me to know it was from you.’
‘Yes,’ he agreed. ‘I suspect that even then I knew in my heart of hearts how much I was committed to you.’
‘You had the perfume specially blended…’
‘I drove them mad. What I wanted was a perfume that reminded me of the scent of your skin… of you…’
‘I love it,’ she told him. ‘Even though I was furious with you when I opened it.’
‘But you wore it, all the same…’
‘I told myself that I’d worn Charles’s perfume with you, so it was only fair that I wore yours with—–’ She broke off and shuddered. ‘Even now sometimes I can’t believe that it’s over… you could so easily have died.’
‘We both could, but we didn’t. It’s all in the past now, and that’s where it should stay.’
They were married three months later, and their eldest son was born at Rothwell on the anniversary of the night his parents had first celebrated their love there.
They had already decided that if he was a boy he was to be called James Justin Richard and, if a girl, simply Beth.
It had seemed a fitting tribute to the memories of those they had loved and whom they would always remember—with grace and with gratitude.
ISBN: 978-1-474-03251-3
SILVER
© 1989 Penny Jordan
Published in Great Britain 2015
by Mills & Boon, an imprint of Harlequin (UK) Limited
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