by Penny Jordan
‘Already your victim is disarmed. He’s totally forgotten that he wasn’t sure he wanted to have dinner with you.
‘As soon as dinner’s over, you start getting a little on edge. You look at your watch… make it subtly obvious that your attention isn’t really on your victim. He’ll feel the withdrawal symptoms like a blast of Arctic air. You announce hesitantly that you really must leave. On the way home he asks you if something’s wrong. You hesitate and then admit to man-trouble. You’re expecting a phone-call or whatever. He then starts thinking he’s misunderstood the entire situation and suffers the consequent challenge to his ego. When you invite him in for a drink, he’s only too eager to accept and offer you his “brotherly” advice—–’
‘Oh, come on,’ Silver interrupted him acidly. ‘That wouldn’t deceive a five-year-old. It’s so obvious.’
‘Never underestimate the efficacy of the obvious. That is why it is obvious, after all.’
‘This is ridiculous,’ Silver told him sharply. ‘I haven’t come here to play these kind of games. What I require you to instruct me in is sexual technique. That’s all.’
‘If that’s the way you want it.’
He shrugged and seemed completely unaffected by her outburst. Silver, on the other hand, was flushed and angry. Did he think her such a fool that she hadn’t got the intelligence or the ability to be able to coax her prey into her carefully baited trap? She had seen others do it often enough.
‘I’m hungry,’ she said, aggressively now. ‘Do I get any dinner, or is that an optional extra?’
There was a small silence. She could feel him assessing her, and she cursed herself for so nearly losing her temper. He was probing her for her weaknesses as deliberately and cold-bloodedly as she had searched for his.
‘Board and lodging is inclusive,’ he told her unemotionally.
Over dinner neither of them spoke, Silver because she was still too angry, as much with herself as with him. His silence, she suspected, had a more dangerous and manipulative motive.
She didn’t offer to help afterwards as he loaded the dishwasher and deftly restored the kitchen to pristine order.
He hadn’t offered her anything to drink during dinner, or had anything himself, and he didn’t offer her anything now, saying briskly as he walked back into the room, ‘Well, we’d better make a start, hadn’t we? We’ll take all the opening stages as accomplished. Your victim has reached the stage where he’s ready to contemplate wanting to make love to you.’
She was sitting in one of the chairs in front of the fire, and as he came towards her he told her drily, ‘In order to facilitate matters, it might be advisable if I show you what’s possible, preferable—and desirable.’
He sat down on the sofa and added, ‘Come and sit here,’ and when she would have sat next to him said firmly, ‘No, not there… Here on the floor.’
Silver shot him a suspicious glance, but his face was perfectly grave and composed, as controlled and emotionless as though he were quite simply a lecturer instructing a rather dull pupil.
As she knelt ungraciously at his feet, he told her wryly, ‘In the harems of the East, the concubines used to be taught to wriggle snakelike upwards from the foot of the bed, adoring their master’s person with their hands and lips as they went.’
Silver was glad that he couldn’t see the betraying wave of colour that burned her skin. With great difficulty she managed to stop her colour from fluctuating.
‘Not that I’m suggesting you do the same thing, at least not at this stage, but it’s a point worth remembering. Now, sit in front of me, resting your back against my legs.’
Silver did as he instructed, sitting ramrod-straight as she stared into the fire.
‘Now, when I speak to you, instead of turning round to look at me you can tilt your head back so that, were I able to see, what I would see would be the undoubtedly tempting line of your exposed throat… your breasts… very temptingly within easy reach of my hand… thus.’
She wasn’t prepared for the brief, clinical touch of his hand, and her body flinched at the contact until she willed it into acquiescence. ‘I could, if I wished, lean down to kiss you, or, more probably, reach down to pull you up over my body, like so.’
His hands fitted easily beneath her armpits, and although she was so tall he turned her easily, so that for a brief, startling moment of time her face was pressed against his hard thigh. Then he was drawing her upwards, as though she were as fluid as a piece of silk.
‘At this stage if I were physically aroused you would be aware of it, and if I weren’t… Well, there are several options open to you, depending upon how much time you have and how far the relationship has already advanced.
‘If it’s still in its early stages and you think I’m drawing you up to kiss you, like so…’
He lifted her easily so that she was virtually draped across his body. One hand in the hollow of her back pressed her torso against his; the other found her nape and locked smoothly in her hair, his mouth cold and clinical on hers.
She wondered a little unkindly if he closed his eyes when he kissed her or if his perpetual darkness rendered it unnecessary.
Her own had closed instinctively, more to blot out the sight of him than to focus her awareness on his mouth, which was just as well, she acknowledged grimly, because there was certainly nothing provocative or erotic in its distant possession.
His eyes weren’t closed, but his lids were lowered so that his dark irises glittered between them. She lay totally unmoving against him, not wanting to remember how she had felt when Charles had kissed her—how joyously, frantically grateful she had been that he loved and wanted her; how eager to respond… to please…
‘You’re not concentrating.’ The harsh criticism jolted her out of her memories, her body tensing in dislike before she could stop it.
‘You’re supposed to be learning how to arouse a man to desire, not wallowing in self-pitiful memories,’ he derided her.
She stifled her rage that he should so easily have followed her thoughts.
‘Now listen and remember. You’ve gained an advantage—physical contact. Now you’ve got to make the most of it… turn a tentative embrace into an erotic enticement.’ When she said nothing, he muttered under his breath, ‘My God, what the hell happened to you when they were handing out good old-fashioned feminine instinct?’
She could have told him that she had never been encouraged to develop her femininity; that her father had treated her as the son he could never have; that plain women, ugly women, as she had heard herself described, were not given many opportunities to develop such instincts. But instead she folded her mouth into a hard line and reminded him coldly, ‘If I had those kinds of instincts, I wouldn’t need you to teach me, would I?’
He was still holding her, but there was nothing intimate about it, apart from the proximity of their bodies, his own all hard, solid, unyielding muscle, unprepared to accommodate her more vulnerable softness, so that leaning into him and being held there hurt her breasts. She tried to ease her discomfort by moving away, but the weight of his hand on her back wouldn’t allow her to put any space between them, and all she could do was move slightly sideways.
‘Let go of me,’ she complained. ‘I can hardly breathe.’
She felt his chest expand as he suddenly took a deep breath and she winced at the uncomfortable pressure against her breasts.
‘You can feel that, can you?’ he asked her.
‘Yes.’
‘Well, that’s a start, at least. Now this time, when I kiss you, I want you to move your body against mine. Here,’ he told her, the hand in her hair sliding unerringly to her waist and then upwards to the curve of her breast, touching her briefly before moving away. ‘And here…’ His other hand left the hollow of her back and traced the curve of her hip.
‘As rhythmically as you can manage. I trust I don’t have to tell you what kind of rhythm,’ he added under his breath, and Silver was glad that he couldn
’t see the fierce flood of angry colour that burned her face. She wanted to wrench herself away from him and tell him that she would find someone else to help her, but the stubborn streak of hardiness that had enabled her to survive so much wouldn’t let her. There was far more than mere pride at stake here.
‘Now, just in case you haven’t already realised it, the object of this exercise is to transform what is on my part merely a light kiss into… Well, let’s see what you can turn it into, shall we?’
She hated him… Hated the cold, dismissive way he spoke to her, the way he touched her… the way he made no effort to hide his dislike and contempt. But she needed him too much to show her feelings, and so she waited as his hands moved back to her body and he held her as he had done before, pressing the same cold mouth to her own.
Instinctively she froze, while her mind screamed its impatience with her body’s ineptness and she forced her unwilling muscles to obey her mental commands, moving her body against his, trying to imagine that he was Charles, and that this situation was real.
It was harder than she had thought, her body made clumsy and bashful by the unresponsiveness of his. It was like trying to soften iron, she decided angrily, knowing even before his mouth left hers that she had failed to impress him.
It was a shock to open her eyes and find his boring into her, as though he really could see her. Her heart jerked uncomfortably and she pulled away from him, saying bitterly, ‘Is all this really necessary?’
‘You seemed to think so… Look, I’ll show you how it should be done and then we’ll give it another try. Now concentrate,’ he instructed her, taking hold of her, ignoring her body’s tense rejection as he manoeuvred her ungently on to the sofa and then kept her there with the weight of his body.
‘Now,’ he said grimly against her mouth, ‘this is what should happen.’
This time his mouth was just as clinical, but it moved slowly and subtly on hers, matching the slow tempo of his body, the subtle rotation of his hips pressing her deeper into the sofa, the movement of his chest against her breasts, his hands in her hair, as he deliberately increased the rhythm, enforcing their erotic cycles on her body. He held her head between his hands so that she couldn’t evade his mouth, making a thousand unknown pulses leap under her skin, making her breasts swell and harden and her belly turn weak. The rhythm quickened, changed and became more forceful, and then, shockingly, stopped.
‘This is what I meant when I told you to move your body against mine,’ she heard him saying calmly in her ear. ‘If he’s attracted to you, it should turn him on. Now it’s your turn.’
He levered himself away from her briskly, leaving her to stare up at him. She felt too shocked to move, her pride bruised by the inescapable knowledge of the effect he had had on her. She shuddered as she sat up, wondering why on earth she felt so weak.
As she looked at him, sitting relaxed and composed at the other end of the sofa, she knew there was simply no way she could do to him what he had just done to her.
He must have read her mind, she suspected, because suddenly his voice changed, softening slightly.
‘Forget about me. Just try imagining that I’m someone else—this all-important man that all this is for.’
The palms of her hands had gone damp. She was more scared than she had ever been in her life, even when Annie had explained to her just what the surgery she had wanted would involve… how painful it would be… how potentially dangerous. She didn’t want to touch him… didn’t want to experience his amusement and contempt when she failed to match the effortless sensuality he had just shown her. Was it just experience that brought such skill, or was there more to it than that? Did you have to be born with a facility for it? If so… If so, her plan was doomed, and she wasn’t going to allow that to happen.
Taking a deep breath, she got up.
‘We’ll take it from the top this time, when you’re sitting on the floor.’
Obediently she sat at his feet, closing her eyes and willing herself to believe that she wasn’t here in this chalet, but in the library at Rothwell, that it wasn’t Jake’s body behind her, but Charles’s. She breathed slowly and deeply, trying to relax, trying to capture the evocative scent of old leather and wood that permeated the high-ceilinged room. Trying to imagine the heat of the fire, the guttering of the candles on the desk behind the old leather chesterfield, the feel of Charles’s hands on her hands as he reached for her and twisted her round in his arms, drawing her up over his thighs.
She tried to imagine she was water, amorphous and fluid, flowing against him; her hands touched his chest, feeling the hardness of muscle that unexpectedly flexed beneath her palms. Again the touch of that cold mouth; for a second her concentration wavered and her nails dug into his shoulders as she tensed, but then she pushed Jake’s image to one side and fought to superimpose over it that of Charles.
The kiss was warm and teasing, as Charles’s had been, but instead of accepting it shyly and awkwardly she remembered what Jake had taught her. She was a powerful, seductive woman, and he was her victim. She murmured softly beneath the cold mouth and slid her fingers into his hair, frowning momentarily, conscious of its texture and thickness, knowing by some form of osmosis that Charles’s fair, fine hair would never feel like this, vibrant with male energy. For a moment her confidence faltered, the image of Charles she was fighting to fix behind the closed eyelids fracturing and the pieces reassembling into Jake’s face. She shivered and suppressed the image, telling herself fiercely that this wasn’t Jake, it was Charles… Charles, and that this was her chance to take hold of her own fate and shape it… form it. This was her chance to start exacting payment, and to do that she must seduce him away from other loyalties… other loves.
She moved her body sinuously, ignoring the unresponsive muscle and tissue that was Jake, letting her movements whisper promises of pleasure, trying to recreate the rhythms Jake had shown her, forcing her mouth to soften and linger coaxingly on the implacable, shuttered lips that refused to give her any encouragement.
When Jake took hold of her shoulders and held her away she stared at him, waiting for his judgement. This time her body had not reacted the way it had when he had kissed her, for which she was profoundly grateful. That was a complication she didn’t need or want. Nor did she want to remember that, despite all she had felt for Charles, he had never drawn that involuntary, unstoppable feeling from her.
‘You’re beginning to get the idea,’ Jake told her.
Beginning… Silver glared at him, conscious of a fierce stab of disappointment. What had she expected? she derided herself. Lavish praise? She suppressed her chagrin and said as lightly as she could, ‘I see. And how long will it be, do you suppose, before I’ve absorbed it to your satisfaction?’
‘Who knows, but until you have we don’t go any further.’
As though he heard the angry protests locked in her throat, he said evenly, ‘What do you want from this, Silver? You told me you wanted to be able to seduce a man to the point where he’d virtually kill to have you. Judging on your present performance, you wouldn’t even be a good lay; you’d be forgotten even before the bed had gone cold,’ he told her brutally, and although the words cut into her ego like thin whip-strokes she knew he was telling the truth.
‘Now… we’ll do it again, and remember, a seductress doesn’t necessarily love the man, but she does love herself and her power over him, and because of that she enjoys what she’s doing. She loves making him ache and burn… making him want…’
An hour later, her throat burning with suppressed tears of rage, her pride cut to rags and her temper burning through her like vitriol, Silver pulled back from Jake’s restraining hands and gritted, ‘Don’t tell me… I know… try again. Tell me something, Jake. What exactly do I have to do to get a pass mark?’
He wouldn’t release her, and a flash of caution warned her against trying to overcome his physical strength. She reminded herself that there was nothing personal in this; that it was
idiocy to let her dislike for him prejudice her progress. After all, she had chosen him.
‘I should have thought that was obvious,’ he told her. He was beginning to sound terse, and his mouth snapped shut with uncompromising hardness. She had known all along that he wasn’t a man who would suffer incompetence easily, and now he was proving it to her. ‘When you can arouse me, you’ll get your pass.’
Arouse him? She couldn’t stop the shudder jolting through her as she snatched her hands away from his shoulders.
‘We’re talking about a physical reaction, nothing more,’ he told her drily, correctly reading her reaction. ‘A physical reaction to deliberate provocation. It isn’t impossible. It isn’t easy, either… I don’t like you, and I certainly don’t want you,’ he told her frankly, ‘but until you can draw that involuntary physical response from my flesh, we don’t go any further. There wouldn’t be any point.’ He gave her a hard look which made her catch her breath until she remembered that he couldn’t actually see her.
‘Now, let’s try it again, and this time remember: the sooner you get it right, the sooner we can move on to the next stage, and ultimately the sooner you and I can go our separate ways.’
It should have been all the encouragement she needed, but it had exactly the opposite effect. She became unbearably conscious of herself and of him, and totally unable to superimpose Charles’s image on to his features, no matter how tightly she tried to close her eyes and use her imagination. Her movements became clumsy, her body tense and awkward.
After three humiliating attempts to recapture her earlier burgeoning skill had failed, she was tempted to call the whole thing off.
She was too demoralised even to hide from him how she felt, pushing her hair back off her hot face as she protested angrily, ‘It’s no use. I’ll never get it right…’