by Penny Jordan
Her eyes snapped open, her breathing suddenly stilted. What was she doing? Jake Fitton was gone. He had no place in her life… in her thoughts. It was Charles who was important now… Charles who was the focus of all her plans… Charles whom she must allow to pursue and seduce her, so that she in turn could taunt and humiliate him as he had once taunted and humiliated her… so that she could destroy him as he had once destroyed her father.
It was the goal to which she had directed her whole life, so why was she experiencing this almost physical shrinking back from it? Why was she suffering this almost overwhelming revulsion at the thought of allowing Charles to be her lover…?
Reaction, she told herself grimly. It was only reaction… reaction to the realisation of all that Charles really was… reaction to having the scales well and truly ripped from her eyes. It had nothing to do with Jake Fitton, nothing at all. And even if it had had, it wouldn’t have made any difference to what she intended to do. It couldn’t make any difference, she told herself hardily.
CHAPTER TWENTY
JAKE was in London. He had sold the apartment he had shared with Beth after her death, but had bought another, clinical, empty… it was simply a place to sleep and work, rather than a home. After Beth’s death, a home had been the last thing he’d wanted. He picked up a tape off the desk in front of him and inserted it into the machine, frowning as he listened to it. He had played it so many times already… first in Switzerland… now here in London.
It was coded and contained information from the men he was paying to track down those responsible for Beth’s death.
This one contained a list of names… names of pushers prominent on the London drug scene.
One of those names had struck Jake immediately… Charles Fitzcarlton.
His informer had been interested enough in Charles to supply Jake with a potted history of his background, and had added the fact that it was obvious that Charles was desperately short of money and more than likely milking his ‘employers’ of their drugs profits.
He was in a vulnerable position, so vulnerable that he might yield easily to pressure. And on the tape Jake’s informant had listed the names of several other pushers who might be ‘persuaded’ to give more information about their sources. Charles’s name had headed that list, however.
Important though that information had been, it was not that which caused Jake to play the tape over and over again. He stopped it abruptly just as his informant began to document Charles’s life story.
Placing the tips of his fingers together, Jake stared into his own inner darkness.
Charles Fitzcarlton. Well connected… good-looking… ultimately a peer of the realm… ultimately? Once his cousin was pronounced legally dead…
Geraldine Frances Fitzcarlton… a countess in her own right. Heiress to a vast fortune… a shadowy, insubstantial figure about whom little was known, other than the fact that her father’s death had caused her to commit suicide by throwing herself off the cliffs below a remote Irish castle.
Charles Fitzcarlton, Geraldine Frances… Silver… ‘my cousin Charles’.
Was there any connection, or was he allowing his intuition to play idiotic tricks on him? It was a fantastic and ridiculous assumption that Geraldine Frances Fitzcarlton, by all accounts a tragic, lonely woman who had killed herself rather than face life without her father, could possibly be the same woman he had heard swearing revenge and hatred against the man who had deceived her.
There was nothing in the tape to suggest that any relationship other than that of cousins had existed between Charles and Geraldine Frances… no hint that his intuition was right. The death of the Earl followed by the suicide of his daughter was tragic, yes, but these things happened…
And yet, why would a man as astute and intelligent as James Fitzcarlton was reputed to have been specifically tie up his estates and monies in such a way that only his daughter could inherit? Why would he draw up a will that deliberately bypassed his nephew, that deliberately excluded him from inheriting his wealth?
Why would he petition the Queen to have his titles passed on direct to his daughter?
It was common knowledge that Charles Fitzcarlton was obsessed with Rothwell and the earldom, that already, whenever he could, he anticipated his right to use the title… that he refused to take the advice of his accountants and close up Rothwell until such time as he inherited enough money to run it.
Would a man like that, with a female cousin younger than himself… a female cousin, moreover, whose father intended that she should inherit everything ahead of him, casually stand aside and allow that to happen?
Charles Fitzcarlton had married once for money… Marriage to Geraldine Frances would have secured her titles and her wealth…
Unless, of course, she had refused him… unless, of course, she had married someone else… Then the only way for him to inherit would be through her death.
His frown deepened. Silver had spoken specifically of loving the man, and someone of Charles Fitzcarlton’s stamp would not make the mistake of allowing his prey to remain available to any other fortune-hunter. Silver had been a virgin.
It was ridiculous to assume that Geraldine Frances Fitzcarlton and Silver Montaine were one and the same person, and despite his attempts to check he uncovered nothing to confirm his suspicions.
But they still remained, which meant that if she was… she must have known about Charles’s involvement with drugs. Had known and said nothing.
She wasn’t a user herself; but then, neither was Charles. As Jake drummed his fingers on the table he told himself that he couldn’t afford not to follow through and check her out completely, and that his determination to put his suspicions to the test had nothing to do with her personally. Nothing at all… And that he had come to London purely because that was where Beth had been murdered and because he was already convinced that her murder had been ordered by whoever was in charge of Ortuga’s London operation.
According to his informant, of all the pushers they had managed to identify, Charles Fitzcarlton would be the most likely to give way under pressure. He had more to lose than any of the others, lived a much higher-profile life, had a public image to maintain which would make him vulnerable to the threat of his involvement with the drug scene being made public. He must also by now be fearing the reaction of his employers to the knowledge that he had been misappropriating their profits.
So why was he experiencing this reluctance to begin putting pressure on Charles? He could, after all, be completely wrong about the man’s involvement with Silver. There was one very easy way for him to find out.
He stopped the tape, rewound it, and selected another. Each of them was carefully marked so that he could recognise them by touch. He inserted the new one into the machine and played it.
It hadn’t been hard to track down Silver. He had known she was staying in London, and he had known the milieu in which she intended moving.
Quite why he had felt the necessity, the compulsion almost, to track her down, he still wasn’t sure.
He told himself it was force of habit… insurance… common sense… but no amount of re-assuring himself that his behaviour was nothing more than an automatic reflex action totally banished the inner knowledge that he was making the classic mistake of allowing his emotions to reach out and colour his reactions.
He had come to London for one purpose and one alone, and that was to track down his wife’s murderer. He switched off the tape abruptly, his mouth grim. His first step must be to make contact with Charles.
Within a couple of hours of Charles’s departure, Silver herself had checked out of Blake’s.
Having fulfilled her purpose in staying there, there was now no need for her to remain. Her Knightsbridge apartment was waiting to welcome her, as was the interior designer.
She studied Silver discreetly as she handed over the keys. She had been curious about this particular client, whose instructions had been so meticulous and exact.
The way a person chose to decorate and furnish their home normally gave away a great deal about their personality. This woman’s instructions had been explicit… and yet, studying her, the designer discovered that she was not as she had imagined at all.
‘I want the apartment to reflect the lifestyle of a woman who is essentially a hedonist… a sensualist,’ she had instructed, and that was exactly what it did, subtly, discreetly, with no suggestion of vulgarity or ostentation… and yet this woman in her Chanel suit, her eyes cool and unreadable as she surveyed their work, was very different from what she had expected.
Silver dismissed her. She was pleased with the apartment. Its pastel colours and pretty chintzes were exactly what she had wanted. The rooms breathed warmth and perfume; they were rooms that belonged to a woman without in any way being over-feminine or fussy.
Everything Jake had taught her was reflected in this apartment, right down to the open fires that burned in the elegant grates.
Her agents had found her a housekeeper, a discreet and efficient woman in her late fifties who would live in the small staff flat attached to the apartment.
As Silver studied the deep, softly upholstered sofas, she tried to imagine Charles seated on one of them… Charles trying to make love to her…
She turned away, frowning at the way her body rejected the image.
In her bedroom was an antique French bed, lavishly draped with fabric… a large double bed with crisply laundered white sheets and pillows, not plain like the ones in Jake’s chalet; these were trimmed with expensive handmade lace and scented with pot-pourri… She smiled drily to herself. It was a bed that Jake would hate sleeping in. Jake… Jake… why did she keep allowing him into her thoughts? He had no place there…
It was Charles who should be occupying her thoughts; Charles on whom she ought to be concentrating.
Today, in his eyes, she had seen that he was attracted to her, but she had angered him by refusing to have dinner with him.
Well, tonight at the reception she would discover which emotion had been the stronger. If he appeared at the reception…
Silver dressed for the reception with the same meticulous attention to detail she had accorded to every small part of her plans.
The dress she had chosen to wear came from Lacroix and could only be worn by a woman possessing equal amounts of beauty and self-possession.
In it she would be the cynosure of all eyes; if Charles wasn’t at the reception then it wouldn’t be long before he heard reports of her appearance there; to that end, the discreet work of her agents would ensure that when the event was written up in the gossip columns her name would feature there. And if Charles was there…
Well, Charles had always liked the kudos of squiring the kind of women whom other men looked at and desired.
As she checked her make-up in the mirror, she frowned. Only on one point had she deviated from her original plans, and as her attention was caught by the small bottle of perfume on her dressing-table she wondered a little at her own weakness in wearing it.
Jake’s perfume, for Charles—a fitting gesture in so many ways… so why did she feel almost as though in choosing to wear Jake’s perfume next to her skin she was somehow taking Jake with her into this new life in which he had no place?
Judiciously Silver timed her arrival at the reception just over halfway through the evening, late enough to cause a certain amount of interest, but not so late that her arrival looked obviously contrived.
She had visited the Embassy before on many occasions, normally attending similar events to this one with her father, but, she reflected grimly as she pretended to give her full attention to the man talking to her, in those days she had never received the kind of attention she was receiving tonight.
She had known before she left Switzerland that physically she was now a beautiful woman, but she had still not fully adjusted to the effect her new face had on others. Men who had once openly avoided conversation with her now stared obviously and admiringly at her, women who before had dismissed her patronisingly now studied her with narrowed, critical eyes.
Beauty brought its own problems, she recognised grimly, fending off the unwanted advances of yet another overweight middle-aged male.
Those whom she had employed to do a little discreet preliminary PR work on her behalf had done well. Her name was familiar to enough of the other guests for those who were not familiar with it to accept her on the strength of their knowledge.
To those who chose to ask her questions she answered simply that she was and always had been attached to England, and that, finding herself widowed—and, by implication, wealthy—she had decided to make her home in London.
It was hard sometimes to remember the image she was supposed to be projecting, to remember that she must not, as she wanted to, snub the advances of the men who were soon surrounding her, that she must remember that she was no longer Geraldine Frances but Silver, and that she must act accordingly; that she must flirt and pout and generally behave as though she were the seductive, sensuous, self-centred woman she had created especially for Charles. And all the time she was talking, smiling, laughing, she was also watching, discreetly surveying the room, wondering whether or not Charles would appear.
The group she had come with had long ago split off, and she had deliberately chosen not to have a specific escort for the evening. She spent a rather sardonically amusing few minutes chatting to the Ambassador, who, while far too urbane and worldly actually to flirt with her, still discreetly managed to make his admiration plain.
Was this the same man who had dismissed her with austere and obvious disgust when her father had originally introduced them? Fastidious and meticulous, he was an excellent ambassador, but, like all men, vulnerable through his vanity…
Like almost all men, she amended, remembering one man who had not had that vulnerability.
Not for the first time, she wondered what manner of man Jake had been before he had lost his sight. He had loved his wife… that much she knew, and wished that she didn’t, and that moreover that specific bit of knowledge about him didn’t cause her the sharp pang of emotion it did cause.
To anyone watching her, and there were many, Silver appeared relaxed and totally at ease. No one could have guessed at her tension… growing slowly as the evening advanced and Charles did not appear. This was only the opening move in the game, she reminded herself. There would be other occasions… other opportunities.
She had her back to the open double doors, but there was a mirror on the opposite wall facing her, through which she could see those entering and leaving the elegant reception-room.
Even so, she did not see Charles until he was several feet away from her, his blond head shining as bright as the gold paint gilding the plasterwork on the ceiling.
In evening clothes he looked magnificent, a god among lesser and mortal men; without the cruel harshness of daylight to highlight the signs of self-indulgence that marred his physical perfection, he looked very much as he had once been, and for one second out of time Silver was instantly transported back to the past, to the time when merely to look upon Charles’s face had been enough to set her stomach churning and her heart pounding.
Perhaps something in her expression betrayed that weakness, because all of a sudden he smiled at her, a brilliant, triumphant smile that brought her abruptly back down to earth. The temptation to turn away from him and ignore him was overwhelming, but she suppressed it.
Humiliating him now in public would serve no good purpose. When she humiliated him she wanted that humiliation to be so complete, so all embracing that he would carry the scars of it with him for the rest of his life, just as she must carry hers.
As he came to her, a path seemed to open up in front of him… a testimony to his charisma… or to his arrogance, Silver thought cynically, watching the way others reacted to him.
How many people here knew that other Charles… the one that she knew so well? Some of the women, certainly… Charles, as sh
e had discovered from her agents, had a voracious appetite when it came to changing his lovers… How many of them knew still yet another side to him… the one her father had discovered… the Charles whose greed had led him into the shadowy world of drugs and all that went with it?
It was no secret that a great many wealthy and bored socialites took drugs… Drugs that were supplied by men like Charles.
He had reached her now, holding out his hands to her… Automatically she placed hers in them and suffered the focus of everyone’s curious attention as Charles lifted first one and then the other to his lips, kissing the blue-veined inner flesh of her wrists with openly sexual enjoyment.
A fierce shudder ran through her. She knew he had seen and felt it… saw the triumph leap into his eyes.
He thought she desired him. How wrong he was. Her shudder had been of revulsion.
Willing herself to remember the lessons so painfully learned, she smiled at him, and said archly, ‘Charles, what a surprise!’
This was obviously territory with which he was familiar. He returned her smile and murmured confidently, ‘A pleasant one, I hope…’
She was surprised how natural her laughter sounded, how natural and how sensual; several other people turned to look at them and Charles continued to hold her hand, obviously pleased by the attention they were getting, obviously enjoying being seen with her. Just for a moment she remembered with bitterness how he had once felt about her, and then she dismissed her own weakness, reminding herself of the high stakes she was playing for. She couldn’t afford to make a mistake this early on in the game. It was important now that she lull Charles into a false sense of security, that she flatter and please him.
She moved slightly closer to him and replied, ‘Very much so…’