by Penny Jordan
It never once crossed her mind that tonight she could have been sharing her bed with Charles… that Charles could have been the recipient of all that she was now squandering on Jake… wasting on Jake, whose body lay rigid with rejection beneath her own, Jake, whose hands were bruising her skin, and whose mouth remained brutally closed against the soft invasion of her lips and tongue.
But she wasn’t going to give up. After all, wasn’t it Jake himself who had taught her so coldly and so skilfully exactly how to arouse desire in any man?
She kissed his throat again, circling the hard swell of muscle with her tongue, feeling him swallow, feeling his tension.
The top half of her body was lying across his, but when she lifted her pelvis to press herself caressingly against him his hands left her arms and descended to her hips holding her off.
Silver ignored his denial of her. Her mouth touched his chest, her tongue investigating the hard flatness of his nipple. No response, none at all, but she must have learned more from him than she had thought, because his tension told its own story, and she refused to be deterred. With each touch, each caress, her own desire was growing, feeding her determination to break through the barriers of his self-control, and make him feel the need that was possessing her.
So far he hadn’t said a word, and the silence continued, cold, chilling, rejecting her as her hands and mouth moved over his body.
She knew quite well there were easier, quicker, more direct methods of arousing him than by the slow and delicate exploration of his flesh by her fingertips and mouth, but she was enjoying what she was doing, enjoying the challenge she had set herself, and enjoying, too, the subtlety of her slow assault on his senses.
When she reached his belly she stopped, sitting up in the darkness to say softly, ‘I’m not going to give up, Jake. I’m quite prepared to start at your toes in the prescribed fashion and work my way up over every inch of you until…’
She felt him flinch, and into the darkness he said harshly, ‘I don’t know what the hell you think you’re playing at, Silver, what possible pleasure you yourself—–’
‘Oh, I’m not playing,’ she told him coolly, ‘and as for pleasure…’
Before he could stop her she reached for his hand, placing it boldly over the hard swell of her bare breast and deliberately moving his hand against the hard pulse of her nipple.
‘Why… why the hell are you doing this…?’
She released his hand and looked at him. ‘I don’t know,’ she told him honestly. ‘I only know that tonight I need you as a man…’
‘As a substitute for—–’
‘Charles has never been my lover,’ Silver pointed out to him drily. ‘You have.’ She leaned over him and begged softly, ‘Please, Jake.’
His nostrils were full of the scent of her, his body tense from the effort of denying his reaction to her; there was nothing he wanted more than to roll her over and pin her to the mattress with the weight and heat of his body, while he punished her for each exquisite second of torture she had just inflicted on him by letting her feel the torment he himself had just endured.
Instead he sat up and said abruptly, ‘No.’
She hadn’t expected that. She had genuinely thought that he would give in. She had genuinely thought that he would desire her, she recognised bleakly. She had been a fool. Just because once, on one never-to-be-forgotten night he had held her, touched her, possessed her so thoroughly and so intimately that her body would never be free of its memories of him, it didn’t mean that his flesh was as vulnerably responsive to her as hers was to him.
That knowledge pierced the bubble of self-confidence, of sureness that had buoyed her up and out of her normal caution.
With the sick realisation that he meant it and that he didn’t want her came an equally sickening realisation of how much she had humiliated herself… how much she had abandoned herself.
Hot colour burned her skin, and to her horror her throat clogged with tears… Tears… Oh, God, that was all she needed. She sniffed quickly, choking them back, but not before one escaped and rolled down her face.
Jake heard the betraying sniff, and felt the dampness of her tears as they hit his skin.
‘Oh, God, no… Don’t cry…’
The moment his arms came round her her self-control shattered. She howled uncontrollably, beating at his chest with angry fists, demanding to be released.
‘Isn’t it enough that you’ve already rejected me?’ she demanded between hiccups. ‘You don’t have to humiliate me like this as well. I’m not a child…’
‘No,’ Jake agreed drily, and the underlying note of humour in his voice made her tense and look up at him.
‘I don’t need you to tell me you’re not a child, Silver,’ he told her. ‘My body is already getting that message across to me loud and clear.’
He felt her shudder and she thought she heard him say indistinctly, ‘This is madness,’ but the sensation of his mouth moving on her own completely destroyed her remaining ability to think.
For a second she hesitated, wary of further rejection, of further traps, but his tongue ran round her closed lips and the sensation of its moving against them caused her to moan softly and allow him to draw her down against the blissful hardness of his body, no longer cold and withdrawn from her, but pulsing with the same delirious heat that ached inside her own.
It was different this time from that last night they had spent together, because now her body knew the pleasure his could give it; knew it and welcomed it, eagerly accepting his touch, his possession.
He made love to her fiercely, demandingly, and her body gloried in its responsiveness to his, matching its every intensity and need; then he held her in silence while her body shuddered down from the peaks to which his had taken it.
‘Now,’ he told her, whispering the words against her mouth, ‘You can start at my toes if you still want to.’
She still wanted to, and so, it seemed, did he.
When he left her in the clear, bright daylight of the early summer morning, a daylight he couldn’t see as he silently retrieved his clothes, all the time aware of the sleeping warmth of her in the bed where he had left her, Jake wondered what madness had possessed him.
Even given that the urge to make love to her had been overwhelming, he should have resisted it. She was a complication he had no room for. He had done many things in his life that he had later regretted, but this was the first time he had knowingly made love with a woman who was using him because she couldn’t have someone else.
She might not be involved with Charles Fitzcarlton’s drug trafficking—in fact he knew now that she was not— but she had kept her awareness of Charles’s involvement from him. Through her love for her cousin, she was vulnerable to him, and now he was vulnerable to him as well. There was nothing to stop her betraying him to her cousin, warning him…
He had things to do, and not very much time to do them in, and yet even so he lingered, breathing in the warm woman-scent of her, remembering how it had felt to hold her and touch her, recalling the generosity of her giving and his own dangerous responsiveness to the pleasure of it.
When Silver woke up she was alone. She was reaching out automatically to the other side of the bed when she realised what she was doing and why. She sat up abruptly, appalled by the way her body registered Jake’s absence with aching regret.
What had happened to her? What was it about him that had made her react to him like that? A substitute for Charles, was what he had called himself when he’d refused her. She hoped that of the two of them she was the only one who knew how far off the mark that accusation was.
For days she waited, half hoping he would ring or call and half dreading it, and then, when he didn’t, she forced herself to acknowledge that what she had done had been the ultimate folly and that it was something she would be wise to forget.
It was like trying to shut a door on a floodtide, and she thanked God that it was only her body that was so physically
obsessed with him that it now yearned unceasingly for him.
It was Charles on whom she ought to be concentrating… Charles on whom all her attention should be focused. Charles with whom she would be accepting dinner engagements… Charles…
She kept on repeating his name in her head until she felt safe that her brain could echo to nothing else.
CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO
‘SO TELL me… what brought you to London?’
Seated opposite Charles in the intimate setting of a very exclusive London restaurant, Silver forced herself to remember exactly why she was here.
‘I’ve always loved it,’ she told him, giving him a provocative smile. ‘When my husband died I decided to come and live here.’
‘Your husband was much older than you… such a marriage couldn’t have been easy.’
Silver gave him a speculative smile.
‘No marriage is easy. You must know that. You’ve been married yourself.’
She made it a statement and not a question, knowing that his vanity would be flattered by the knowledge that she had been interested enough in him to make some enquiries about him.
‘A bad mistake… my marriage was a disaster. My wife… but I don’t want to bore you with my problems. I’d much rather talk about you. You fascinate me, do you know that? You’re not like any woman I’ve ever known.’
He was holding her hand, tracing the shape of her fingers with his nail. His touch repulsed her, so much so that she had to fight not to withdraw her hand from him. Panic seized her. If she felt like this when he was merely touching her hand, how was she going to manage when…?
A waiter came up to remove their plates, and Charles released her.
Thankfully she tucked her hands out of sight, fighting to conceal her tremor of revulsion. It was all so much harder than she had expected. She had thought that because she had once desired Charles, because she had been able to endure the ordeal of learning the lessons Jake had taught her, the physical intimacy she would share with Charles would be unimportant to her. But she had been wrong.
The restaurant he had brought her to was the kind of discreet establishment favoured by lovers. Nearly all the tables were occupied by couples. The atmosphere stifled her, choked her. She desperately wanted to escape to breathe clean, unperfumed air.
‘Is something wrong?’
The sharp words halted her flood of panic. Charles was no fool. He knew her sex if he knew nothing else.
‘I was just thinking about my husband,’ she lied. ‘Like yours, my marriage was not a happy one. I married him for all the wrong reasons.’ She made a wry face. ‘He was very rich, and I was very naïve… but, like you, I don’t want to spoil a very pleasant evening by talking about the past.
‘I understand you have a magnificent house in the country?’
‘Rothwell,’ Charles acknowledged. His voice almost purred over the name, and Silver wondered if he knew how much he was giving away.
‘Is it as beautiful as I’ve been told?’ she asked him.
He paused and then suggested, ‘Why not come and see for yourself?’
She allowed herself to look hesitant.
‘I’m having a small “do” there next weekend,’ he told her, observing it. ‘It’s nothing special, just a few friends over for drinks and dinner.’
Silver smiled at him as she accepted his invitation, wondering how it would feel to be back at Rothwell— without her father—as a guest…
‘We could travel down to Rothwell together early on Saturday. That will give me the chance to show you around before the others descend on us.’
He reached for her hand again and she let him take it.
‘You’re a very desirable woman, Silver, and right now I want very much to be alone with you.’
Odd to think how once those words would have thrilled her. Now they simply caused her to wonder if he really believed that she was ready to throw herself into his arms simply on the promise of spending the weekend at Rothwell. If so, he was going—– She stopped herself abruptly. She was allowing her own personal thoughts and feelings to intrude on what was simply a necessity to ensure that she had him completely within her power when she delivered the final blow. At this stage it was vitally important that she make him believe she desired him as much as he apparently desired her…
She hesitated, and then said softly, ‘I think it might be very dangerous for me to be alone with you right now…’
‘You think I’m dangerous?’ he challenged, obviously liking the thought.
She smiled at him, a coquette’s smile, all warm invitation and promise.
‘Very dangerous,’ she told him huskily, ‘especially to me… you are a very, very handsome man, and it’s a very long time since I have had the pleasure of such a man’s company.’
She saw the way his eyes glittered and the betraying tension of his body.
‘Perhaps if I were to give you my word that if I were alone with you I would behave as a perfect gentleman…’
She allowed herself to laugh, a mocking, caressing sound that made his hand tighten on hers.
‘Ah, but I’m very much afraid I might not be able to act as a lady,’ she told him teasingly, watching the hot glitter darken his eyes as he stared obviously and very pointedly from her face to her body.
‘If we were on our own right now—–’ he began, and then broke off as the waiter interrupted him to say that there was a phone-call for him.
Predictably, he didn’t ask for the phone to be brought to the table, but excused himself to go and answer it.
He was gone almost ten minutes, and when he came back he looked tense and withdrawn. Silver wondered to whom he had been talking, and about what.
For the rest of the evening he remained on edge, but once they were in the taxi on their way to her apartment he seemed to throw off his tension, sitting more close to her than Silver really liked, pressing his body purposely against hers as the cab lurched around a corner, his hand straying to her knee and from there to her thigh.
Much as she longed to brush it off, she couldn’t. Not after the come-on she had been giving him over dinner.
She knew she had done it deliberately, committing herself because she was desperately afraid that, if she didn’t, when she actually was alone with him she would panic and back off. And she couldn’t afford to allow him to guess how she really felt about him.
The taxi stopped, and Charles got out and opened the door for her. She knew he would expect to be invited in. Her body cold and tight, she did so.
In her drawing-room she offered him a drink… he accepted and she poured it, marvelling at the steadiness of her hand.
‘Nice place,’ he commented, calculating the cost of the pretty room. He had already checked that she was as wealthy as rumour suggested. He would enjoy going to bed with her; she was his kind of woman… But not tonight… that damned phone-call… sweat beaded his skin suddenly, and he shifted uneasily from one foot to the other. It was easy enough to reassure himself that he had nothing to worry about… that he could soon convince them that he could repay the money he had borrowed… He looked calculatingly around the room a second time. A rich mistress… a rich wife…
‘You’re a very beautiful woman,’ he told Silver huskily and truthfully. ‘One of the most beautiful I’ve ever seen.’
She smiled back at him, wondering what he would say if she told him that he had once called her the ugliest woman he had ever seen.
He drained his glass and came towards her purposefully.
Silver knew what was going to happen. It was, after all, what she had planned would happen—what she wanted to happen—but that didn’t stop the coldness invading the pit of her stomach when his arms came round her and his body moved close to her own.
This was Charles… Charles, whom she had once adored, worshipped… desired beyond anything else. Charles, who had made her ache and yearn, caused her sleepless nights and so many tears that she had thought she had cried them all away.
And yet now, held in his arms, his body moving eagerly against her own, his lips against her throat, hot and demanding, his hand against her breast, all she felt was a deep inner revulsion, a sickness that chilled her blood and turned her body to stone.
‘I want you…’
He must have mistaken her shudder for a tremor of excitement, because she could hear the thickening of his voice, feel the sexual tension of his body.
Oh, God, if he didn’t let her go soon she was going to be sick, but his mouth was already crawling over her skin, seeking her lips, his hot, unsteady breath making her want to retch.
‘Silver… Silver…’ He moaned her name as his teeth savaged her bottom lip and his hands moved roughly against her breasts.
She endured it for as long as she could, before breaking free and saying sharply, ‘No!’
For a moment he looked furious, and then he seemed to gather himself together, and as though it had been he and not she who had broken the embrace he said raggedly, ‘I can’t stay… I only wish I could.’
Her lip was bleeding a little where he had savaged it. She ached to touch it with her tongue, but dared not, in case he read in that small gesture an invitation to resume his lovemaking.
‘Tomorrow night I’ll take you to dinner, and then—–’
‘No…’
She had said it without even thinking, her body’s revulsion expelling the denial before she could check it.
He looked surprised and frowned, and against every screaming protest from her flesh she forced herself to say softly, ‘No… not tomorrow night. I’m afraid I already have an engagement, but perhaps lunch…?’
Lunch was safer… lunch would be easier. So she told herself while she waited for her nausea to subside and wondered painfully why it was that her body had chosen to betray her like this.
Without its support, she would still go on… still pursue her goal. She had to, she owed it to her father, but it was going to be so hard… so hard.