Silver. PENNY JORDAN
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can’t threaten me, Jake. I could walk out of here right this moment and there’s not a thing you could do about it.’
She looked at him, and something cynical and world-weary in his expression tightened the coil of panic gripping her.
‘You can’t even see me, never mind stop me—–’
She broke off, shaking with a mixture of panic-based rage and a deep sense of shame. That she, who had born so many taunts and cruel words because of her own physical handicap, should use such a weapon against someone else sickened her. She took one look at Jake’s shuttered, hard face, and the words of apology stuck in her throat.
‘If you want to walk out of here, Silver, I’m not going to stop you,’ Jake told her quietly.
There was no recognition of her insult, her cruelty… her immaturity… Nothing other than the weary patience of an adult for a recalcitrant, awkward child. His reaction, so mild and restrained, bit into her soul like a tempered steel whip, lacerating her pride until it was raw with pain.
‘You aren’t the only one wishing this were over, you know,’ he told her calmly. ‘It would be the easiest thing in the world right now for me to let you walk away from here—as you just said, I can’t stop you.’
Her face burned with guilt and self-contempt. His very acceptance where she had expected anger, his calmness where she had expected ferocity, made her feel far worse than if he had lost his temper with her.
The trouble was… the trouble was, she ached for him to make some betrayal of vulnerability—of humanity. At the moment she felt like a stupid child confronted by a particularly intelligent and mature adult.
She wanted to bring him down to her own level, she admitted wearily. She wanted to weaken him for the sake of her own conceit.
She closed her eyes, feeling her stomach muscles knot. When had it happened, this dangerous desire to shift the entire axis of their relationship… this need to make him respond to her on a personal level, even if that response came only from anger?
As she opened her eyes, she tensed, realising that he had moved and was now standing within inches of her.
‘And it’s not true that just because I can’t see you, I can’t find you,’ he told her softly. His hand touched her face and he said quietly, ‘It isn’t very pleasant when we make discoveries about ourselves that we don’t like, is it?’
And Silver knew, immediately and shockingly, that he was as fully aware of her most private thoughts as if they had been his own.
She tried to step back from him, but he wouldn’t let her.
‘Acknowledging that we aren’t perfect and then learning to make our vices work as well for us as our virtues is an important step on the road to maturity.’
And then, before she could speak, he added almost ruefully, ‘I do know what it’s like, you know. I have been there myself… which is why I cautioned you against this goal you’ve set for yourself. All right, so you loved the guy and you lost him… He hurt you, and now you want to hurt him back…’
‘There’s more to it than that,’ Silver told him stiffly. ‘A lot more…’
His hand left her face and she discovered that she was free to move away, but for some reason she no longer felt the need to.
It was an odd sensation to be talking with him like this… to be communicating with him as one human being to another.
‘Such as?’
Later, questioning the wisdom of having confided in him, she had been forced to admit that he had applied a startlingly skilful degree of emotional pressure on her, and in such a way that she had had no idea how she was being manipulated until it was too late and she had told him far more about herself than she had ever intended he should know.
‘He—my cousin—wanted to marry me—he didn’t love me—he told me that, and laughed at me for thinking he might. How could he love me? I was plain, fat, ugly.’
‘You mean you thought he wanted to marry you?’
Silver shook her head, angry that he wouldn’t believe her.
‘No, I know it. He told me… boasted about it… said he would make me do it. That I had no choice. That our engagement—he said that he had to have Roth—–’ She broke off, biting her lip. No one, except Annie, knew who she really was… what she had originally been. And Annie might have told Jake everything else, but she wouldn’t tell him that—she had promised.
‘You were engaged to him?’
She could see Jake frowning, and felt a sudden shaft of pleasure that she had at last managed to surprise him after all.
‘Yes, unofficially. But not because he loved me. He made that plain enough. And to think I’d been stupid enough to believe that he actually could.’ She laughed bitterly. ‘God, I was such a fool!’
‘And then he found someone else and dumped you…’
Silver gave a bitter laugh. ‘Oh, no… There was someone else, but he still intended to marry me. He gave me a choice: marriage or destruction; there was nothing I could do about it, nothing at all… at least not as Ger—–’
Again she froze, realising she had once more nearly said too much, but Jake didn’t appear to be listening. He was frowning, and then he raised his hand and touched her face, lightly tracing its shape with his fingers.
‘So this was not merely done out of vanity, but out of necessity, as well. Out of self-protection and self-defence.’
His astuteness shocked her. Not even Annie had guessed at that second part of her need to change her appearance so totally that no one would ever recognise what she had once been… who she had once been.
‘Partly,’ she acknowledged, and then honesty forced her to admit, ‘Of course I could have chosen to have a plainer face… I can’t pretend that vanity didn’t come into it. You see, Charles has a weakness for beautiful women… that and his greed are perhaps the only weaknesses he does have.’
She pulled away from him and said tiredly, ‘There’s no point in trying to dissuade me, Jake. This is something I have to do.’
She felt him weighing her up, considering, thinking, and then he said, almost reluctantly, ‘It won’t be easy. And I do know what I’m talking about. I have a score to settle of my own…’
‘Which is why you need my money.’
‘Which is why I need your money,’ he agreed.
It was on the tip of her tongue to ask him what had happened, but already she could feel him withdrawing from her, his face becoming stern and remote.
‘Speaking of which, unless I want you to accuse me of wasting your time, I think perhaps we ought to get back to work.’
‘Work!’ The man was practically inhuman. He had cleverly trapped her into confiding in him, but when it came to his own past… How many other men in this position could continue to treat her as he did, as though he was completely unaffected by her, by the intimacy of what they were doing, as though he found her flesh as coldly uninviting as if it belonged, not to another human being, but to a robot.
He kept himself completely divorced from her emotionally, and mentally, and yet he seemed to possess a diabolical awareness of her every thought and mood, as though he had some deep inner awareness of her most complicated emotional response that not even she herself was privy to. And she hated that… Hated it… resented it… defied it, and constantly tried to transfer those feelings to him, to blame him for those aspects of her own inner vulnerabilities that she couldn’t bear to face.
‘Thank God there’s only another week to go,’ she hissed at him bitterly. What would it take to break his self-control, to reduce him to need and despair? She looked at him assessingly and tried to judge