‘Amazing,’ he said quietly behind her when she turned her back on him. ‘I can feel your anger from here, and yet I can hold you against my body and feel nothing. Try projecting as much energy into feeling desire as you do into feeling rage,’ he instructed her. ‘It would be a far more worthwhile expenditure of energy.’
‘I don’t want to feel desire,’ she gritted at him. ‘I don’t need to feel it…’
‘If you honestly believe that, then nothing I can teach you will be of the slightest benefit to you,’ he told her coldly, ‘and you’re wasting my time as well as your own. Stop behaving like a petulant child, Silver. You’re the one who wanted this, and you’re paying me two million pounds to get it. If you’re not prepared to take this thing seriously, then you might as well walk out of here now and save us both a lot of aggravation.’
Biting her lip, Silver walked away from him without making any response.
Later, as she lay in bed, she acknowledged the point he had made. She must learn to adopt some of his own cool ability to distance himself emotionally. This time here with him was a chasm she had to cross, no matter how painful or frightening that crossing. There was no way she could just close her eyes and will herself over it, no matter how much she might ache to be safely on the other side.
IT WASN’T easy, but then nothing in her life had been, apart from her early childhood relationship with her father. But this was different from any other obstacle Silver had ever had to overcome, and her nights became haunted by the savage bite of Jake’s voice, the acid-cool neutrality of his curt instructions, the calm indifference with which he blocked her every attempt to outmanoeuvre him, when, driven beyond caution, she pushed recklessly at his astounding self-control, waiting for the storm to break and his temper to overwhelm his mastery of his emotions.
It never did; she was always the one forced to back down from the confrontation. She was the one forced to withdraw and regroup… And on and on it went, instructions, criticism, cool, curt, matter-of-fact reminders of what she was trying to achieve, while all the time she felt she would go insane and break down completely beneath the unrelenting pressure.
Another woman would have done; but then another woman would never have taken the dangerous course she had chosen in the first place. She was as hard on herself as he was, grimly reminding herself that this was her own choice—a necessary means to a specific end—and that if she could not control her dislike and resentment of the man for long enough for him to teach her what she needed to know, then she had little or no chance of fulfilling her ultimate promise to herself. And all the time she clung on to the vision that drove her: the vision of Charles, awestruck, spellbound, held in total thrall to her beauty, trapped by his desire for her as she had been by hers for him. Nothing else would do… nothing less would satisfy what she felt inside… And it was for that vision that she endured when others would have given up.
There were times when Silver thought almost fancifully that it was only that granite-hard, stubborn mingling of English and Irish blood within her that made her go on where others, more sensible perhaps than she, would have backed down. She was beginning to recognise within herself a certain grim relentlessness that she had thought belonged exclusively to her father. It was like coming abruptly face to face with a stranger within herself—shockingly and heart-stoppingly terrifying, until she forced herself to accept that it was simply one facet of her own personality.
She had been with Jake almost a month and, although she herself didn’t realise it yet, she had already learned much.
He knew it, though, and he observed with a certain detached clinicality that already her voice had developed a subtle sensuality, that she moved differently, more voluptuously, with more awareness; and he knew these things without seeing them; felt them, heard them; sensed them growing within her while she herself remained oblivious to what was happening to her, too caught up in what had become a fierce personal battle to prove to him that she would succeed to notice the slow, progressive steps she was already taking along the road she had chosen for herself.
He told her as much one cold afternoon when a blizzard outside had turned the world grey-white, and Silver filled the sitting-room with the tension of her impatience… with her longing to break free of the constrictions he placed upon her, of her role as supplicator and pupil, which she constantly wanted to challenge, and overset.
‘You’re too impatient,’ he told her emotionlessly after she had flung herself away from him and gone to stand in front of the window. ‘The Chinese have a saying: “A journey of a thousand miles begins with the first step”…’
Silver narrowed her eyes and turned round, glowering at him, and then she caught herself up. It still had the power to astonish her that she should be so intensely aware of him and antagonised by him in so many minute ways, and yet that she should almost totally forget so often that he was blind.
It was as though he possessed some power that enabled him to project himself past his blindness and render it completely unimportant.
‘Come back here, Silver, and we’ll go through it again. Unless, of course, you’ve changed your mind…’
Changed her mind… She swung back to the window. How many times had she longed to do so, but stubbornly refused to allow herself to give in? Sometimes she thought his clinical detachment was meant to be deliberately abrasive… that he wanted her to give in and back down… that he was secretly and deliberately torturing her by forcing her to go over and over every tiny caress, every inflection of the words he made her say, the things he made her do.
She had learned a lot from him since that first night, had been slowly and inexorably inculcated with the information and expertise she had wanted.
Now she knew exactly how to touch a man to arouse him in desire—and not just to touch him, but to look at him, smile at him, speak to him. And now, if she managed to get through today’s lesson without telling him to go to hell, she would know how to argue with him and still challenge him to desire.
The lessons… the supply of information seemed inexhaustible, like a ceaseless stream pouring relentlessly into her, so that there were times when she wanted to scream at him, ‘Stop… enough!’ Times when she felt as though her spirit would break in two beneath the weight of his accumulated cynicism and knowledge… when she wasn’t sure which of them despised the other the more… when for some odd, uncomfortable reason, instead of screaming defiance at him, she wanted to break down and cry, without having an atom of understanding of why she should feel that way.
And harder to bear than everything he had taught her about his own sexuality had been the knowledge he had forced on her about her own… not as a woman, but as an individual… She had learned for instance that the mere pressure of his fingers against the inner flesh of her arm could make her jerk back from him in fierce tension… that the sensation of his mouth against her throat, his hand against her breast could evoke responses that had to be frozen at birth; although he said nothing, did nothing to show that he was aware of what was happening to her, instincts as ancient as the race she herself had sprung from warned her that he had known… Had known and yet hadn’t used that knowledge against her… and that confused her.
She closed her eyes, blotting out the blinding whiteness of the blizzard and thinking instead of Ireland… of the ancient castle of stone, facing out across the Atlantic, guardian of the land beyond which had been the stronghold of a race of Irish princes until one of her ancestors had seduced and married one of the noble daughters. If she closed her eyes, she could see the castle now, rising up out of the mist that blew in off the sea… Rugged, dauntless, austere, swept by gales and storms in winter and in no way to be compared with Rothwell, that jewel of Palladian