Kilrayne… If she kept her eyes closed she could almost imagine she was there, standing in front of the huge fireplace in the great hall, warming herself on the heat of the massive logs needed to fill the enormous grate. The room would smell of oak-smoke and soot, the draughts lifting the faded banners and tapestries from the walls, and outside the Atlantic gale would hurl the rain against the narrow, leaded window-slits.
Kilrayne, a dark grey fortress, built for defence and not pleasure; Kilrayne, whose stone walls had more than once run red with the blood of its enemies. Charles hated it… He shivered in the draughts, complained about the smoking fires, loathed the narrow passages and huge stone-walled rooms.
Silver, on the other hand, loved it… loved the sharp contrast between the dull grey stone and the richness of its tapestries and embroidered bed-hangings… its stone-flagged floors and glowing Oriental carpets, the massive heaviness of its furniture and the pewter dullness of its silver; commissioned in France and smuggled back from that country, so the story went, by an Irish Jacobite younger son of the family banished to Ireland to keep him out of the way of Hanover George’s revenge.
She and her father had spent every spring there. He had always said that there was nowhere quite like Ireland in the spring, when the sky was washed clean and soft by the wind from the Atlantic and the hedgerows and fields of the south turned a green that could not be rivalled anywhere in the world.
He would arrive there at the same time as the season’s first crop of foals. He used to take her with him when he visited the stables, carefully instructing her in the good points to look for, pointing out to her which foals they would keep and which they would sell, and why.
Later in the year he would go to Argentina, where he bought his polo ponies, and here again he would instruct her, tutoring her so that she learned without ever knowing that she did so.
It was only in the winter, when he always returned to Rothwell so that he could hunt with the Belvoir, that she refused to accompany him. Much as she enjoyed the spectacle and pageant of the hunt, she had never been able to endure being in at the kill, and her father rode to hounds at the very forefront of the chase.
Sometimes Charles had accompanied him, both of them looking in their different ways intensely male and virile… very much the epitome of the traditional image of upper-class manhood.
Her father had loved to hunt—had been a first-class rider… Other men sustained falls, broken limbs, the jocular teasing of their peers, but her father had never been unseated once. He had always shrugged his skill aside, claiming modestly that it was his mounts who deserved the credit and not him.
And yet he had died on the hunting field, thrown by a young and untried mount, who had panicked and bolted, dragging his unconscious rider so that by the time they were able to stop him her father was dead.
An accident… or was it? Her father’s doctor had told her gently that there was a possibility that her father might have committed suicide. Suicide… It had come as a shock to her to discover that there were areas of her father’s life about which she knew nothing… shadows darkening it which might have led to his taking his own life…
An accident… suicide… or murder…? Her mouth twisted bitterly. She knew which it was. Charles had murdered her father; she was sure of it. And she knew why. Charles, upon whom she had looked as near perfect; believing that his outer, golden perfection mirrored an equally golden heart. How wrong she had been… how naïve… But she was naïve no longer, and she intended to make Charles pay—and not just for what he had done to her, for his cruelty, his cynical callousness towards her, for the threats he had used to show her how defenceless she was without her father to protect her—for who would believe the hysterical claims of a fat, plain young woman who it was known was speaking out of jealousy and spite, against the assured sophistication of a man like Charles? No, it was more for her father’s sake that she was determined to hunt him down, to stalk him, and finally to trap him, exposing him to himself and to the world for the person that he really was. Her father… God, how she missed him even now. He was the only person who had ever really loved her, who had ever really cared…
Her throat closed on a surge of deep emotion, and then, like a knife ripping into a tender, unhealed wound, she heard Jake saying coldly, ‘It’s your time we’re wasting, Silver, not mine. I promised you a month… after that…’
‘You’ll what…?’ she demanded savagely. He couldn’t see her face, couldn’t see the suspicious glitter of the tears she was fighting to suppress, but even so she lashed out at him verbally, hating him for being present at her moment of betrayal. ‘Double the price? I haven’t paid you yet, Jake,’ she reminded him, driven by her own demons to taunt softly, ‘What would you do if I walked out of here and refused to pay you a penny?’
That she was punishing him for Charles’s faults and for her own weakness she knew quite well, but the fierce pace he was setting her, the gruelling insistence on perfection, which was like nothing she had ever undergone before, was undermining her self-control, making her want to draw retaliatory blood, making her hate herself for the way he pierced her defences and pushed her from her sanctuary of icy remoteness into the painful world of feelings and emotions. She had turned her back on that world when she had turned her back on herself, totally destroying the woman she had once been. And she hated him for making her bitterly conscious of the fact that that woman and some of her vulnerabilities still remained; that she had not, as she had thought, completely obliterated and buried her.
Jake was silent for so long that she actually began to think with relief that he hadn’t heard her, and then he said quietly, and very pleasantly, ‘How you do like to flirt with fire. Why not try it and see?’ And without a single threat being made Silver was overwhelmed by the pressure of a menace so strong that she physically shivered beneath it, awestruck that a voice and face that could look so benign and unemotional should at the same time be able to convey such an intensity of purpose. How different he was from Charles… as dark-visaged and formidably boned as a Roman god of war, where Charles was all golden promise, all physical perfection, with the face and body of a Greek statue. Under a similar threat, though, as she now had good cause to know, Charles would have reacted with violence and malevolence, so intense and strong that the shock of it would have terrorised his victim. Jake, while equally formidable, used so little anger, and no physical force, and yet the effect he was having on her right now was far more powerful, so much more effective than anything Charles had ever said or done.
Idly she wondered who would be the victor if the two men were ever to confront one another as enemies. Pound for pound, inch for inch they were probably evenly matched, both tall, well-muscled men, although Jake had a way of moving that was somehow far more intimidating than Charles’s aggressively male stride.
Physically, there was surely no comparison. Charles had the looks of a screen idol, and the charisma… Jake, on the other hand, had the kind of face that women would find challenging and a little austere.
Charles had the natural hauteur and arrogance that came from having a privileged, wealthy background; he possessed charm, sophistication—sex appeal. He also possessed, as she had good cause to know, a deep vein of cruelty, a love of inflicting emotional and physical pain… a desire to dominate and destroy. Charles, all golden beauty on the outside, was inwardly corrupt… even evil… Silver gave a tiny shudder, remembering the extent of that evil, wondering how many lives it had touched and damaged.
Jake, on the other hand, was without such cruelty. He was hard, yes, unyielding, savagely determined, completely impervious to the kind of vanities which she knew were going to be Charles’s downfall.
In any kind of contest between them, Charles should have been the victor, and yet there was something about Jake that made her acknowledge that when he thought he was in the right he would hang on as grimly as the proverbial bulldog. She respected Jake, something she realised with a sudden start of shock she had never felt for Charles, despite her youthful idolatry of him.
A tiny frisson of unwanted sensation touched her, an awareness…