Penny Jordan - Silver

She tried to imagine she was water, amorphous and fluid, flowing against him; her hands touched his chest, feeling the hardness of muscle that unexpectedly flexed beneath her palms. Again the touch of that cold mouth; for a second her concentration wavered and her nails dug into his shoulders as she tensed, but then she pushed Jake’s image to one side and fought to superimpose over it that of Charles.

The kiss was warm and teasing, as Charles’s had been, but instead of accepting it shyly and awkwardly she remembered what Jake had taught her. She was a powerful, seductive woman, and he was her victim. She murmured softly beneath the cold mouth and slid her fingers into his hair, frowning momentarily, conscious of its texture and thickness, knowing by some form of osmosis that Charles’s fair, fine hair would never feel like this, vibrant with male energy. For a moment her confidence faltered, the image of Charles she was fighting to fix behind the closed eyelids fracturing and the pieces reassembling into Jake’s face. She shivered and suppressed the image, telling herself fiercely that this wasn’t Jake, it was Charles… Charles, and that this was her chance to take hold of her own fate and shape it… form it. This was her chance to start exacting payment, and to do that she must seduce him away from other loyalties… other loves.

She moved her body sinuously, ignoring the unresponsive muscle and tissue that was Jake, letting her movements whisper promises of pleasure, trying to recreate the rhythms Jake had shown her, forcing her mouth to soften and linger coaxingly on the implacable, shuttered lips that refused to give her any encouragement.

When Jake took hold of her shoulders and held her away she stared at him, waiting for his judgement. This time her body had not reacted the way it had when he had kissed her, for which she was profoundly grateful. That was a complication she didn’t need or want. Nor did she want to remember that, despite all she had felt for Charles, he had never drawn that involuntary, unstoppable feeling from her.

‘You’re beginning to get the idea,’ Jake told her.

Beginning… Silver glared at him, conscious of a fierce stab of disappointment. What had she expected? she derided herself. Lavish praise? She suppressed her chagrin and said as lightly as she could, ‘I see. And how long will it be, do you suppose, before I’ve absorbed it to your satisfaction?’

‘Who knows, but until you have we don’t go any further.’

As though he heard the angry protests locked in her throat, he said evenly, ‘What do you want from this, Silver? You told me you wanted to be able to seduce a man to the point where he’d virtually kill to have you. Judging on your present performance, you wouldn’t even be a good lay; you’d be forgotten even before the bed had gone cold,’ he told her brutally, and although the words cut into her ego like thin whip-strokes she knew he was telling the truth.

‘Now… we’ll do it again, and remember, a seductress doesn’t necessarily love the man, but she does love herself and her power over him, and because of that she enjoys what she’s doing. She loves making him ache and burn… making him want…’

An hour later, her throat burning with suppressed tears of rage, her pride cut to rags and her temper burning through her like vitriol, Silver pulled back from Jake’s restraining hands and gritted, ‘Don’t tell me… I know… try again. Tell me something, Jake. What exactly do I have to do to get a pass mark?’

He wouldn’t release her, and a flash of caution warned her against trying to overcome his physical strength. She reminded herself that there was nothing personal in this; that it was idiocy to let her dislike for him prejudice her progress. After all, she had chosen him.

‘I should have thought that was obvious,’ he told her. He was beginning to sound terse, and his mouth snapped shut with uncompromising hardness. She had known all along that he wasn’t a man who would suffer incompetence easily, and now he was proving it to her. ‘When you can arouse me , you’ll get your pass.’

Arouse him? She couldn’t stop the shudder jolting through her as she snatched her hands away from his shoulders.

‘We’re talking about a physical reaction, nothing more,’ he told her drily, correctly reading her reaction. ‘A physical reaction to deliberate provocation. It isn’t impossible. It isn’t easy, either… I don’t like you, and I certainly don’t want you,’ he told her frankly, ‘but until you can draw that involuntary physical response from my flesh, we don’t go any further. There wouldn’t be any point.’ He gave her a hard look which made her catch her breath until she remembered that he couldn’t actually see her.

‘Now, let’s try it again, and this time remember: the sooner you get it right, the sooner we can move on to the next stage, and ultimately the sooner you and I can go our separate ways.’

It should have been all the encouragement she needed, but it had exactly the opposite effect. She became unbearably conscious of herself and of him, and totally unable to superimpose Charles’s image on to his features, no matter how tightly she tried to close her eyes and use her imagination. Her movements became clumsy, her body tense and awkward.

After three humiliating attempts to recapture her earlier burgeoning skill had failed, she was tempted to call the whole thing off.

She was too demoralised even to hide from him how she felt, pushing her hair back off her hot face as she protested angrily, ‘It’s no use. I’ll never get it right…’

She expected him to agree with her and was surprised when he remained silent, until she remembered that, for all his contempt, he would stand to lose two million pounds if she backed out now.

‘We’ll have a break,’ he told her equably at last, adding, ‘Think of it as mind over matter, Silver. The physical skills alone aren’t enough. You have to be confident of success… to know you have the power to arouse me… to know that you can make me want you. Without that mental strength, no matter what I teach you, you won’t succeed. The outward skills can only facilitate the effectiveness of the inner ones. Which is perhaps why they say seductresses are born and not made.’

It infuriated her that, after she had faced so much, endured so much, she was failing at this last obstacle… surely the most simple of them all?

‘I’m tired,’ she told him pettishly. ‘I’m going to bed.’

She waited for him to stop her, to make some cynical and mocking retort, and when he didn’t she walked stiff-backed over to the stairs and then up them.

A month of Jake’s time was what she had bought. Four short weeks of his time and his tuition. So why should it suddenly seem as though those short weeks were going to prove a lifetime of endurance and punishment?

HER bedroom was simply furnished. Rag-rugs on the polished floorboards, a large double bed with bolster pillows and two huge quilts, a solid-looking chest of drawers in an unvarnished bleached wood that felt smooth and worn to the touch, and a wardrobe to match. The small shower-room was as basic and frugally furnished as the bedroom, but there was a Tightness about the plain white sanitaryware that was pleasing to the eye.