Penny Jordan - Silver

She had been injured, hurt, her life destroyed by the treachery of the man she loved, and now she was going to hit back at him. To destroy him in turn. Revenge, one of the most powerful human emotions there could be. And one of the most self-destructive; he should know. Yet, though he tried to warn her against taking up those burdens, he knew quite well that she would not listen to him. This need in him to warn her, to protect her almost, irked him; she was no real concern of his, but old habits died hard, and far too long he had carried the burden of being responsible for others, Beth and, before her, Justin…

Anyway, did he really have the right to tell Silver how to run her life, he who had never allowed anyone to dictate to him how he lived his life? Already in his thoughts he was betraying the fact that he was losing his emotional distance from her, that he was aware of her in ways that threatened both of them. It had to stop. Now, before things got completely out of control.

He moved restlessly around the room, acknowledging a deep inner truth he had been fighting for days.

It was time to bring things to an end…

One final lesson and they would both be free to go their own separate ways.

Silver sensed the purposefulness in him when she came down to prepare dinner. Supplies of food were delivered regularly twice a week from the town and they took it in turns to prepare the meals.

Tonight it was her turn.

Despite her father’s wealth and upbringing, she could cook, a strange, eclectic collection of dishes prepared with an expertise she had garnered from her father’s households throughout the world.

Tonight it was Irish stew, made in the traditional way, and served with soda bread.

As she lifted the casserole out of the oven and prepared to serve it, she commented briskly to Jake, ‘It’s Irish stew; that’s—–’

‘You don’t need to tell me what it is. I know.’

The vehemence in his voice startled her. She stopped what she was doing and looked at him, stunned to see a muscle twitch fiercely in his jaw. His mouth was drawn into a tight line of pain, and for the first time she saw the brilliant eyes unfocused as they stared not at her but past her, as though he were looking at something no one else could see.

He had been sitting down, since she had told him she was about to serve dinner, but now he got up abruptly, awkwardly almost, half stumbling against the table so that she reached out automatically to catch him and then withdrew her hand as she heard him swear.

He was halfway towards the door when she realised that he wasn’t going to have dinner with her. Without thinking what she was doing, she asked protestingly where he was going.

‘Somewhere I can’t smell that ,’ he told her savagely, gesturing towards the steaming casserole, and then he added softly, ‘The last time I had Irish stew, my wife made it for me. It was her favourite dish and our last meal together before I went away on business. She was dead before I returned… murdered in cold blood.’

Silver let him go in silence, too shocked to say anything. It was the first time he had ever made any kind of reference to his own personal life, and the horror of the small picture he had drawn for her remained with her long after he had gone. She found that she couldn’t eat the stew herself and, picking up the casserole, she took it outside and threw it away.

When she came back in her stomach was still heaving, but there was nothing she could do. There were a thousand questions she wanted to ask… a thousand things she wanted to know…

It was unnerving and unwanted, this glimpse into the raw pain of someone else’s life; this knowledge that he was after all human and vulnerable.

She had wanted that vulnerability in him, hungering for it as a weapon she could use against him, but now she realised she didn’t want it after all… She was like a child suddenly discovering that a parent was frightened of the dark, and cravenly wishing she did not have to know about that fear.

She made herself go back into the kitchen, and turned on the extractor fan. She opened the fridge, and took out some fresh chicken breasts.

Half an hour later she went up to his room, knocked briefly on the door and without opening it said quietly, ‘Dinner’s ready. It’s Chicken Maryland,’ and without waiting for a response, for all the world as though the entire incident with the stew had never happened, she went back downstairs and calmly started serving the chicken.

He arrived just as she was filling her own wine glass, sitting down at the table and saying quietly, ‘I’ve decided that you’ve learned as much from me as you’re going to learn. That being the case, there’s just one small formality left…’

Silver’s hand shook. She spilt a drop of wine on the table and watched it with fixed attention, unable to bring herself to face him. Was he doing this as a reward because she had thrown away the stew, or as a punishment because she had made it in the first place?

Without appearing to notice her tension, he added coolly, ‘I made up my mind this afternoon. My decision has nothing to do with any personal motivation.’

That wasn’t strictly true, but he had realised from her tension exactly what she was thinking and his own pride would not allow him to let her go on thinking it.

That had been an idiotic thing to do. There was no reason why he shouldn’t have eaten the damn stew… But the smell of it had reminded him too sharply of Beth, of their lives together, of her death and his own feelings afterwards.

Revenge; he knew it all, every last nuance of what it felt like.

Desperate to conceal her tension from him, Silver said the first thing that came into her head.

‘Your wife… You said she was murdered…’ She shivered suddenly, thinking of her father, of Charles, who would surely destroy her as ruthlessly and as cold-bloodedly as he had threatened if he should ever penetrate her disguise. But that was impossible. To all intents and purposes she was dead, and had been reborn in a different image.

‘What is it you want to know?’ Jake asked her bitterly. ‘How Beth was killed, or why?’

Inwardly he was shocked at his own response to her question.

Silently Silver watched him, sensing his withdrawal, his anger. She had known quite well that mentioning his wife would anger him, but she had been desperate to divert his attention from her own tension. She half expected him to get up and walk out as he had done earlier, but to her astonishment he said grimly, ‘Well, why not? It might even serve as an object lesson to you, but somehow I doubt it. I was working as a government agent, tracking down a drug-trafficking syndicate. I was close enough to exposing the ringleaders to receive threats against my life when my cover was blown. I should have stopped then, should have insisted on sending Beth away somewhere safe, but she didn’t want to leave me and, God help me, I didn’t want her to go.

‘In my arrogance I thought they’d target any violence against me . I got a lead that some of the stuff was being shipped in from South America… a deliberate ruse to get me out of the way, but I was stupid enough and vain enough to fall for it.

‘While I was out of the country Beth was killed by a hit-and-run driver. An accident—that was how it looked, only it was no accident. Beth had been deliberately and cold-bloodedly murdered. You want to know how I can be so sure? Easy… her murderers took the trouble to let me know what they had done.

‘I only found out later that there’d been additional threats to the ones I’d received, threats that Beth hadn’t told me about… you see, she knew how important my work was to me…’