THERE were just the two of them in the ski-lift. The avalanche warning issued that morning by the Swiss Federal Avalanche Institute was keeping the other skiers away from these dangerous off-piste slopes.

In Gstaad Silver had overheard a group of guides mourning the loss of income the avalanche threat would bring.

Since the British heir to the throne had come so close to death on off-piste snow at Klosters, the authorities had clamped down heavily on guides foolish enough to allow the persuasion of their clients to overrule their own better judgement.

She, though, had no need of a guide. Neither, it seemed, did he. She recognised him. In his twenties and thirties he had been famous as an amateur racing driver, and it seemed he had never lost that need for the exhilarating thrill of speed. Especially when that thrill went hand in glove with death.

She knew he was watching her, and she knew why. In her mind’s eye she re-created an image of herself, tall and slender, wearing a cerise ski-suit, the kind that speed-skiers wore. It moulded her body, revealing high, taut breasts that owed nothing to silicone injections or indeed any other artifice. She had a narrow ribcage and waist, flaring out to feminine hips and long, long legs. It was a body which could have been that of an athlete, but which, in her, was softened into voluptuous femininity.

Her head was covered with a snug-fitting hood, and her profile as she stared silently down into the valley would have made a poet cry for the inability of mere words to convey the perfect, haunting quality of her features.

As he looked at her, Guido Bartoli wondered what it would be like to make love to her, here, high above the mountains where the air sang crystal-clear and the snow cracked ominously under its own weight. He mused that if he were to make love to her, and if she were to scream her pleasure noisily into the silence, as he liked his women to do, it would undoubtedly bring about the avalanches that were threatened. Life, death, love—the eternal triangle. He dwelt for several cynical and pleasurable moments on the possible consequences of his mental meanderings.

To be destroyed in that moment of ecstasy by the displeasure of nature at having her virgin world of silence splintered. It would be a fitting way for him to die… But for her… He looked at her again.

Deep in her eyes was that fierce, hungry look he remembered from his own youth. No, she was not yet ready to join him in mutual destruction.

He was forty-two years old, a wealthy, good-looking man whose company was still much sought after in bed and out of it. He felt the familiar clutch of excitement tighten his muscles as he watched her.

She knew he was looking at her, but she didn’t betray it. He liked that. It showed style. He wondered who she was. Most of the regular Gstaad crowd were known to him. This woman wasn’t. Neither was she someone it would be easy to overlook.

She puzzled him—intrigued him—some sixth sense telling him that there was a dichotomy about her, a mysteriousness, that in itself was a challenge.

He spoke to her, softly, so as not to arouse the wrath of the snow. In English first, since her pale skin made him think she must have Celtic origins, and then, when that got no response, in French, and finally in Italian, half a dozen ruefully apologetic words that drew no response other than a coolly enigmatic look that for some reason made him feel slight chagrin. She had eyes like those of a young hawk he had once tamed: wild and feral; dangerous both to herself and others; green eyes that threw back the reflection of the trees edging the snowfields.

The lift stopped. He had to step past her to get off. She stood back from him and apologised.

In Russian.

The shock of it made him stand and stare at her. Russian, for God’s sake! Just who the hell was she?

He stood watching her as the lift swung her upwards. Silver permitted herself a small smile. She’d heard about Guido Bartoli and wondered if they’d meet. He was an Italian count with a very Catholic marriage and a reputation for treating his mistresses with extreme generosity, as indeed he could afford to—but his wealth wasn’t what interested Silver. She had contemplated using him for the final test and then had changed her mind, but it was a good omen that they should have met, and by accident, today of all days.

She stretched luxuriously, breathing in the cold, sharp mountain air. The threat of the storm and its attendant danger exhilarated her. She felt a fierce surge of pleasure and power run through her body—a body lithe with exercise and careful honing. A body that matched the beauty of her face.

She touched her skin and frowned slightly, reaching for her goggles. She mustn’t let euphoria make her take a stupid risk… Calculated risks, now, they were a different thing altogether. Calculated risks were designed to test her progress, her readiness for a task which she had never deceived herself would be anything other than hard. She pulled on her goggles, her eyes focusing on the horizon. Green eyes with a touch of grey, that changed colour so that people who looked at her often weren’t sure what colour they really were.

It had started to snow, and the peaks above her had disappeared.

No matter… she shrugged the thought of danger aside as the lift shuddered to a halt and she got off. The only passenger… the only skier foolhardy enough to come up so high, to risk the danger of off-piste skiing. But it wasn’t on a mere whim that she was risking her life on this, one of Gstaad’s most dangerous runs. It was a very definite purpose that had brought her here. The final test, bar one…

But first the run… and then… and then the ultimate barrier must be breached. For until it was…

A fine, delicate shudder ran through her. Closing her eyes, she arched back her throat and looked upwards, an expression of rapt, fierce anticipation carving the perfect structure of her face… an expression that was almost ecstatic as her body quickened with feverish excitement, her eyes behind her goggles glittering cold as the ice- and snow-covered mountain.

She smiled to herself as she recalled the look of chagrin in Guido Bartoli’s eyes when he’d realised she was not going to respond to his flirting. It had amused her to address him in Russian. She had a facility for learning languages and was equally fluent in Italian, French and a number more. A legacy from her father, who had…

But no, she was not going to think of the past… not today. She had lived with it as her closest companion for the last two years, and today she was going to step away from it.

Guido had been right about one thing, though. She was Celtic in origin, heiress to a fortune so staggeringly large that even her trustees weren’t quite sure exactly what she was worth.

And not just heiress to a fortune, but heiress to an ancient title as well, carrying a family name that echoed with over a thousand years of history. Her ancestors had been Celtic princes when Egypt had ruled the known world. They had been princes long before the Romans had discovered the misty shores of the land of the Angles, their names written on every page of history that followed that invasion. They had also had a facility for picking a winning side, and their English titles had added weight and wealth to their hereditary Irish lineage.

She was the last of her line, and her father had reared the girl who was the only child fate had seen fit to bestow on him as the son he had never had.

She stood ready at the top of the slope, poised, alert, the adrenalin flowing through her veins like a powerful drug. The day; her life; eternity itself lay spread out before her like the village below, offered up to her as a sacrifice, as she in turn offered up herself… To live or to die… the decision was not hers. Who but the fates knew on which side they would weigh the scales? A higher power, if such an authority existed, must see into her soul and know what she planned; reared by a father who had been insistent on a sporting code of ethics that no longer existed, she had felt it only fair to give that power a chance to intervene. If it chose not to do so…

She bent her knees, her body fluid and ready, waiting until the falling snow thickened, driven by the wind, and then she dug her poles into the fresh snow and laughed out loud, throwing herself forward into the ferocity of the storm.

If she was good enough, if her skill matched her self-confidence, she would survive; if it didn’t, she would die, her body broken and her beauty destroyed.

The final test… but not the final hurdle. That still remained… and she knew enough about her own make-up to recognise what this ski-run was all about… the final psyching up for the barrier through which she must pass if she was going to go on and achieve her ultimate goal.

Snowy trees flashed past, blurred by her speed and the impact of the storm, and she felt the siren song of all she had done and would do sing in her blood.

This was her first taste of the narcotic of absolute self-confidence, but it would not be her last.

The chalet was small and utilitarian, unlike her own. Hers was a luxuriously equipped hideaway owned by a Saudi Arabian prince who had been persuaded to allow her to hire it for an unspecified amount of time. Its sole appeal for Silver was its inaccessibility. The overwhelming richness of its decor, the ostentation of its size and splendour, irritated her to the point of distaste. It was as though someone had tried to create the fabled luxury of a rich nomadic sheikh’s tent within the totally unsuitable framework of a wooden chalet.

This one, though, was everything that such a building should be. Neat and four-square, with a balcony on the upper floor and a large glass window for viewing the mountain. Smoke curled slowly from the chimney, but she didn’t hesitate as she used the key she had purloined to let herself in.

She was still wearing the cerise ski-suit. The chalet wasn’t far from where she had finished her run. Another piece of careful planning. To the rear of the property lay the garage and drive, cleared of snow for access to the narrow road that linked the remote cluster of chalets, of which it was one, with Gstaad.

She let herself in and closed the door behind her. The entrance hall was plain and yet welcoming in a way in which the large, imposing, marble-flagged hallway to her rented chalet was not.

This one had a natural wood floor covered with a rag-rug. The floor was highly polished, and Silver smiled grimly as she stepped on the rug and discovered that it had been very carefully stuck to the floor.

As she opened the inner door she saw that several other rugs covered the polished floor in the main living-room of the chalet, their textures different, so that anyone walking on them would realise even blindfolded which way they were walking. One row led to the sofa, in front of the stove, another to the small kitchen, and the third to the stairs that rose up in one corner of the room.

She didn’t linger in the living-room, despite the tempting warmth of the log-fuelled stove, but instead crossed it and went upstairs.

The chalet had two bedrooms, both with their own bathroom, and, outside, a passage linked the chalet to the garage and sauna.

She knew all this without having to look. She had done her research well, and in all honesty it hadn’t been difficult. Annie had been all too easy to milk of information. She was so ridiculously proud of Jake and all that he had done—all too ready to sing his praises to anyone who was ready to listen.

Silver wondered idly whether, when Annie visited him up here, they shared one bed or whether she slept alone. Nothing she had ever said had indicated that they were lovers—just the opposite—and Silver knew that Annie still loved her dead husband, but…

Halfway up the stairs she paused, wondering what it would be like to make love with a blind man. Would it give a woman an added thrill of excitement to know that he must learn her by touch, taste and scent alone, and therefore employ those senses to make up for his lack of sight—or would she feel repulsed by the knowledge that those dark blue eyes could see nothing other than the blackness of permanent darkness?

At the top of the stairs she wondered if he had made love to many women since losing his sight, and then she shrugged the thought aside, heading first for his bathroom, where she stripped off her clothes and stood beneath the hot sting of the shower until her skin glowed.

Then, wrapped in a huge, fluffy white towel, she went into his bedroom, noting approvingly that the simple furniture was exactly right for the chalet, that the two paintings on the wall had been chosen with taste and a good eye for colour, and that the sheets on the bed were pure cotton and freshly laundered.

For a man who was currently virtually unemployable, and who had apparently no money of his own to fall back on, he lived very well. Very well indeed, even if the chalet did belong to one of Annie’s wealthy patients.

Silver wasn’t deceived by the chalet’s apparent simplicity. Such a blending of colours and fabrics, so much use of materials that were natural rather than synthetic, so much attention to detail, right down to the pure and very expensive soap in the bathroom, not to mention the Hockneys on the wall downstairs—all whispered discreetly, to those with the properly attuned ear, of wealth and privilege. And more than that: of knowing just how such things should be done… and when, and by whom…

The chalet wasn’t representative of Jake’s taste, though; how could it be? It wasn’t his. What kind of tastes would he have, a man who spent his life with the very roughest kind of people—those who dealt in drugs—and who was in Switzerland to recover from the effects of the bomb blast which had tragically destroyed his sight.

She unstrapped the plain gold watch which had been her father’s last birthday present to her, along with the details of the various secret trust funds he had set up for her and the deeds to the Irish castle which had been in the family long before William the Bastard had ever set his covetous eyes on Harold’s England.

She had loved her father. Now he was dead—a hunting accident, one of those appalling, unthinkable accidents that should surely never have happened to such a keen and excellent sportsman, a rider admired for his ability and skill.

No accident, of course, but her father had been too wealthy, too important, had had his fingers in far too many pies that no one wanted stirring for too much fuss to be made, and, besides, only she knew the truth. A quiet announcement… the death of the Earl of Rothwell, Lord Wesford, James, William, Geraint… and so on… All his titles and dignities… all his names: family names, each showing an affiliation for the various causes her family had espoused over the years. James for the Stuarts, William for the Hanovers, Geraint, a derivation from the family’s French titles.

She still missed him. Her father had had a brain which had allowed him to build a modest inheritance, counted merely in the odd million or so, into a multi-billion-pound empire. There wasn’t an innovation or a discovery he hadn’t been aware of and involved in—secretly, subtly… he had not been a man who ever courted publicity.

He had also been a first-rate sportsman. He had had everything to live for, mourned his friends at the funeral. What a tragic waste that he should die. And she had moved among those mourners, blundering, overweight, unable to imagine the enormity of her loss, for once unaware of the amused and contemptuous looks people gave her, the raised eyebrows and unkind comments… the incredulity that a man like her father should have produced a child like her.

But that was all behind her now. This wasn’t the time to dwell on the past, other than to acknowledge what it had given her. Now she had to concentrate on the future… a future she could only be fit for if… She tensed, hearing a car drive up to the chalet. It had to be Jake. The taxi that collected him from the hospital would have picked him up at three, as it always did. Now it was almost four.

She wondered how long it would take him to find her. Not too long, surely? She had deliberately worn a particularly strong scent. She wondered if he would recognise it. She didn’t normally wear it during the daytime, and to the best of her recollection there had only been one evening occasion on which she had met him. That had been Annie’s birthday, when she had booked a table for her friend at Gstaad’s most exclusive eating spot, only to have her refuse, uncomfortably explaining that she had already agreed to have dinner with Jake.

Silver smiled to herself as she remembered how Jake had stood there and looked at her… Strange to think he was blind. No one looking at him and not knowing it would ever realise. He had somehow or other perfected a trick of looking directly at people that made it seem as though he could actually focus on them.

He hadn’t invited her to join them, simply smiled at her in that grim-lipped, scornful way of his that made it so abundantly clear what he thought of her. Rich bitch… spoiled playgirl… shallow… useless… predatory… she hugged to herself with glee the words he had not voiced but nevertheless felt, enjoying them, and the joke of it was that he had no idea that it was for that—because of his so obvious contempt and disdain—that she had picked him above the others she had contemplated approaching. His blindness only gave the situation an added piquancy.

It was a pity he knew so much about her. She had been angry when she’d discovered how much Annie had told him, but in the long run it was probably for the best. It would make any explanations so much less tedious and messy. And there would have had to be explanations, no matter whom she had chosen.

The car drove away and the door to the chalet opened. She had left the bedroom door open, but she still couldn’t hear him moving. She had noticed that about him before: that silent, menacing tread that Annie had once told her was a legacy of his early army training.

Annie had never told her why he had left the army and joined the special anti-drugs squad of carefully chosen operatives, working alone and in secret, reporting only to their superior in Whitehall. Whatever the reason, it was unimportant as far as her plans were concerned.

‘What are you doing here, Silver?’

Silver was glad he wasn’t able to see her as her eyes widened fractionally. She hadn’t heard him come upstairs, and the sight of him standing in the doorway, looking directly at her, made her muscles clench.

She forced her body to relax, curling her mouth in the lazy, teasing smile she had been practising, knowing that it would be reflected in her voice.

‘Why don’t you come over here and find out?’

She made no comment on the fact that he had recognised her. It simply confirmed her view that she had chosen correctly… made the right decision.

She watched as the mobile eyebrows rose. It was odd, after all he had been through, that his black hair should remain untinged by any grey at all, while she…

‘Silver, I’m not in the mood to play games. Simply say what you’ve come to say and then get on your way.’

No compromise there, simply a harsh, flat statement that indicated very clearly what he thought of her. That was good…

‘I want you to be my lover,’ she told him equably. She had been practising this for over a week now, mentally rehearsing every question he would ask and every answer she would give, and now, with all the poise she could muster, which was considerable, she added coolly, ‘Or rather, should I say, I want you to teach me how to make love to a man so that he won’t be able to resist me?’

She smiled as she caught the betraying indrawn breath. Much as Annie knew about her, there was one thing she did not know.

‘You see, Jake,’ she went on, taking firm hold of her advantage, ‘I need that expertise, and I need it very badly.’

‘What the hell kind of game is this?’ he asked her angrily, and she knew that she had broken through the tough armour of his self-assurance because he swore at her, something she had never heard him do before. An odd conceit in a man who lived the way he did.

‘No game,’ she assured him smoothly. ‘Annie’s told you a lot about me, hasn’t she? About why I’m here? About what I intend to do…?’

She saw from his face that she was right, and went on as though he had invited her to do so.

‘Unfortunately, there’s one major stumbling block. As a virgin, I’m afraid that I rather lack the—er—expertise necessary for my plans…’

‘A virgin…?’

She gave him a cold smile which showed in her voice as she bit off the words. ‘Amazed? You needn’t be. As my ex-fiancé once commented, a woman as ugly as me in both face and body is hardly likely to attract lovers. Of course,’ she added pleasantly, ‘you can’t see me… and I understand that physically you might find it impossible to become my lover, but I’m sure if you were to imagine I were someone else…’

Now she had broken through his guard.

‘My God,’ he swore, ‘what kind of woman are you?’

‘The kind who generally gets what she wants and pays generously for it,’ she told him sweetly.

‘Pay?’

For the first time in the months she had known him she saw him make an awkward movement. He stepped forward automatically, as though he intended to reach out, grab hold of her, and inflict a physical punishment on her; but she had deliberately moved the chair from beside the bed to the open doorway, and as he walked into it he tensed and swore savagely under his breath. Her father would have described what she had done as cheating. She tried not to admit that knowledge. She couldn’t afford that kind of weakness… not now… not ever again.

‘Please don’t be foolish about this, Jake,’ she said with composure. ‘Obviously I should wish to pay for the skills you can teach me, just as I would pay for any other commodity.’

‘Just the way you paid for your new face,’ he jeered unkindly, but she didn’t wince. Why should she? Once she had been sensitive, vulnerable, easily hurt by others, but not any more.

‘At least I have a genuine reason for being here,’ she told him sardonically, unable to resist the temptation to punish him just a little. She saw that her barb had found its mark. He tensed momentarily, his whole stance betraying wariness, and then it was gone and he had himself under control.

‘Well, you’ve come to the wrong man, Silver,’ he told her curtly. ‘I don’t need your money. Now get the hell out of my bed before I throw you out…’

Now she had him cornered, and the fierce thrill of triumph that ran through her was visible in the brilliant glitter of her eyes.

‘You’re lying, Jake,’ she countered softly, and then, before he could speak, added coolly, ‘I could allow you to continue to lie to me, but I don’t have that kind of time to waste. You see, I happened to be standing outside Annie’s sitting-room when you were telling her how desperately you did need money.’

What she hadn’t heard was why. Annie, it seemed, knew far more about Jake than she was prepared to admit. It had been obvious to Silver from the quality of their conversation that they were two people who knew one another well—as friends, not as lovers—and, intrigued as she was by the mystery that seemed to enshroud Jake, she was pretty sure that his presence at the clinic had nothing at all to do with any supposed reaction to his surgery, as Annie had originally intimated to her in the days when she’d had far too much to accomplish herself to worry about other people’s affairs.

Lost in her own thoughts, Silver took several seconds to become alive to the deep aura of menace emanating from Jake. It washed over her in an icy cold blast, activating her own instinct for self-preservation.

‘What you want the money for, what you do with it—that’s your concern and not mine, but don’t waste both our time by lying about not needing it,’ she told him, ignoring his anger.

She waited, feeling the tension ease out of her body a little as the menace evaporated.

‘Hasn’t anyone ever told you that it’s dangerous to listen outside other people’s doors?’ he asked her.

Silver shrugged the question aside and said firmly, ‘I’m prepared to pay you a million pounds—–’

She didn’t get any further; Jake interrupted her with a smothered curse.

‘God! If it’s just your virginity you want to lose, you could lose it for free any night of the week just by picking up someone—–’

‘It isn’t,’ she interrupted him flatly. ‘If you’d listened to what I said originally, you’d realise that. My virginity isn’t of any importance. I simply mentioned it to illustrate why I need the expertise you can teach me. It isn’t pleasure I want from you, Jake. It’s simply knowledge. A crash course in what turns a man on, in what sends him out of his mind with desire… In what makes him forget everything else in the driving need to possess one particular woman.’

‘Go and buy yourself a sex manual,’ he jeered. ‘It will come much cheaper than a million pounds.’

But Silver could see where the tiny betraying nerve pulsed in his jaw as his mouth compressed, and she felt a corresponding savage kick of triumph in her own stomach. She was going to win… whether he knew it or not, she was going to win.

She didn’t make the mistake of letting him sense her triumph. He might be blind, but his other senses, already honed by the years he had spent staying alive in one after another of the world’s danger zones, had been hardened by the accident, compulsively perfected by what Annie had once, in an unguarded moment, described to her as the strongest will she had ever come across. His perception was a hundred times greater than that of the majority of sighted human beings.

‘I’ll give you twenty-four hours to think over my proposition,’ she told him coolly. ‘After that, the deal’s off.’

As she spoke, her voice was cold and brisk, formidably like that of her father, a man who had single-handedly run one of the world’s most successful private business empires. It had none of the deliberate sensuality she had injected into it before. She was a clever woman, who for the first time in her life was learning to direct that intelligence into promoting for herself a false image—which in time she was determined would become herself—and she had already learned the power of projecting conflicting messages. She did it now, contrasting the frozen chill of her voice with the deliberately erotic movements of her body. She slipped off the bed and walked slowly up to and then past him, holding herself tall, using her powerful imagination to create the role she needed.

She was a high priestess of an ancient religion, sure of her strength and her power, knowing that her body was one of her strongest tools, unconcerned by her nudity. Her hair rippled down her back, a silver cloud, her skin warmed by the room’s heat.

She didn’t touch him—that would have been a beginner’s mistake—but she walked close enough to him to be quite sure he would be aware of her nudity… of her body, with its woman’s scents and allure.

Annie had told her that he was generally an abstemious man who didn’t indulge in any of life’s pleasures greedily. It was an admission Silver had rather trapped the other woman into giving.

A dulcet comment about the anomaly of the fact that he was a man in his early thirties apparently without any intimate relationship in his life had provoked Annie into defending him, and had also elicited the information that he had once been married and that his wife was now dead.

Silver had sensed that Annie was torn between protecting Jake’s privacy and telling her more. She had been curious to know how his wife had died, but not curious enough to push Annie too hard.

She had other ways of finding out all there could possibly be to find out about him if she so chose… there were those admirable men of business in Switzerland who had looked after her father’s affairs so discreetly and who now looked after hers. But Jake Fitton’s past held no interest for her, and neither did his future. She had a use for him, that was all—a use that, once finished, would cease to be of any importance.

He let her walk past him without moving, looking stoically towards the window as though unaware of the tormenting, warm human presence of her.

Her clothes were in his bathroom. She opened the door, wondering what she would have done if he had given way and reached for her.

12 3 След.

Silver

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Silver
Penny Jordan

Table of Contents

PART ONE

CHAPTER ONE

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