by Penny Jordan
Female bonding with a ten-year-old? And she was supposed to be intelligent? Charlotte was right—she did need to get a grip on her life.
‘Presumably, though, you knew by the time Honor had informed the nurse that you were going to be her stepmother,’ he informed her with deadly acidness.
She was surely far too old and had far too much self-control to be betrayed now by the kind of hot-faced blush which had betrayed her so readily all those years ago, but nonetheless Verity found herself hurriedly looking away from the anger she could see in Silas’ eyes and curling her toes into her shoes as she fibbed, ‘Uh…did she…? I really don’t remember…the casualty department was busy,’ she embroidered. ‘I just wanted to make sure that Honor got some medical attention—’
‘Liar.’ Silas cut across her stumbled explanation in a brutally incisive voice that made her wince. ‘And don’t think I don’t know exactly why you laid claim to a non-existent relationship between us.’
This was worse than her worst possible nightmare, worse by far than the most embarrassing and humiliating thing she could ever have imagined happening to her, Verity decided. She could never remember feeling so exposed and vulnerable, so horribly conscious of having her deepest and most private emotions laid bare to be derided and scorned. No, not even the first time she had had to stand up in front of her late uncle’s board of directors, knowing how much each and every one of them must secretly have been resenting her appointment as their leader, as the person to whom they would have to defer.
In that one sentence Silas had torn down, trampled, flattened, all the delicate defences she had worked so hard to weave together to protect herself with—defences she had created with patience and teeth-gritting determination; defences she had bonded together with good humour and cheerful smiles, determined never to allow anyone to guess what she was really feeling, or to guess how empty her life sometimes felt, how far short of her once idealistic expectations it had fallen. Other people’s compassion and pity were something she had always shrunk from and gently rejected. Her lack of a man to share her life, a child to share her love—these had been things she had determinedly told herself she was not going to allow herself to yearn for. She had her life, her friends, her health.
But now, pitilessly and brutally, Silas had destroyed that precious, fragile peace of mind she had worked with gentle determination to achieve.
Silas had guessed, unearthed, exhumed the pitiful little secret she had so safely hidden from other eyes.
Bravely Verity lifted her head. She wasn’t going to let him have a total victory. Something could be salvaged from the wreckage, the destruction he had caused, even if it was only her pride.
‘Contrary to what you seem to think—’ she began, but once again Silas wouldn’t let her finish.
He cut her off with a furious, ‘I don’t think. I know. You let the nurse believe that you had the right to sign Honor’s consent form because you thought it would get you off the hook, that that way you wouldn’t have to face up to what you had done, nor suffer any potential legal consequences.
‘My God, what kind of woman are you to be driving so carelessly in a built-up area in the first place, and at school-leaving time? But, then, we both already know the answer to that, don’t we? Such mundane matters as children’s safety, children’s lives, simply don’t matter to you, do they? You’ve got far more important things to concern yourself with. How many millions are you worth these days, Verity? No doubt that car outside is just one of the perks that comes with being a very rich woman.
‘Funny—I knew, of course, that the business came first, second and third with you, but I never had you down as a woman who needed to surround herself with all the trappings of a materialistic lifestyle.’
Verity gave him a dazed, almost semi-blind look. What was he saying—something about her car? About her wealth? It didn’t matter. All that mattered was the intense feeling of relief she felt on realising that he hadn’t, after all, meant what she had thought he had meant by that comment about knowing why she had not refuted Honor’s outrageous claim that she was soon to become her stepmother. That he had thought she had allowed his daughter’s fib to stand so that no questions could be asked about the accident, not because secretly she still yearned for…still wanted…
‘My God, but you’ve changed,’ she heard him breathing angrily. ‘That car…this house…those clothes…’
Her clothes…Verity pushed aside her euphoric sense of relief—there would be time for her to luxuriate in that later when she was on her own.
‘I’m wearing jeans,’ she managed to point out in quiet self-defence.
‘Designer jeans,’ Silas told her curtly, nodding in the direction of the logo sewn on them.
Designer jeans? How had Silas known that? The Silas she remembered simply wouldn’t have known or cared where her clothes had come from. The Silas she knew and remembered would, in fact, have been far more interested in what lay beneath her clothes rather than the name of the design house they had originated from.
Quickly, Verity redirected her thoughts, telling him dryly what her own quick eye had already noticed.
‘Your own clothes are hardly basic chain store stuff.’
Was that just a hint of betraying caught-out colour seeping up under his skin? Verity wondered triumphantly.
‘I didn’t choose them,’ he told her stiffly.
Then who had? A woman? For some reason his admission took all her original pleasure at catching him out away from her, Verity acknowledged dismally.
‘I suppose you thought you were being pretty clever and that you’d got away with damn near killing my daughter,’ Silas was demanding to know, back on the attack again. ‘Well, unfortunately for you a…a friend of mine just happened to see you at the scene of the accident and she took a note of your car’s registration number.’
‘Really? How very neighbourly of her,’ Verity gritted. ‘I don’t suppose it occurred to her that she might have been more usefully employed trying to help Honor rather than playing at amateur detective?’
‘Myra was on her way to a very important meeting. She’s on the board of several local charities and, as she said, she could hardly expect busy business people who are already giving their time to feel inclined to make a generous cash donation to a charity when its chairperson can’t even be on time for a meeting…’
Whoever this Myra was, Silas obviously thought an awful lot of her, Verity reflected. He made her sound like a positive angel.
‘You aren’t going to deny that you were responsible for Honor’s accident, I hope?’ Silas continued, returning to the attack.
Verity was beginning to get angry herself now. How dared he speak to her like this? Would he have done so had he not already known her, judged her…had she been a stranger? Somehow she doubted it. He was being unfairly critical of her, unfairly caustic towards her because of who she was, because once she had been foolish enough to love him, and he had been—Quickly she gathered up her dangerously out-of-control thoughts.
Deny that she was responsible? But she hadn’t been responsible. It was…On the point of opening her mouth to vigorously inform him just how wrong he was, Verity abruptly remembered her conversation with Honor and the little girl’s anxiety. Quickly she closed it again.
‘It was an accident,’ was all she could permit herself to say.
‘An accident caused by the fact that you were driving too selfishly and too fast along a suburban road, in a car more properly designed for fast driving on an autobahn, or in your case, probably more truthfully, for showing off amongst your friends.’
Verity gasped.
‘For your information,’ she began, ‘I bought that car…’ On the point of telling him just why she had bought the BMW, she suddenly changed her mind. After all, what explanations did she possibly owe him? None. None at all.
‘I bought that car because I wanted to buy it—because I liked it. No doubt your friend prefers to drive something ecologicall
y sound, modest and economical. She has a Beetle, perhaps, or maybe a carefully looked after Morris Minor which she inherited from some aged aunt…’ she suggested acidly.
‘As a matter of fact—not that it’s any business of yours, Myra drives a Jaguar. It was part of the settlement she received when she divorced her husband…But I’m not here to talk about my friends or my private life. You do realise, don’t you, that I could report you to the police for dangerous driving?’
Immediately Verity froze, unable to control her expression.
‘Yes, you may well look shocked,’ Silas told her grimly.
‘You can’t do that,’ Verity protested, thinking of Honor.
‘Can’t I? I’ve certainly got a damned good mind to, although, given your cavalier attitude towards the truth and the fact that there were no witnesses to the whole event, no doubt you’d manage to find a way of extricating yourself.’
‘Me cavalier with the truth? That’s rich coming from you,’ Verity retorted bitterly.
‘What the hell do you mean by that?’ Silas challenged her.
Verity glared at him, her own temper as hot as his now. After all, she could hardly remind him that he had once told her he loved her; that he would always love her; that there would never be anyone else.
‘Why have you come back here?’ he demanded abruptly.
Verity turned her face away from him so that he couldn’t fully see her expression.
‘I grew up here. It’s my home town,’ she reminded him quietly.
‘Sentiment. You’ve come back out of sentiment. My God, now I really have heard everything!’
‘My roots are here,’ Verity continued, praying that nothing in her voice or her expression would reveal to him how very, very much his cruelty was hurting her.
‘Roots, maybe,’ Silas allowed in a biting voice. ‘But if you’re hoping to revisit the past or resurrect old—’
‘I’m not hoping to do any such thing,’ Verity interrupted him passionately. ‘So far as I’m concerned, the past is the past and that’s exactly how I intend it to stay. There’s nothing in it that I miss.’
‘Nothing in it that you miss and certainly nothing in it that you ever valued,’ Silas agreed.
And then to Verity’s shock he suddenly took a step towards her.
‘Silas.’ Dizzily Verity moved too, but not back away from him putting more distance between them as she had planned. No. Instead what she actually did was take a step towards him. A step that brought her within intimate reach of his body, within his private body space, and close enough to him not just to see the dark shadowing along his jaw where his beard would grow but also to reach out and touch it, to feel it prickling against her palm as she had done all those years ago, the first time they had shared a bed together, and she had woken up in the opalescent light of a summer morning in the euphoric knowledge that he was there beside her, that she had the blissful, awesome right to simply turn her head and watch him as he slept, knowing that he was hers; that she was his, that nothing and no one could cause them to part—ever.
Silas!
Verity closed her eyes. She could feel the deep, uneven, heavy thud thud of her own heartbeat, pounding through her body in urgent summons. Was it that that was making her feel so weak, so…?
‘I’m warning you, Verity, stay away from me. Stay out of my life…’
The ugly words hit her like blows aimed viciously into her unprotected vulnerable emotions. Instinctively she tried to protect herself from them by wrapping her arms around her body, but Silas was already turning away from her and heading for the door.
‘I mean it,’ he warned her as he paused to open it. ‘Stay out of my life.’
She must be suffering some kind of shock, Verity decided dazedly ten minutes later as she slowly made her way back upstairs.
Stay out of his life? Did he really think he needed to warn her off, that she didn’t know that there was no place there for her, no love there for her?
Numbly she stared out of her bedroom window and into the garden below. From this window she could just about see the roof of the little summer house where they had sheltered from the rain, and it had been here in this room, if not on this bed, that she had lain dreaming her foolish, idealistic, heated, adoring, loving, girlish dreams of him.
And it had been here too that she had lain in the days after he had fully made love to her, feeling and believing that the reality of his lovemaking had far, far outstripped even her most feverish and sensually exciting daydreams.
It had been here too in this room, this sanctuary, that she had come after that dreadful quarrel when he had challenged her to choose between her love for him and her duty to her uncle, and here too that she had cried her tears of relief and happiness when he had told her, with remorse and regret, that the last thing he had wanted to do was to hurt her; that hurting her had hurt him even more and that, of course, he had understood that she had to at least attempt, as a matter of duty and honour, to accede to her uncle’s wishes.
‘It won’t be for long,’ she had promised him as he had held her face and her tears had flowed down onto his hands. ‘America isn’t really so very far away and when I come back…’
‘When you come back I’m never ever going to let you out of my sight again,’ he had told her savagely. ‘If you weren’t so damned stubborn I wouldn’t be letting you go now.’
‘I have to go,’ she had wept. ‘I owe it to my uncle…’ And yet she had known even as she had said the words that a part of her had longed for him to snatch her away, to refuse to allow her to leave him, to, however implausible it would have been, insist.
‘You could come with me,’ she had even suggested. ‘You could work over there…’
‘Come with you? As what?’ He had balked immediately, telling her, ‘I’m a independent man, Verity. I can’t live on your coat tails and, besides, what about our plans to buy the small holding we visited last week—to develop the garden centre…?
Verity closed her eyes now and leant her hot face against the cool glass.
‘I’ll wait for you,’ he had promised her when she had left. ‘I’ll wait for you, no matter how long it takes…’
Only he hadn’t…he hadn’t waited. Hadn’t loved her. Hadn’t given her the wedding ring nor the child he had promised her so passionately and, she had believed, so meaningfully.
Oh, God! Had he guessed just now in the hallway, when she had stepped towards him instead of stepping away, just what was going through her mind, her body? How easy it would have been for her to…? Had he known that a foolish, idiotic part of her had actually thought that he was going to kiss her, that he had wanted to kiss her? That that same foolish, idiotic part of her remembered with such aching intensity that that was exactly how he used to move towards her when…?
‘No,’ Verity protested despairingly beneath her breath. ‘No…please, no…’ But it was already too late, already the memories were flooding back, swamping her. The first time he had made love to her…She could remember it as clearly and intensely as though it had only happened yesterday.
They had been out together for the day. Another visit to a famous garden—Silas, as she had discovered by this time, was a passionate advocate of the importance of good garden structure.
‘Not having a proper structure to me is like…like…well, imagine trying to clothe a human body if all the limbs had simply been stuck on haphazardly here and there and everywhere, or if a house had been designed simply by adding one room next to another…’
And he produced books and then drawings to show Verity to reinforce his point. Completely head over heels in love with him by this stage, Verity acknowledged that she was probably spending longer gazing adoringly at the way his hair curled into his collar and flopped over his forehead than studying the designs he was showing her, but she took on board all that he was saying and she was as impressed and excited as he was by the elegant simplicity of the gardens they went to see.
‘Every garden h
as a right to be properly designed,’ he told her passionately, ‘and you only have to read one of Sir Roy Strong’s books to see just how the concept of good architectural design can be transferred to even the smallest urban garden.’
They were sitting eating their sandwiches at the time.
‘Mmm…’ Verity agreed, smiling lovingly at him.
And then he put down his sandwich and removed hers from her, and took her in his arms and kissed her lingeringly and very, very thoroughly, but very gently, before lifting his head and looking from her love-dazed eyes to her kiss softened mouth before telling her rawly, ‘You don’t know what I’d give right now to be somewhere alone with you and private…’
Very slowly he reached out and traced the shape of her lips with his fingertip.
‘Perfect,’ he whispered tenderly.
‘Good architectural design,’ Verity whispered teasingly back.
‘Better than that. The best,’ Silas told her solemnly, but then the laughter died out of his eyes as the tip of his finger touched the centre of her bottom lip and Verity could feel it and him starting to shake with need—a need which she fully reciprocated.
‘Couldn’t we do that—be together?’ Verity asked him huskily.
They talked about becoming lovers but Silas told her that he had applied the brakes to his plans to find them the perfect hideaway because he wanted to wait until he was sure it was what she wanted—he was what she wanted—and that he didn’t want to rush her.
‘We could…there’s my bedroom,’ Verity boldly offered her home again. Her uncle was away on another trip. The Sales Director’s appendicitis had proved more problematic than his doctors had first expected, causing a delay in his recovery, and her uncle had had to take over his duties and was consequently away on business far more than usual.
‘No, not there,’ Silas answered firmly, ‘but if you’re sure…’
His hand was holding the back of her head, caressing her scalp through her hair. Shivering with excitement and emotion, Verity smiled tremulously at him. The look in his eyes made her face burn—and not with the embarrassment of coy self-consciousness of a young woman who was still a virgin.