by Penny Jordan
‘I’m sure,’ she told him positively. ‘Oh, Silas, I’m so sure…’
‘I want everything to be right—special,’ he told her gruffly. ‘I’ve looked into some of the hotels in the area and I could book us a room—for tonight…’
‘Oh, yes, yes,’ Verity breathed.
Tenderly she reached out and touched his face, feeling the warmth of his skin beneath her fingertips, the hard firmness of the bones and muscles that lay below it. She might not have been physically experienced, might never have had a previous lover, but she had no sense of fear nor trepidation, simply a deep inner knowledge of how right this was, of how right Silas was!
Silas found them a hotel several miles away from the garden they had visited. Small and privately owned, it was set in its own gardens but, for once, after they had booked in, Silas showed no inclination to explore.
‘I…I thought you might like to…to see the gardens,’ Verity had protested a little uncertainly once they were alone in the room.
Silas shook his head quietly, locking the door before turning back to her.
‘No. Right now there’s only one thing I want to do, one garden I want to explore,’ he said softly, and Verity knew from the way he looked at her, his glance slowly caressing every inch of her, just exactly what he meant.
‘I…what…? I don’t know what to do,’ she told him finally and honestly, blushing and then laughing. ‘Well, I do, at least I think I do, but…’
‘Come here,’ Silas commanded her and, her colour still high, Verity walked unsteadily into his arms.
They had kissed before of course, and touched intimately so, but never like this, Verity acknowledged as Silas kissed his way slowly along the soft line of her lips and then, repeating the gesture he had made earlier, pressed the pad of his thumb to the centre of her bottom lip, hungrily nibbling the tender flesh he had exposed, his arms tightening possessively around her as Verity trembled in response to his touch. His tongue slowly caressed the inner sweetness of her mouth as hers did his and then he slowly and rhythmically sucked on her tongue and taught her to do the same to his.
As she repeated his sensual, intimate caress, Verity could feel the jolt that ran through his body and the sexual hardening and arousal that went with it.
Wrapping her arms around him, she pressed herself just as close to him as she could get, instinctively rubbing her body lovingly against his and making little purring sounds of pleasure as she did so, her eyes closing.
‘Verity, Verity,’ she heard Silas groaning as his hands gripped her waist half as though he was going to put her slightly away from him, but then he changed his mind, his hands sliding down her body to cup her buttocks and grind his own hips into her receptive body.
A delicious shiver of pleasure convulsed her and Silas removed one of his hands from her bottom to gently rub and knead the length of her spine in a caress that was so tenderly soothing that it made Verity open her eyes and look dazedly up at him.
‘I don’t want to take things too fast,’ Silas told her rawly in response to her unspoken question. ‘This will be your first time and I want…I want to make it perfect for you—in every way, Verity.’
‘It will be,’ she promised him, knowing as she spoke the words that they were true, with some deep rooted primal feminine wisdom that didn’t need to be analysed or questioned.
Gently and lovingly, Silas undressed her, pausing to caress and kiss each bit of flesh he exposed, but once he got to her breasts, Verity felt his self-control beginning to slip away. As he slowly circled one taut, hard, flushed nipple with the pad of his thumb she knew it wasn’t just her who was trembling so violently in sensual reaction.
‘These are the most beautiful…you are the most perfect thing I have ever seen,’ he whispered throatily as he picked her up and carried her over to the huge king-sized bed.
‘More perfect than one of Sir Roy Strong’s gardens,’ Verity teased him remembering their earlier shared humour.
An answering smile crinkled the corners of his mouth and momentarily lightened the passion that had darkened his eyes as he teased back, ‘Who’s Sir Roy Strong?’
Their laughter immediately banished whatever small feeling of self-consciousness Verity felt she might otherwise have had and very soon her fingers were equally busy as Silas’, if not perhaps quite as patient, as she tugged at the buttons of his shirt and then closed her eyes in mute pleasure when she had finally revealed the tanned male expanse of his chest.
Lovingly she buried her face against him, closing her eyes and breathing in his scent before delicately licking at the small indentation in the middle of his chest, discovering the faintly salty male taste that was exclusively his.
‘Verity,’ Silas groaned.
‘I want to,’ Verity protested. ‘I want to know every bit of you, Silas. I want to hold you, touch you, taste you. I want…’
‘You don’t know what you’re saying,’ Silas warned her.
But gravely and seriously and suddenly completely adult and mature, suddenly totally sensually a woman, Verity told him quietly, ‘Oh, yes, I do. I want you, Silas,’ she told him, lifting one of his hands and placing it first against her heart and then against her sex, saying, ‘Here,’ and ‘here,’ and then finally lifting his hand to her temple and repeating softly, ‘and here.’
‘With all my heart I thee love,’ Silas whispered back, taking hold of her hand and pressing a kiss into the palm before placing it against his chest. ‘With my body I thee worship.’
Watching her eyes, he placed her hand intimately on his own body. Verity drew in a quick sharp breath of feminine appreciation and urgency, the pulse in her wrist thudding every bit as fiercely as the pulse she could feel throbbing through the urgent shaft of male flesh she was touching. Instinctively her fingers closed over him, delicately learning and knowing him, whilst Silas continued in a thickly changed voice, lifting not the hand that was holding his sex with such feminine tenderness and love, but her other to his own forehead. ‘With my mind I thee honour, with everything that is me I commit myself to you now, Verity. Nothing ever can and ever will break the bond we are forming between us tonight. Nothing…’
‘Nothing…’ Verity repeated softly, and beneath her fingertips she could feel the hot, hard shaft of his sex harden even further and begin to pulse in ever fiercer demand.
The first time he entered her Verity cried out, not in pain but in exultation, clinging passionately to him, welcoming him within her with a heart full of love and joy, her emotions so charged and heightened that the feel of him within her, the knowledge of the intimacy, the love they were sharing, the bond they were creating, brought quick, emotional tears to her eyes.
Seeing them, Silas immediately cursed himself under his breath and started to withdraw from her, believing that he had hurt her. Quickly Verity reassured him, explaining in a choked voice that it was the pleasure of having him within her that had caused them, and not the pain.
Later he told her that what they had shared was just the beginning of the pleasure he intended to give her, the special sensual intimacy they would share.
‘You are my special garden, Verity,’ he told her as he lovingly caressed her warmly naked body. ‘My most private, secret garden where what flowers between us is special and magical and for us alone.’
‘And which, one day, hopefully will bear fruit,’ Verity continued, picking up on his theme as she blissfully ran her fingertips down his spine, revelling in her right to touch him and to be with him. ‘But not for a long time yet,’ she added drowsily. ‘And I don’t suppose that Uncle Toby will want me to have more than the most basic maternity leave…’
‘Maternity leave?’ Silas checked her, his body suddenly tensing as he started to frown. ‘I know you’ve said that your uncle expects you to work in the business once you’ve finished university, but surely what’s happened between us changes that? I’m not so sexist that I’d want to prevent you from working if that’s what you want, but…’
‘More than you or your happiness,’ Silas challenged her. ‘Or are you trying to tell me that it and he mean more to you than me and our children…?’
‘No, of course not…but I owe him so much and he…’
‘More than you owe our love?’ Silas demanded.
They were on the verge of quarrelling and Verity’s eyes filled with hot, hurt tears. Couldn’t Silas understand how difficult things were for her? Of course she wanted to be with him. How could she not do?
‘Please, don’t let’s spoil things by fighting,’ she begged him. Although she sensed that he wanted to continue their discussion, instead he gave a small sigh and said, ‘No, you’re right. This isn’t the time…nor the place…’
‘Make love to me again, Silas,’ she urged him, and it wasn’t until many, many months later that she was mature enough to recognise how dangerously she had begun the habit then—a way of avoiding the issue and sidelining it, and Silas, by distracting his attention away from the future through lovemaking. In fact, it wasn’t until Silas himself accused her of it that she was forced to recognise just what she was doing and by then…
‘I’ll love you for ever. You’re everything I’ve ever wanted, everything I will ever want,’ Silas promised her the following morning as they lay entwined with one another in bed, her body still sleek and damp from the passion of their recent lovemaking.
Only it hadn’t been a promise which he had kept. It had been a promise he had broken, just as he had broken her heart and almost broken her.
CHAPTER FOUR
HER first impression that the town hadn’t changed had been an erroneous one, Verity acknowledged as she dumped the supermarket carrier bags on the kitchen table.
She had spent the afternoon exploring her old environment before calling in at an out-of-town supermarket to fill her car with petrol and buy some food.
The layout of the town centre might essentially be the same but many of the small shops she remembered from her girlhood had gone, to be replaced with what she privately considered to be an over-representation of building society and estate agents offices. The pedestrianisation of the town centre itself, though, she had to admit, was an improvement, and she had particularly liked the way shady trees had been planted and huge tubs of brightly coloured tumbling summer bedding plants grouped artistically around them. Along with the strategically placed benches, they had created a relaxed, informal, almost continental air to the town centre, which today had been heightened by the fact that the warm summer weather had meant that people had been able to eat outside the square’s several restaurants and cafés under the umbrellas decorating the tables and chairs on the pavement. It had been disconcerting, though, to read from a small plaque that the square had been re-designed by Silas as a gift to the town.
If the town centre itself had looked disconcertingly unfamiliar, then so had the faces of the people she had seen around her. She had never made any really close friends during her schooldays. The regime imposed by her uncle had prevented that, but there had been girls whose company she could have enjoyed.
Tonight she would ring Charlotte, she promised herself as she started to unpack her provisions. It would be good to hear a friendly voice. She didn’t want to think about the consequences of the fact that one of the few adult voices she had heard since her return had been that of her ex-lover and that it had been far from friendly.
A ‘friend’ had told him about the accident, he had told her tersely. What exactly did that mean? The term ‘friend’ applied to a member of the opposite sex could cover so many possibilities. Anyway, why should she care who or what this woman was to Silas?
Removing the jacket of the Gucci trouser suit she was wearing, she opened the fridge door.
Wearing Gucci to do the supermarket shopping was perhaps a trifle over the top, especially outside Knightsbridge, and even more especially when the suit in question was white and had featured extremely prominently in all the glossies early on in the season, but having given into Charlotte’s pleas and bought the dratted thing she could hardly leave it hanging in her wardrobe…Even so…She had fully registered the several double takes she had received from other shoppers, women clad in the main in the busy suburban women’s uniform of immaculate neat jeans, white shirt and navy blazer.
She supposed her hair didn’t help either, she acknowledged, flipping it back over her shoulder, then taking a clip from her pocket and pinning it up. She had worn it long ever since she could remember. As a teenager she had wanted to have it cut but for once her uncle and Silas had been unanimous in their veto—albeit for very different reasons. Her uncle had always insisted that her hair was neatly tucked into an old-fashioned bun—the kind he remembered his mother wearing—whilst Silas… Silas had whispered to her that first night they had shared together that he had fantasised about taking her hair and wrapping it around his body, feeling its supple silkiness caressing his skin.
She had made that fantasy come true for him, even if she had blushed a little to do so that very first time.
In the years that had passed since then, she had still not had her hair cut—trimmed occasionally, yes, but cut, never—and, until she had sold the company, in obedience to her uncle’s wishes she had always worn it rolled into an elegant knot.
She had lost count of the times Charlotte had tried to persuade her to wear it down.
‘I’m too old for long, loose hair,’ she had protested determinedly.
‘Are you crazy?’ Charlotte had argued back, adding, ‘Have you seen the latest round of jeans ads—the one featuring the back view of a woman with hair down to her waist? She’s seventy and she’s making one hell of a positive statement about the way women have the right to view ourselves, besides which she looks absolutely stunning. If I had hair like yours—thick, wavy—there’s no way you’d ever get me to hide it away.’
‘In business, big business, men view long hair on a woman as a sign of weakness. It’s probably some kind of Narcissus complex,’ Verity had remarked wryly. ‘They see long hair and immediately they think, Ah ha…gotcha…she’s going to be spending more time in front of the mirror than in front of any sales figures, and then they start rubbing their hands together in glee because they think they’re going to put one over on you.’
‘Oh, yeah. Let me tell you something, lady,’ Charlotte had corrected her after she had finished laughing. ‘The reason they’re rubbing their hands together in glee is because they’re thinking, Wow, that’s some woman, I want to take her to bed…’
‘In other words to them long hair equals bimbo, victim…weakness.’
‘Why do I get the distinct impression that somewhere, some time, some man has hurt you very badly?’ Charlotte had asked intuitively. But Verity had simply shaken her head. The past, her past, was simply something she was not prepared to talk about—not even to her closest friend.
One thing Verity had noticed, though, when she had been out, and it was something that had caught painfully at her unguarded, vulnerable emotions, had been the number of couples shopping together—and not all of them young. Seeing the loving, tenderly amused looks one couple had exchanged, as the man had reached up to a higher shelf for something the woman had wanted and she had surreptitiously stroked his thigh whilst he did so, had made Verity look away in hot-cheeked sharp awareness of the emotional emptiness of her own life. It didn’t have to be that way. Once she had had time to think, to assess and to plan; once she became fully involved in the charities she intended to set up with her uncle’s money, then there would be no time for painful regrets about what might have been.
It was seeing Silas that had unsettled her so distressingly, she told herself angrily. Seeing him and listening to him making those outrageous accusations against her.
She stiffened as she heard th
e doorbell ring. There was no reason for her to think that it might be Silas, of course, but just in case…Forcing her face to assume the expression she normally reserved for the boardroom—the one that said ‘Don’t even think about trying to mess with me’—she headed determinedly for the front door and yanked it open.
‘Honor,’ she squeaked in startled surprise. ‘What on earth are you doing here?’
‘I got my pocket money today and I’ve come to pay the first instalment of the money I owe you for the damage to your car,’ Honor told her sturdily, adding before Verity could say anything, ‘May I come in? It’s so hot…’
‘Yes. Of course. Let me get you a cold drink,’ Verity offered, leading the way to the kitchen. ‘Did you walk here?’
‘Mmm…’ Honor mumbled as she took a deep gulp of the iced orange juice Verity had poured for her.
‘Mmm…real juice!’ Honor exclaimed blissfully. ‘Wonderful, but it’s very expensive,’ she told Verity sternly. ‘Dad won’t buy it—he says I waste it because I never finish it and it’s too expensive. He buys it when Myra comes round, though.’ She pulled a face. ‘Apparently she likes it for breakfast—not that she’s ever stayed overnight. She’d like to, though. She thinks I don’t know what her game is but I do—a woman always knows,’ she concluded wisely. ‘She wants to get married again and she wants to marry Dad. He’d be mad if he did—she’s poison.’ Honor pulled an expressive face. ‘She didn’t even like the new clothes I made him buy, and I know why—she doesn’t want any other woman looking at him.’
Honor had chosen Silas’ designer clothes! But Verity didn’t have time to digest this information properly before Honor was continuing, ‘I’ve tried to warn him but Dad just can’t see it…I suppose he can’t see the truth beneath all that make-up she wears. She hates kids as well. That’s why she left her first husband. I know…But Dad thinks it’s because he wouldn’t let her get pregnant…’