by Penny Jordan
‘You will stay the night, won’t you?’ she whispered now, clutching Verity’s hand. ‘I want you to be here when I wake up in the morning…’
‘I’ll be here,’ Verity promised her.
‘I like your hair best when it’s down,’ Honor told her sleepily. ‘It makes you look…more huggy. Catherine, my friend, has got two brothers and loads and loads of cousins…’ Her eyes closed. Very gently, Verity bent and kissed her.
For all her outer layer of sturdy independence, inside she was still very much a little girl. Silas’ little girl.
Quietly Verity got up and headed for the bedroom door.
Alone in the kitchen, Silas allowed himself to relax for the first time since he had come home. He didn’t know what kind of game Honor thought she was playing by inveigling Verity into agreeing to hosting that damned dinner party, and the only reason he hadn’t given her a thorough dressing down over it was because he was well aware that she had reached that sensitive and delicate stage in her development where her burgeoning pride and sense of self could be very easily bruised. He would have to talk to her about it, of course, and explain that she had put Verity in a very embarrassing and difficult position.
It had been hard to guess exactly what Verity’s real feelings about the situation were. She had developed a disconcerting, calm, distancing and very womanly maturity which, very effectively, drew a line over which no one was allowed to cross, but he certainly knew how he was going to feel, sitting at the opposite end of the dining table from her whilst she acted as his hostess. It was going to be sheer hell, total purgatory, an evening filled with excruciating pain of ‘could have beens’ and all because his darling daughter wanted to be on a par with her school friends.
Well, he couldn’t blame her for that. It was all part and parcel of growing up. Honor was getting ready to grow into womanhood and she was making it clear to him that she wanted a woman in her life to pattern herself on.
He had, at one stage, wondered if Myra—but the pair of them would never accept one another.
Had Verity been anyone other than who she was he suspected that by now he would have been thanking fate for bringing her into their lives. It was glaringly obvious how Honor felt about her—and not just from the determined way she was attaching herself to Verity. If he was honest with himself, which he always tried to be, without the past to cast its unhappy shadow he knew perfectly well that, had he been meeting Verity for the first time now, he would have been instantly and immediately attracted to her.
She had still, despite the life she had lived, an air of soft and gentle femininity, an aura of natural womanly strength melded with compassion and love.
He found it hard to picture her as the head of a multi-million-pound business making corporate decisions based purely on profits and completely without emotion. It wasn’t that he doubted her skills or abilities, it was just that, to him, even now, she still possessed that certain something that made him want to look after her and protect her.
Protect her? Was he crazy? She had all the protection she needed in the shape of the material assets she had chosen above their love.
‘It’s my duty, I owe it to him,’ she had told him sadly when she had allowed her uncle to part them and send her away to New York, but those had been words he hadn’t wanted to hear.
Last night, holding her in his arms, kissing her…She’d been back less than a week and already…He wasn’t going to make the same mistake he had made last time. This time he was going to be on his guard and stay on it…
He had known, of course, of her uncle’s plans for Verity’s future and the way her uncle had deliberately fostered and used her strong sense of duty for his own ends.
One of the first things he had decided when he had found himself widowed and the father of a baby girl was that he would never ever manipulate her feelings and cause her to feel that she was in debt to him for anything in the way he had witnessed Verity’s uncle manipulating hers.
But, naively perhaps, he had assumed that Verity had shared his feelings, his belief that their future lay together.
‘Do you love me?’ he had demanded, and shyly she had nodded.
Had she ever loved him or…?
‘I’ll be back soon from New York and then…then we can be together,’ she told him.
And he had taken that to mean that she had wanted to marry him, and share his dream of establishing a business together.
He could still remember the sense of excitement and pride he had felt the day he had first taken her to see the small run-down market garden he had hoped to buy. She had seemed as thrilled and excited as him.
‘There’s a real market locally for a garden centre and a landscaping service, but it won’t be easy,’ he warned her. ‘I’ve been through all the figures with the bank and for the first few years we’re going to have to plough back every penny we make into the business. I won’t be able to buy us a big house or give you a nice car.’
‘I don’t care about things like that,’ Verity assured him softly, making one of those lightning changes she could make from a girl’s naïveté to a woman’s maturity and shaking his heart to its roots in the process. It fascinated and delighted him, held him in thrall with awe to be privileged to see these glimpses of the woman she was going to be. She was so gentle, so loving, so everything that most appealed to him in a woman.
‘I don’t care where we live just so long as we’re together…’
‘Well, I should certainly make enough to support a wife and our child, our children…’ he had whispered. It was all he wanted then. His parents were away on holiday with friends and he took her home with him, making love to her in the warm shadows of the summer evening. He was twenty-seven and considered himself already a man; she was twenty-one.
‘I’m going to see the bank manager tomorrow,’ he whispered to her as he slowly licked and then kissed her pretty pink fingertips, ‘and then I’m going to put a formal offer in on the business. Once it’s ours, we can start to make plans for our wedding.’
He thought that the quick tears that filled her eyes were tears of love and pleasure—she often wept huge silent tears of bliss after their lovemaking—and it was only later that he realised that she had wept because she had known that, by the time he was the owner of the small plot of land, she would be on the other side of the Atlantic.
Silas warned her repeatedly that her uncle was trying to separate them, that he had his own selfish reasons for not wanting them to marry, but Verity refused to listen.
Her uncle wasn’t like that, she protested, white-faced. He didn’t push the matter, thinking he knew how vulnerable she was, how much she needed to believe that the man who had brought her up did care more about her than his business, not wanting to do anything that might potentially hurt her.
Hurt her! Did she care about hurting him when she ignored his letter, his pleas to her to come home? She didn’t even care enough to write to him and tell him that it was over. She simply ignored his letter.
And then her uncle called round, supposedly to buy some plants but in reality to tell him that Verity had decided to stay on in New York for a further year.
The business wasn’t building up as fast as Silas had expected. He was struggling to service the bank borrowing he had taken out to buy and develop the garden centre, and when his bank manager telephoned him a week later to inform him that they had had an anonymous offer from someone wanting to buy the newly established garden centre from him he was so tempted to take it, to move away and make a fresh start somewhere else. What, after all, was there to keep him in the area any longer? His parents had decided to retire to Portugal, and he knew there was no way he could bear to live in the same town as Verity once she did return to take over her uncle’s business—but then fate stepped in, throwing him a wild card.
He had obtained tickets for the annual prestigious Chelsea Flower Show—two of them—because he had assumed by then that Verity would be back from New York and he had wante
d to take her with him.
Almost, he decided not to go. He had lost his love, and it looked very much as if he could soon be losing his business as well, but the tickets were bought and paid for and so he set out for London.
He saw Sarah when he was booking in at his hotel. She was staying there too, a thin, too pale girl who looked nothing like Verity and whom, if he was honest, he felt more sympathy for than desire. Her attempts to pick him up were so obvious and awkward that he had took pity on her and offered to buy her a drink. She was, she told him, originally from Australia where she had lived with foster parents, and she had come to England trying to trace her birth mother.
Whilst living in London she had met and fallen in love with a fellow Australian who had now left the country to continue his round-the-world tour, refusing to take Sarah with him.
‘I thought he loved me,’ she told Silas sadly, ‘but he didn’t, he was just using me.’
Her words and her sadness struck a sombre chord within Silas. In an attempt to cheer her up he offered her his spare ticket for the flower show, which she accepted.
They spent all that day together and the next, although there was nothing remotely sexual between them. Silas simply didn’t feel that way about her. Verity was the only woman he wanted. Emotionally he might hate her for what she had done to him, but physically, at night alone in his bed, he still ached and yearned for her.
Even now he still didn’t know what prompted him to knock on Sarah’s door the second night after they had met. She didn’t answer his knock but when, driven by some sixth sense, he turned the handle and pushed open the door, he found her seated on the bed, a glass of water in one hand and a bottle of pills on the bed beside her.
He shook her so savagely as he demanded to know how many she had taken that it was a wonder her neck didn’t snap, he acknowledged later.
‘None,’ she told him dull-eyed, ‘not yet…’
‘Not yet. Not ever!’ Silas told her sharply, picking up the bottle and going through to the bathroom to flush the contents down the lavatory.
When he came back she was crying soullessly into her hands.
‘Don’t go,’ she begged him. ‘I don’t want to be on my own.’
And so he stayed and, inevitably perhaps, they had sex, out of compassion and pity on his part and loneliness and need on hers.
In the morning they went their separate ways, but not before Silas had insisted on giving Sarah his telephone number and getting her own address from her.
He was concerned enough about her to telephone her as soon as he got home and to ring her regularly twice a week after that.
Always, at the back of his mind, was the concern that she might succumb and try a second time to take her own life. She had told him sadly that when her boyfriend had moved on she had felt she had nothing left to live for. His own pain at losing Verity had enabled him to understand what she had been feeling. He had counselled her to think about returning to Australia and her foster parents and friends, and she had promised him she would think about doing so, and then he received the tearful telephone call that was to completely change his life—to change both their lives.
She was pregnant, she told him, an accident. She was on the pill but had forgotten to take it. He was not to worry, she said, she intended to have the pregnancy terminated.
Silas reacted immediately and instinctively, taking the first train to York where she was living.
‘I can’t afford a baby,’ she protested when he told her that he didn’t want her to have a termination.
‘This is my baby as well as yours,’ Silas reminded her sombrely. ‘We could get married and share the responsibility.’
‘Get married? Us…? You and me? But you don’t…It was just sex,’ she protested shakily.
Just sex maybe, but they had still created a new life between them, and in the end she gave way and they were married very quickly and very quietly.
From the start Honor had been an independent, cheerful child. Until she had started school Silas had often taken her to work with him and the bond between them was very close and strong. She had asked about her mother, of course, and Silas had told her what little he knew, but until recently she had always seemed perfectly happy for there just to be the two of them.
He had named her Honor as a form of promise to Sarah that he would always honour the bargain they had made between them to put the welfare of the child they had created first, and he believed that he had always honoured that bargain.
He could hear Verity coming back downstairs now.
‘I…I’m sorry about…about the car…’ she told him awkwardly as she walked into the kitchen.
‘It’s hardly your fault,’ Silas pointed out.
‘Do you plan to stay in town long?’ he asked her politely as he handed her the glass of wine he had poured her.
‘I…I’m not really sure yet.’
Silas frowned. ‘Surely the business—?’ he began, but Verity cut him off, shaking her head.
‘I sold it…It was either that or risk being forcibly taken over. I plan to use the money to establish a charitable trust in my uncle’s name,’ she told him.
Silas fought hard not to let his shock show. What had happened to the woman who had put the business before their love? Verity must have changed dramatically—or perhaps weakened. Quickly he caught himself up. There was no point in allowing his thoughts to travel down that road, or in hoping, wishing—what? That she had had such a change of heart earlier, that their love…that he had been more important to her, that they could have…Stop it, he warned himself.
‘It must have been hard for you, making the decision to sell,’ he commented as unemotionally as he could. ‘After all, it’s been your life…’
Her life. Had he any idea how cruel he was being? Verity wondered. Did he know what it did to her to be told by him, of all people, that her life was so cold and empty and lacking in real emotion? She stiffened her spine and put down her glass.
‘No more than your business has been yours,’ she pointed out quietly.
It wasn’t true, of course—his work had been something that he loved, that he had chosen freely for himself, whilst hers…Not even with him could she be able to discuss how it had felt to finally step out from beneath the heavy burden that the business had always been to her, to feel free, to be her own person for the first time in her life.
Verity drew in her breath with a small hiss of pain.
‘I think I’d like to go to bed,’ she told him shakily. ‘It’s been a long day.’
Meaning, of course, that she didn’t want to spend any time with him, Silas recognised.
‘I’ll take you up,’ he told her curtly.
The guest room, Verity discovered, was more of a small, private suite on the top floor of the house in what must have originally been the attics—a pretty, good-sized bedroom with sloping ceiling and its own bathroom plus a small sitting room.
‘I had this conversion done for Honor,’ Silas informed her. ‘She’s getting to an age where she needs her own space and her own privacy.’
As he turned and walked towards the door Verity had a strong compulsion to run after him and stop him.
‘Silas…’
He stopped and turned round, waiting in silence.
‘Goodnight,’ she told him shakily.
‘Goodnight,’ he returned.
After showering and brushing her hair, Verity crept into bed. It felt so strange being here in Silas’ house. During the years they had been apart she had resisted the temptation to think about Silas and what might have been. She thought she had learnt to live with the pain, but seeing him again had reawakened not just the pain she had felt but all her other emotions as well. She couldn’t possibly still love him. Hadn’t she learned her lesson? Verity could feel the back of her throat beginning to ache with the weight of her suppressed tears as she closed her eyes and willed herself to go to sleep.
CHAPTER EIGHT
SILAS wok
e up abruptly. There was a sour taste in his mouth from the wine he had drunk and his head ached. Swinging his legs out of bed, he stood up and reached for his robe. His weight was much the same now as it had always been but his body was far more heavily muscled than it had been when he was in his twenties—the work he did was responsible for that, of course. Shaking his head, he padded barefoot out onto the landing and into the bathroom. He needed a glass of water.
He was just reaching into the bathroom cabinet for an aspirin when he heard a familiar sound. Putting down the glass of water he had been holding, he walked quickly towards Honor’s door. When she was younger she had often woken in the night in tears, frightened by some bad monster disturbing her dreams, but when he gently opened her bedroom door she was sleeping deeply and peacefully.
Still frowning, he glanced towards the stairs that led to the guest suite.
The noise was clearer now, a soft, heart-tearing sobbing. Verity was crying?
Immediately, taking the stairs two at a time, Silas hurried to her room, pushing open the door.
Like Honor she was asleep, but unlike Honor her sleep wasn’t peaceful. The bedclothes were tangled and the duvet half off the bed, exposing the creamy softness of her skin. As he realised that, like him, she slept in the nude, Silas hastily willed himself to ignore the temptation to let his gaze stray to her body, concentrating instead on her pale, tear-stained face.
Without her make-up and with her hair down she looked no different now than she had done at nineteen and, for a moment, the temptation to gather her up in his arms and hold her close was so strong that he had to take a step back from the bed to prevent himself from doing so.
In her sleep Verity gave a small, heartbreaking little cry, fresh tears rolling down her face from her closed eyes.
Silas could remember how rarely she had cried, how brave and independent she had always tried to be. Once, when they had quarrelled about something—he had forgotten what, some minor disagreement—she had turned her face away from him in the car and he had thought she had been sulking until he had looked in the wing mirror and seen the tears streaming from her eyes.