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‘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…’
