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Watching her ten minutes later as she lay next to her, Verity felt a tug of love on her heartstrings so strong that Honor’s small hand might actually have been physically wrapped around them.
‘Stop it,’ she warned herself sternly. ‘Don’t you dare start daydreaming along those lines…Don’t you dare!’
Very gingerly Verity eased her arm from beneath Honor’s sleeping body. It ached slightly and had started to go a little numb. Disconcertingly, though, she discovered as she slid carefully off the bed, she actually missed the warm young weight of Honor’s body.
The knowledge that she would probably never marry and have children of her own had been something she had pushed to the back of her mind in recent years. A child or children that she would have to bring up on her own had never been an option for her—her own childhood had given her extremely strong views about a child’s need to feel secure and, to Verity, the kind of security she had craved so desperately as a child had come all neatly wrapped up with two parents.
In the early years after her breakup with Silas she’d had virtually only to see a young couple out with a small child to feel pierced with misery and envy.
Another woman, a different woman, might, on learning that the man she had loved, the man who had promised always to love her, had married someone else, have hardened her heart against her own emotions and made herself find someone else, built a new life for herself with a new man in it, but Verity had never been able to do that. For one thing the business had meant that she simply hadn’t had the time to form new relationships and for another…For another, for a long time she had felt so hurt and betrayed, so convinced that Silas was the only man she could ever love, that she simply hadn’t tried.
But there had still been that sense of loss, that small, sharp ache of envy for other young women who’d had what she hadn’t: a man to love and their child.
But now she felt she was far too mature to give in to such feelings.
‘What rubbish,’ Charlotte had told her forthrightly recently when she had brought up the matter and Verity had said as much to her.
‘For one thing you are not even in your late thirties, and for another, women in their early forties are giving birth to their first child nowadays. Neither can you start telling me that you can’t spare the time and that the business is too demanding—you don’t have the business any more.’
‘I don’t have a partner either,’ Verity had felt bound to point out.
‘That could easily be remedied,’ Charlotte had told her firmly, ‘and you know it!’
‘Perhaps I’m simply not the maternal type.’ Verity had shrugged, anxious to change the subject.
‘Come off it,’ Charlotte had scoffed. ‘You know my two adore you.’
And she loved them, Verity acknowledged now as she tiptoed towards the bedroom door, but something about Honor had touched her heart and her emotions had really shaken her.
Because she was Silas’ child?
If anything, surely that should make her resent and dislike her and not…? It was certainly plain that Myra did not feel in the least bit maternal towards her intended future stepdaughter. Was it Honor herself she didn’t like, or did she perhaps simply resent the fact that she was the physical evidence that Silas had loved another woman? Myra certainly hadn’t struck her as the emotionally insecure type.
As Verity opened the bedroom door, Honor moved in her sleep and muttered something. Holding her breath, Verity waited until she was sure she had settled down again and, leaving the bedroom door open and the landing light on, she went quickly downstairs.
It was gone twelve. How much longer would Silas be?
Her discarded suit jacket was lying on the chair where she had left it. Automatically she picked it up and folded it neatly, smoothing the soft fabric. Her uncle would have thoroughly disapproved of her buying something so impractical in white and in a delicately luxurious fabric. Clothes to him had simply been a necessary practicality. Verity could still remember how surprised and thrilled she had been when she and Silas had been walking through town one day and he had stopped her outside a boutique window and, indicating the dress inside, told her tenderly, ‘That would suit you…’
The dress in question had been a silky halter-necked affair, backless, the fabric scattered with pretty feminine flowers, and it had also been a world away from the type of clothes she had normally worn: sturdy jeans, neatly pleated skirts, dully sensible clothes bought under the stern eye of her uncle’s sixty-year-old Scottish housekeeper.
‘Oh, Silas, it’s lovely,’ she had breathed, ‘but it’s far too…too pretty for me…’
‘Nothing could ever be too pretty for you,’ Silas had returned softly, adding huskily, ‘Not pretty enough, maybe…’
‘Oh, Silas…’ she had whispered, blushing.
‘Oh, Verity,’ he had teased her back but, later in the week, when he had arrived with a present for her that had turned out to be the dress, the look in his eyes when he had persuaded her to model it for him had made her blush for a very, very different reason.
She had protested, of course, that he shouldn’t have bought her something so personal nor so expensive.
‘Why not?’ he had countered. ‘You’re the woman I love, the woman I’m going to marry.’
She had been so young and naive then, assuming that he’d accepted that even as Silas’ wife she’d owe it to her uncle to do as he wished and take her place in his business. She had known too, of course, that Silas hadn’t been happy about the silent but ostrich-like way she had convinced herself that it would all work out and had pushed it to the back of her mind. Silas would surely come to respect her point of view. They were young and in love—how could anything so mundane as duty come between them? She had been too dazed with love and happiness to guess that Silas might still see her role as his future wife in a far different light from that in which she did herself.
Through the sitting-room window Verity saw the headlights of a car coming up the drive. Silas! It had to be.
She opened the front door to him, putting her finger to her lips as she warned him, ‘Honor’s asleep.’
