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Good food, good wine and good friends—most of all good friends; they were a recipe for the very best kind of entertaining. But she didn’t know Silas’ friends and the situation was bound to be both uncomfortable and awkward. He was being polite about it now, just as he had been good-mannered about the accident to her tyres and the fact that he had been forced to offer her a bed for the night. But they both knew how he really felt about her.
Quickly now, Verity reached for her wine and took a deep gulp, grimacing a little as the wine’s sharpness hit her palate.
‘You never did have much of a head for alcohol,’ Silas commented, watching her.
Silently their glances met and held.
‘That was over ten years ago,’ Verity finally managed to tell him huskily. ‘My…tastes have changed since then.’
‘Here it is…’
Both of them looked round as Honor came bounding into the room carrying the Scrabble.
CHAPTER SEVEN
‘RIGHT, time for bed…’
‘Oh, Dad, just one more game,’ Honor protested, but Silas was already shaking his head.
‘You said that last time,’ he reminded her sternly.
Diplomatically Verity busied herself tidying up the letters and putting everything away. Honor had needed no allowances made for her and she had thoroughly trounced them, not once, but twice—perhaps because in Verity’s own case, at least, her concentration had been more on the words that Honor had formed than matching them, she admitted, quickly glancing away from Honor to the board.
Love…Tiff…Quarrel…Mama…Surely she was being over-sensitive in her reaction to seeing those words? After all, Honor knew nothing about the past, their shared past.
Quickly Verity broke up the words and folded the board.
‘You will come up and say goodnight to me, won’t you?’ Honor begged Verity, adding determinedly, ‘I want you both to come up…together…’
Verity couldn’t bring herself to look at Silas. Instead she went to wash the empty coffee mugs whilst Silas took Honor upstairs.
She was just about to remove their wineglasses when he came back down.
‘No, leave those,’ he told her. ‘We might as well finish off the bottle.’
‘I’ll just go up and say goodnight to Honor,’ Verity told him huskily.
Standing in the kitchen on her own whilst he?
?d been upstairs with Honor had given her too much time to think, to remember…to regret…
If things had been different Honor could have been her child…If things had been different…If Silas had not rejected her…If…If…But what use were ‘ifs’? No use whatsoever to an aching, lonely, yearning heart. A heart that still beat ridiculously fast for a man who had hurt it so badly.
Honor was lying flat beneath the bedclothes, her hair a dark mass on the pillow. Automatically as she bent to kiss her Verity smoothed it back off her face.
‘I do like you, Verity,’ Honor told her softly. ‘I wish you could be here with us for always…’
Sharp tears pricked Verity’s eyes. She wasn’t totally gullible, and she was perfectly well aware that Honor wasn’t averse to using soft soap and flattery to get her own way, but for once there was no mistaking the very real emotion in the little girl’s voice. The real emotion and the real need, Verity recognised.
Honor was looking, if not for a mother, then certainly for a mentor, a role model, a woman with whom she could bond. None knew better than she herself just how it felt to be on the verge of young womanhood without any guiding female influence in one’s life, Verity acknowledged. It was one of the loneliest and most isolated places on earth—almost as lonely and heartache inducing as being without the man you had given your heart to.
Her uncle, although providing for her material welfare, had been oblivious to the emotional needs of a young girl, and Verity remembered with painful clarity how she as a young adolescent had tried desperately to attach herself to the mother of a school friend, and then, when that had been gently discouraged by the woman in question, she had turned instead to one of her schoolteachers. But both women, although kind and caring, had had their own families and their own lives, and their distancing of themselves from her had left Verity feeling even more bereft than before—and not just bereft, but sensitively aware of being gently held at a distance.
Honor, she suspected, although on the surface a very different girl from the one she had been, was going through a similar stage. There was no doubting Silas’ love for his daughter, nor his caring paternal concern for her. He was, Verity could see, a father who was very actively involved in his daughter’s life, but Honor was making it plain that she wanted a woman’s influence in her life as well as her father’s.
‘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.
