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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.
‘I didn’t want you to see me cry,’ she had told him when he had stopped the car and taken her in his arms. ‘It hurts so much.’
‘The last thing I want to do is hurt you,’ Silas had told her and meant it.
In her sleep Verity was reliving the events of the final summer of her relationship with Silas. After the two days they had spent together, New York had seemed even more lonely than ever. The work she had been doing with her uncle’s old friend had been mentally and physically demanding and yet, at the same time somehow, very unsatisfying. She hadn’t got the heart for it, Verity had acknowledged. Her heart had been given to Silas. Just how empty her life had been without him had been brought home to her during the two days they had spent together. Then, she had felt alive, whole, complete…When he had gone…It had been less than a week since he had flown home, having begged her to tell her uncle that she had changed her mind and that her future now lay with Silas.
‘I can’t do it,’ she protested.
‘It’s business, Verity,’ Silas argued, ‘that’s all. We’re human beings with feelings, needs…I miss you and I want us to be together.’
‘I miss you too,’ Verity told him.
Initially she had been supposed to be spending four months in New York, but the original four had stretched to eight and then twelve, and every time she mentioned coming home her uncle procrastinated and said that, according to his friend, there was a great deal she still had to learn.
Sometimes the temptation to tell him that she simply couldn’t do what he wanted her to do was so strong that she almost gave in to it, and then she would remember how he had taken her in.
Although it had never been discussed between them, Verity had the feeling that her uncle blamed her for her father’s death. He and her mother had been on their way to collect her from a birthday party she had insisted on going to when they had been involved in the fatal accident which had killed them both, and she felt as though, in taking his place, she was doing some kind of penance, making some kind of restitution.
She had tried to say as much to Silas but he always got so angry when they discussed her uncle that she had simply not been able to do so. And her uncle seemed to dislike and resent Silas as much as Silas did him.
‘Have you any idea just how wealthy you are going to be?’ he demanded of Verity when she begged him to allow her to return home. ‘You must be very careful, Verity,’ he warned her. ‘There are always going to be hungry and ambitious men out there who will try to convince you that they love you. Don’t listen to them.’
‘Silas isn’t like that,’ she protested defensively.
‘Isn’t he?’ her uncle countered grimly. ‘Well, he is certainly a young man with an awful lot of debts—far too many to be able to support a wife.’
‘Come home,’ Silas begged her.
But she said, ‘No…not until I have fulfilled my debt to my uncle.’
Shortly after Silas returned to England, the murder of one of her fellow tenants in the block where she rented an apartment resulted in her uncle insisting that she moved to a safer address.
Verity tried to telephone Silas to tell him that she was moving but, when she wasn’t able to get any reply either from Silas’ home telephone or the garden centre, she had to ask her uncle to pass on to him her new address and telephone number.
She knew from what Silas had told her during his visit that he had several new commissions and was working virtually eighteen hours a day, which explained why she was unable to get hold of him.
A month later when she had still not heard from him she finally made herself acknowledge the truth. She loved him and missed him—dreadfully. He was the most important thing, the most important person in her life, and even though it meant disappointing her uncle she knew that it was impossible for her to go on denying her feelings, her love, any longer. She wanted to go home.
She rang her uncle, who assured her that he had passed on to Silas her new address and telephone number.
Silas was angry and upset with her, Verity acknowledged. It had taken a lot for him to beg her to come home as he had done and, no doubt, she had hurt his pride when she had been unable to say yes.
She knew how little he had been able to afford either the time or the money for his spur-of-the-moment flying visit to her, and she wished she had been able to tell him then how much she was missing him and how much she wished she could be with him.
When another two months passed without him getting in touch with her, she finally acknowledged the truth. She had lost weight; she couldn’t sleep; she thought about him night and day; she ached so badly for him that the pain of missing him was with her all the time. She loved him so much that, even if it meant letting her uncle down, she knew that it was impossible for her to go on denying her feelings. There must surely be a way that she could be with Silas and do as her uncle wished, a way she did not have to choose between them, but if there wasn’t…
If there wasn’t, then she had made up her mind, selfish though it might be: being with Silas was more important to her than pleasing her uncle. She wanted to go home; she wanted to be with Silas; she wanted to be held in his arms close to his heart; she wanted to hear him telling her in that gruff, sexy voice he used after they had made love that he loved her and needed her and that he would never ever let her go. She wanted to hear him telling her how much he wanted her to be his wife, how much he wanted them to spend their lives together.
Reliving the times they had had together over and over again in the empty loneliness of her apartment was no substitute for the reality of being with him.
Without giving herself time to change her mind, she booked herself on the first available flight home, without telling anyone what she was doing. She wanted to surprise Silas, to see the look in his eyes when she walked into his arms, to show him that he meant more to her than anything else, than anyone else, in the world.
Confronting her uncle wasn’t going to be easy, she knew that. She was twenty-two, old enough to know her own mind and to make her own decisions.
