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And like the dutiful person she had been raised to be she dipped her head and agreed.
CHAPTER THREE
THE doorbell rang just as Verity had finished her unpacking. Frowning, she went downstairs to answer it. Who on earth could that be? She certainly wasn’t expecting anyone.
She was still frowning when she opened the door, a small gasp of shock escaping her lips as she saw who was standing there and recognised him immediately.
‘Silas!’
Instinctively her hand went to her throat as she tried, too late, to suppress that betraying whisper of sound.
‘Verity,’ her visitor responded grimly. ‘May I come in?’
Without waiting for her assent he was shouldering his way into the hallway.
‘How…how did you know I was back?’ Verity managed to ask him huskily. Was it possible that he had actually grown taller and broader in the years they had been apart? Surely not, and yet she couldn’t remember him ever filling the space of the hallway quite so imposingly before. He might be over ten years older but he was still as magnetically male as she remembered, she recognised unwillingly, and perhaps even more so—as a young man he had worn his sexuality very carelessly, softening it with the tenderness and consideration he had shown her.
&nbs
p; Now…She took a deep breath and tried to steady her jittery nerves. Now there was nothing remotely soft nor tender about the way he was looking at her. Far from it.
‘I didn’t until I did a check at the hospital and found out that you had accompanied Honor there. What the hell kind of person are you, Verity? First you damn near run my daughter over and then you don’t even bother to let me know that she’s had an accident. What am I saying? I know exactly what kind of woman you are, don’t I? Why should I be surprised at anything you might choose to do, after all I know?’
Verity couldn’t utter a word. What was he saying? What was he trying to accuse her of doing? She…He made it sound as though she had deliberately tried to hit Honor, when the truth was…
‘I did what I thought was best,’ she told him coolly. There was no way she was going to let him see just how much he had caught her off guard, or how agitated and ill-equipped to deal with him she actually felt.
Thinking about him earlier had done nothing to prepare her for the reality of him. She had been thinking about, remembering, a young man in his twenties. This was a mature adult male in his late thirties and a man who…
‘What you thought was best?’ He gave her an incredulously angry look as he repeated her words. ‘Didn’t it strike you that as Honor’s father I had the right to know what had happened? Didn’t it cross that cold little mind of yours that you had a responsibility to let me know what had happened? After all, you used to be very big on responsibility, didn’t you? Oh, but I was forgetting, the kind of responsibility you favoured was the kind that meant—’
‘I didn’t get in touch with you because I had no idea that you were Honor’s father until we got to the hospital,’ Verity interrupted him quickly, ‘and by then…’
By then Honor had begged her not to let her father know what had happened and, additionally, untruthfully told both her and the nurse that Silas was unavailable and out of the country. But she certainly wasn’t going to tell Silas that. Against all the odds, and ridiculously, she felt a certain sense of kinship, of female bonding with Honor.
Female bonding with a ten-year-old? And she was supposed to be intelligent? Charlotte was right—she did need to get a grip on her life.
‘Presumably, though, you knew by the time Honor had informed the nurse that you were going to be her stepmother,’ he informed her with deadly acidness.
She was surely far too old and had far too much self-control to be betrayed now by the kind of hot-faced blush which had betrayed her so readily all those years ago, but nonetheless Verity found herself hurriedly looking away from the anger she could see in Silas’ eyes and curling her toes into her shoes as she fibbed, ‘Uh…did she…? I really don’t remember…the casualty department was busy,’ she embroidered. ‘I just wanted to make sure that Honor got some medical attention—’
‘Liar.’ Silas cut across her stumbled explanation in a brutally incisive voice that made her wince. ‘And don’t think I don’t know exactly why you laid claim to a non-existent relationship between us.’
This was worse than her worst possible nightmare, worse by far than the most embarrassing and humiliating thing she could ever have imagined happening to her, Verity decided. She could never remember feeling so exposed and vulnerable, so horribly conscious of having her deepest and most private emotions laid bare to be derided and scorned. No, not even the first time she had had to stand up in front of her late uncle’s board of directors, knowing how much each and every one of them must secretly have been resenting her appointment as their leader, as the person to whom they would have to defer.
In that one sentence Silas had torn down, trampled, flattened, all the delicate defences she had worked so hard to weave together to protect herself with—defences she had created with patience and teeth-gritting determination; defences she had bonded together with good humour and cheerful smiles, determined never to allow anyone to guess what she was really feeling, or to guess how empty her life sometimes felt, how far short of her once idealistic expectations it had fallen. Other people’s compassion and pity were something she had always shrunk from and gently rejected. Her lack of a man to share her life, a child to share her love—these had been things she had determinedly told herself she was not going to allow herself to yearn for. She had her life, her friends, her health.
But now, pitilessly and brutally, Silas had destroyed that precious, fragile peace of mind she had worked with gentle determination to achieve.
Silas had guessed, unearthed, exhumed the pitiful little secret she had so safely hidden from other eyes.
Bravely Verity lifted her head. She wasn’t going to let him have a total victory. Something could be salvaged from the wreckage, the destruction he had caused, even if it was only her pride.
‘Contrary to what you seem to think—’ she began, but once again Silas wouldn’t let her finish.
He cut her off with a furious, ‘I don’t think. I know. You let the nurse believe that you had the right to sign Honor’s consent form because you thought it would get you off the hook, that that way you wouldn’t have to face up to what you had done, nor suffer any potential legal consequences.
‘My God, what kind of woman are you to be driving so carelessly in a built-up area in the first place, and at school-leaving time? But, then, we both already know the answer to that, don’t we? Such mundane matters as children’s safety, children’s lives, simply don’t matter to you, do they? You’ve got far more important things to concern yourself with. How many millions are you worth these days, Verity? No doubt that car outside is just one of the perks that comes with being a very rich woman.
