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‘I like your hair best when it’s down,’ Honor told her sleepily. ‘It makes you look…more huggy. Catherine, my friend, has got two brothers and loads and loads of cousins…’ Her eyes closed. Very gently, Verity bent and kissed her.
For all her outer layer of sturdy independence, inside she was still very much a little girl. Silas’ little girl.
Quietly Verity got up and headed for the bedroom door.
Alone in the kitchen, Silas allowed himself to relax for the first time since he had come home. He didn’t know what kind of game Honor thought she was playing by inveigling Verity into agreeing to hosting that damned dinner party, and the only reason he hadn’t given her a thorough dressing down over it was because he was well aware that she had reached that sensitive and delicate stage in her development where her burgeoning pride and sense of self could be very easily bruised. He would have to talk to her about it, of course, and explain that she had put Verity in a very embarrassing and difficult position.
It had been hard to guess exactly what Verity’s real feelings about the situation were. She had developed a disconcerting, calm, distancing and very womanly maturity which, very effectively, drew a line over which no one was allowed to cross, but he certainly knew how he was going to feel, sitting at the opposite end of the dining table from her whilst she acted as his hostess. It was going to be sheer hell, total purgatory, an evening filled with excruciating pain of ‘could have beens’ and all because his darling daughter wanted to be on a par with her school friends.
Well, he couldn’t blame her for that. It was all part and parcel of growing up. Honor was getting ready to grow into womanhood and she was making it clear to him that she wanted a woman in her life to pattern herself on.
He had, at one stage, wondered if Myra—but the pair of them would never accept one another.
Had Verity been anyone other than who she was he suspected that by now he would have been thanking fate for bringing her into their lives. It was glaringly obvious how Honor felt about her—and not just from the determined way she was attaching herself to Verity. If he was honest with himself, which he always tried to be, without the past to cast its unhappy shadow he knew perfectly well that, had he been meeting Verity for the first time now, he would have been instantly and immediately attracted to her.
She had still, despite the life she had lived, an air of soft and gentle femininity, an aura of natural womanly strength melded with compassion and love.
He found it hard to picture her as the head of a multi-million-pound business making corporate decisions based purely on profits and completely without emotion. It wasn’t that he doubted her skills or abilities, it was just that, to him, even now, she still possessed that certain something that made him want to look after her and protect her.
Protect her? Was he crazy? She had all the protection she needed in the shape of the material assets she had chosen above their love.
‘It’s my duty, I owe it to him,’ she had told him sadly when she had allowed her uncle to part them and send her away to New York, but those had been words he hadn’t wanted to hear.
Last night, holding her in his arms, kissing her…She’d been back less than a week and already…He wasn’t going to make the same mistake he had made last time. This time he was going to be on his guard and stay on it…
He had known, of course, of her uncle’s plans for Verity’s future and the way her uncle had deliberately fostered and used her strong sense of duty for his own ends.
One of the first things he had decided when he had found himself widowed and the father of a baby girl was that he would never ever manipulate her feelings and cause her to feel that she was in debt to him for anything in the way he had witnessed Verity’s uncle manipulating hers.
But, naively perhaps, he had assumed that Verity had shared his feelings, his belief that their future lay together.
‘Do you love me?’ he had demanded, and shyly she had nodded.
Had she ever loved him or…?
‘I’ll be back soon from New York and then…then we can be together,’ she told him.
And he had taken that to mean that she had wanted to marry him, and share his dream of establishing a business together.
He could still remember the sense of excitement and pride he had felt the day he had first taken her to see the small run-down market garden he had hoped to buy. She had seemed as thrilled and excited as him.
‘There’s a real market locally for a garden centre and a landscaping service, but it won’t be easy,’ he warned her. ‘I’ve been through all the figures with the bank and for the first few years we’re going to have to plough back every penny we make into the business. I won’t be able to buy us a big house or give you a nice car.’
‘I don’t care about things like that,’ Verity assured him softly, making one of those lightning changes she could make from a girl’s naïveté to a woman’s maturity and shaking his heart to its roots in the process. It fascinated and delighted him, held him in thrall with awe to be privileged to see these glimpses of the woman she was going to be. She was so gentle, so loving, so everything that most appealed to him in a woman.
‘I don’t care where we live just so long as we’re together…’
‘Well, I should certainly make enough to support a wife and our child, our children…’ he had whispered. It was all he wanted then. His parents were away on holiday with friends and he took her home with him, making love to her in the warm shadows of the summer evening. He was twenty-seven and considered himself already a man; she was twenty-one.
‘I’m going to see the bank manager tomorrow,’ he whispered to her as he slowly licked and then kissed her pretty pink fingertips, ‘and then I’m going to put a formal offer in on the business. Once it’s ours, we can start to make plans for our wedding.’
He thought that the quick tears that filled her eyes were tears of love and pleasure—she often wept huge silent tears of bliss after their lovemaking—and it was only later that he realised that she had wept because she had known that, by the time he was the owner of the small plot of land, she would be on the other side of the Atlantic.
Silas warned her repeatedly that her uncle was trying to separate them, that he had his own selfish reasons for not wanting them to marry, but Verity refused to listen.
Her uncle wasn’t like that, she protested, white-faced. He didn’t push the matter, thinking he knew how vulnerable she was, how much she needed to believe that the man who had brought her up did care more about her than his business, not wanting to do anything that might potentially hurt her.
Hurt her! Did she care about hurting him when she ignored his letter, his pleas to her to come home? She didn’t even care enough to write to him and tell him that it was over. She simply ignored his letter.
