Wanting His Child

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.

‘Funny—I knew, of course, that the business came first, second and third with you, but I never had you down as a woman who needed to surround herself with all the trappings of a materialistic lifestyle.’

Verity gave him a dazed, almost semi-blind look. What was he saying—something about her car? About her wealth? It didn’t matter. All that mattered was the intense feeling of relief she felt on realising that he hadn’t, after all, meant what she had thought he had meant by that comment about knowing why she had not refuted Honor’s outrageous claim that she was soon to become her stepmother. That he had thought she had allowed his daughter’s fib to stand so that no questions could be asked about the accident, not because secretly she still yearned for…still wanted…

‘My God, but you’ve changed,’ she heard him breathing angrily. ‘That car…this house…those clothes…’

Her clothes…Verity pushed aside her euphoric sense of relief—there would be time for her to luxuriate in that later when she was on her own.

‘I’m wearing jeans,’ she managed to point out in quiet self-defence.

‘Designer jeans,’ Silas told her curtly, nodding in the direction of the logo sewn on them.

Designer jeans? How had Silas known that? The Silas she remembered simply wouldn’t have known or cared where her clothes had come from. The Silas she knew and remembered would, in fact, have been far more interested in what lay beneath her clothes rather than the name of the design house they had originated from.

Quickly, Verity redirected her thoughts, telling him dryly what her own quick eye had already noticed.

‘Your own clothes are hardly basic chain store stuff.’

Was that just a hint of betraying caught-out colour seeping up under his skin? Verity wondered triumphantly.

‘I didn’t choose them,’ he told her stiffly.

Then who had? A woman? For some reason his admission took all her original pleasure at catching him out away from her, Verity acknowledged dismally.

‘I suppose you thought you were being pretty clever and that you’d got away with damn near killing my daughter,’ Silas was demanding to know, back on the attack again. ‘Well, unfortunately for you a…a friend of mine just happened to see you at the scene of the accident and she took a note of your car’s registration number.’

‘Really? How very neighbourly of her,’ Verity gritted. ‘I don’t suppose it occurred to her that she might have been more usefully employed trying to help Honor rather than playing at amateur detective?’

‘Myra was on her way to a very important meeting. She’s on the board of several local charities and, as she said, she could hardly expect busy business people who are already giving their time to feel inclined to make a generous cash donation to a charity when its chairperson can’t even be on time for a meeting…’

Whoever this Myra was, Silas obviously thought an awful lot of her, Verity reflected. He made her sound like a positive angel.

‘You aren’t going to deny that you were responsible for Honor’s accident, I hope?’ Silas continued, returning to the attack.

Verity was beginning to get angry herself now. How dared he speak to her like this? Would he have done so had he not already known her, judged her…had she been a stranger? Somehow she doubted it. He was being unfairly critical of her, unfairly caustic towards her because of who she was, because once she had been foolish enough to love him, and he had been—Quickly she gathered up her dangerously out-of-control thoughts.

Deny that she was responsible? But she hadn’t been responsible. It was…On the point of opening her mouth to vigorously inform him just how wrong he was, Verity abruptly remembered her conversation with Honor and the little girl’s anxiety. Quickly she closed it again.

‘It was an accident,’ was all she could permit herself to say.

‘An accident caused by the fact that you were driving too selfishly and too fast along a suburban road, in a car more properly designed for fast driving on an autobahn, or in your case, probably more truthfully, for showing off amongst your friends.’

Verity gasped.

‘For your information,’ she began, ‘I bought that car…’ On the point of telling him just why she had bought the BMW, she suddenly changed her mind. After all, what explanations did she possibly owe him? None. None at all.

‘I bought that car because I wanted to buy it—because I liked it. No doubt your friend prefers to drive something ecologically sound, modest and economical. She has a Beetle, perhaps, or maybe a carefully looked after Morris Minor which she inherited from some aged aunt…’ she suggested acidly.