Celebrate the legend that is bestselling author

PENNY JORDAN

Phenomenally successful author of more than two hundred books with sales of over a hundred million copies!

Penny Jordan’s novels are loved by millions of readers all around the word in many different languages. Mills & Boon are proud to have published one hundred and eighty-seven novels and novellas written by Penny Jordan, who was a reader favourite right from her very first novel through to her last.

This beautiful digital collection offers a chance to recapture the pleasure of all of Penny Jordan’s fabulous, glamorous and romantic novels for Mills & Boon.

About the Author

PENNY JORDAN is one of Mills & Boon’s most popular authors. Sadly, Penny died from cancer on 31st December 2011, aged sixty-five. She leaves an outstanding legacy, having sold over a hundred million books around the world. She wrote a total of one hundred and eighty-seven novels for Mills & Boon, including the phenomenally successful A Perfect Family, To Love, Honour & Betray, The Perfect Sinner and Power Play, which hit the Sunday Times and New York Times bestseller lists. Loved for her distinctive voice, her success was in part because she continually broke boundaries and evolved her writing to keep up with readers’ changing tastes. Publishers Weekly said about Jordan ‘Women everywhere will find pieces of themselves in Jordan’s characters’ and this perhaps explains her enduring appeal.

Although Penny was born in Preston, Lancashire and spent her childhood there, she moved to Cheshire as a teenager and continued to live there for the rest of her life. Following the death of her husband, she moved to the small traditional Cheshire market town on which she based her much-loved Crighton books.

Penny was a member and supporter of the Romantic Novelists’ Association and the Romance Writers of America—two organisations dedicated to providing support for both published and yet-to-be-published authors. Her significant contribution to women’s fiction was recognised in 2011, when the Romantic Novelists’ Association presented Penny with a Lifetime Achievement Award.

Wanting His Child
Penny Jordan

www.millsandboon.co.uk

CHAPTER ONE

VERITY MAITLAND grimaced as she directed the long nose of the top-of-the-range BMW sports car she was driving through the outskirts of what had once been her home town.

It may have been over a decade since she had originally left but, from what she could see, nothing much seemed to have changed—but then why should it have done? Just because so much had changed in her life, that didn’t mean…

The car was attracting a good deal of covert attention, and no wonder: from its immaculate shiny paintwork to its sporty wheels and its sleek soft-top hood it screamed look at me…admire me…want me.

She would never in a thousand years have deliberately chosen a car so blatantly attention seeking and expensive and had, in fact, only bought it as a favour to a friend. Her friend, a modern wunderkind spawned by the eighties, had recently taken the decision to ‘downsize’ and move herself, her man, and her two children to a remote area of the Scottish Highlands where, as she had explained ruefully to Verity, the BMW would be a luxury she simply couldn’t afford. What she had also not been able to afford had been the time to look around for a private buyer prepared to pay a good price for the almost new vehicle and so, heroically, Verity had stepped in and offered to buy the car from her. After all, it was hardly as though she couldn’t afford to—she could have afforded a round dozen or so new cars had she wished.

Along with the nearly new car she had also acquired from the same friend a nearly-new wardrobe of clothes, all purchased from Bond Street’s finest.

‘I’m hardly going to be wearing Gucci, Lauren, Prada or Donna Karan where we’re going,’ Charlotte had sighed, ‘and we are the same size.’

Well aware, although her friend hadn’t said so and despite her cheerful optimistic attitude, that her ‘downsizing’ had not been totally voluntary and that money was going to be tight for her, Verity had equably picked up on Charlotte’s hints about selling off her wardrobe and had stepped in as purchaser.

She could, of course, have simply offered to give her friend the money; as a multimillionairess, even if only on a temporary basis, she could after all afford it, but she knew how Charlotte’s pride would be hurt by such an offer and their friendship meant too much to her for her to risk damaging it.

‘After all, it isn’t just me who’s being done a favour,’ Charlotte had commented enthusiastically as they had stood together in the large bedroom of her soon to be ex-Knightsbridge house, viewing Verity’s appearance in the white Gucci trouser suit she had just pulled on.

‘Now that you’ve sold the business and you aren’t going to be working non-stop virtually twenty-four hours a day, you’re going to need a decent wardrobe. You’re going to have to watch out for fortune hunters, though,’ she warned Verity sternly. ‘I know you’re in your thirties now, but you’re still a very attractive woman…’

‘And the fact that I’m currently worth over forty million pounds makes me even more attractive,’ Verity suggested dryly.

‘Not to me, it doesn’t,’ Charlotte assured her with a warm hug. ‘But there are men…’

‘Please…You sound just like my uncle,’ Verity told her.

Her uncle. Verity was thinking about him now as she drove through the town and headed out towards her destination. It had been an ironic touch of fate that the very house where she had grown up under the guardianship of her late uncle should have been one of the ones the estate agent had sent her details of as a possible house for her to rent.

When people had asked her what she intended to do, having finally taken the decision to sell off the business she had inherited from her uncle—a business which she had been groomed by him to manage and run virtually from the moment she had gone to live with him following her parents’ death; a business which she had been brought up by him to look upon as a sacred trust, as the whole focus of her life and as something far, far more important than any personal desires or needs she might have—she had told them, with the calmness for which she was fabled, that so far she had made no plans. That she simply intended to take some time out in order to give proper consideration to what she wanted to do with the rest of her life. After all, at thirty-three she might not be old, but then neither was she young, and she was certainly wise enough to be able to keep her own counsel—it was not completely true that she hadn’t made any plans. She had. It was just that she knew exactly how her advisers, both financial and emotional, would look upon them.

To divest herself of virtually all of the money she had received from the sale of the company was not a step they would consider well thought out or logical, but for once in her life she wanted to do what felt right for her, to be motivated by her own judgement rather than simply complying with the needs and demands of others.

She had fought a long battle to retain ownership of the business—not because she had particularly wanted to, but because she had known it was what her late uncle would have expected—but that battle was now over. As she herself had known and her financial advisers had warned her, there had been a very great danger that, if she had not accepted one of the excellent offers she had received for the sale of the business, she could have found herself in a position where a sale had been forced upon her. She had at least managed to ensure that her uncle’s name remained linked to that of the business for perpetuity.

Verity frowned, automatically checking her speed as she realised she was approaching the local school and that it was that time in the afternoon when the children were coming out.

It was the same school she had attended herself, although her memories of being there were not entirely happy due, in the main, to the fact that her uncle’s strictness and obsession with her school grades had meant that she had not been allowed to mingle freely with her classmates. During the long summer evenings when they had gone out to play, she had had to sit working at home under her uncle’s eagle eye. It had been his intention that her father, who had worked alongside him in the business and who had been his much younger brother, would ultimately take over from him, but her father’s untimely death had put an end to that and to the possibility that he might have further children—sons.

Her uncle’s own inability to father children had been something that Verity had only discovered after his death and had, she suspected, been the reason why he had never married himself.

She was clear of the school now and the houses had become more widely spaced apart, set in large private gardens.

Knowing that she would shortly be turning off the main road, Verity automatically started to brake and ten seconds later was all too thankful that she had done so as, totally unexpectedly, out of a small newsagent’s a young girl suddenly appeared on a pair of roller blades, skidded and shot out into the road right in front of Verity’s car.

Instinctively and immediately Verity reacted, braking sharply, turning the car to one side, but sickeningly she still heard the appalling sound of a thud against the front wing of the car as the girl collided with it.

Frantically Verity tugged at her seat belt with trembling fingers, her heart thudding with adrenalin-induced horror and fear as she ran to the front of the car.

The girl was struggling to her feet, her face as ashen as Verity knew her own to be.

‘What happened? Are you hurt? Can you walk…?’

As she gabbled the frantic questions, Verity forced herself to take a deep breath.

The girl was on her feet now but leaning over the side of the car. She looked all right, but perhaps she had been hurt internally, Verity worried anxiously as she went to put her arm around her to support her.

She felt heartbreakingly thin beneath the bulkiness of her clothes and Verity guessed that she wouldn’t be much above ten. Her grey eyes were huge in her small, pointed white face, and as she raised her hand to push the weight of her long dark hair off her face Verity saw with a thrill of fear that there was blood on her hand.

‘It’s okay,’ the girl told her hesitantly, ‘it’s just a scratch. I’m fine really…It was all my fault…I didn’t look. Dad’s always telling me…’

She stopped talking, her eyes suddenly brimming with tears, her whole body starting to shake with sobs.

‘It’s all right,’ Verity assured her, instinctively taking her in her arms and holding her tight. ‘You’re in shock. Come and sit in the car…’

Glancing up towards the shop the girl had just come from, she asked her gently, ‘Is your mother with you? Shall I…?’

‘I don’t have a mother,’ the girl told her, allowing Verity to help her into the passenger seat of the car where she slumped back, her eyes closed, before adding, ‘She’s dead. She died when I was born. You don’t have to feel sorry for me,’ she added without opening her eyes. ‘I don’t mind because I never knew her and I’ve got Dad and he’s…’

‘I don’t feel sorry for you,’ Verity assured her, adding with an openness that she could only put down to the fact that she too was suffering the disorientating and disturbing effects of shock, ‘I lost both my parents in a car accident when I was six.’

The girl opened her eyes and looked thoughtfully at her. Now that she was beginning to get over her ordeal she looked very alert and intelligent and, in some odd way that Verity couldn’t quite put her finger on, slightly familiar.

‘It’s horrid having people feeling sorry for you, isn’t it?’ the girl said with evident emotion.

‘People don’t mean to be patronising,’ Verity responded. ‘But I do know what you mean…’

‘Dad told me I wasn’t to go outside the garden on my rollers.’ She gave Verity an assessing look. ‘He’ll ground me for ages—probably for ever.’ Verity waited, guessing what was coming next.

‘I don’t suppose…Well, he doesn’t have to know, does he…? I could pay for the damage to your car from my pocket money and…’

What kind of man was he, this father, who so patently made his daughter feel unloved and afraid? A man like her uncle, perhaps? A man who, whilst providing a child with all the material benefits he or she could possibly want, did not provide the far more important emotional ones?

‘No, he doesn’t have to know,’ Verity agreed, ‘as long as the hospital gives you the all clear.’

‘The hospital?’ The girl’s eyes widened apprehensively.

‘Yes, the hospital,’ Verity said firmly, closing her own door and re-starting the car.

She would be being extremely negligent in her duty as a responsible adult if she didn’t do everything within her power to make sure the girl was as physically undamaged as she looked.

‘You have to turn left here,’ the girl began and then looked closely at Verity as she realised she had started to turn without her directions. ‘Do you know the way?’

‘Yes. I know it,’ Verity agreed.

She ought to. She had gone there often enough with her uncle. Before he had moved the company’s headquarters to London, the highly specialised medical equipment he had invented and designed had been tried out in their local hospital and Verity had often accompanied him on his visits there.

One of the things she intended to do with the money from the sale of the company was to finance a special ward at the hospital named after her uncle. The rest of it…The rest of it would be used in equally philanthropic ways. That was why she had come back here to her old home town, to take time out to think about what she wanted to do with the rest of her life and to decide how other people could benefit the most from her late uncle’s money.

When they arrived at the casualty department of the hospital they were lucky in that there was no one else waiting to be seen.

The nurse, who frowned whilst Verity explained what had happened, then turned to Verity’s companion and asked her, ‘Right…Let’s start with your name.’

‘It’s…It’s Honor—Honor Stevens.’

Honor Stevens. Verity felt her heart start to plummet with the sickening speed of an out-of-control lift. She was being stupid, of course. Stevens wasn’t that unusual a name, and she was taking her own apprehension and coincidence too far to assume that just because of a shared surname that meant…

‘Address?’ the nurse asked crisply.

Dutifully Honor gave it.

‘Parents?’ she demanded.

‘Parent. I only have one—my father,’ Honor began weakly. ‘His name’s Silas. Well, really Silas Stevens.’ She pulled a face and looked at Verity, and unexpectedly told her, ‘You look…’ She stopped, looked at her again speculatively, but Verity didn’t notice.

Silas Stevens. Honor was Silas’ daughter. Why on earth hadn’t she known? Guessed? She could see so clearly now that the reason she had found Honor’s features so oddly familiar was because she was Silas’ daughter. She even had his thick, dark, unruly hair, for heaven’s sake, and those long-lashed grey eyes—they were his, no doubts about it. That disconcertingly level look was his as well and…

‘Are you feeling all right?’

Verity flushed as she realised that both Honor and the nurse were watching her.

‘I’m fine,’ she fibbed, adding dryly, ‘but it isn’t every day that I get an out-of-control roller blader courting death under my car wheels.’

And it certainly wasn’t every day that she learned that that child was the daughter of a man…of the man…What would Honor think if she knew that once Verity had believed that Silas’ children would be hers, that she would be the one to bear his babies, wear his ring, share his life…? But that had been before…Before her uncle had reminded her of where her real duty lay, and before Silas had told her so unequivocally that he had his own plans for his life and that they did not include playing second fiddle to another’s wishes, another man’s rules, another man’s business.

‘But I can’t just walk away and leave him, leave it,’ Verity had protested shakily when Silas had delivered an ultimatum to her. ‘He needs me, Silas, he expects me to take over the business…’

‘And what of my needs, my expectations?’ Silas had asked her angrily.

In the end they had made up their quarrel, but six weeks later her uncle had announced that he had made arrangements for her to go to America where she would work for a firm manufacturing a similar range of medical equipment to their own, since he believed the experience would stand her in good stead when she took over his own business. She had been tempted to refuse, to rebel, but the strictness with which he had brought her up had stopped her—that and her sense of responsibility and duty towards not just him but the business as well. The twenty-year gap which had existed between him and her father, despite the fact that they had been brothers, had meant that her father himself had been a little in awe of him, and Verity, entering his household as a shy six-year-old suddenly bereft of her parents, had been too nervous, too despairingly unhappy over the loss of her mother and father, too intimidated to even think of rebelling against his stern dictatorship so that the seeds had been sown then for her to be taught by him to obey.

Later, away from his oppressive presence, she had started to mature into her own person, to feel able to make her own judgements and have her own values and she had known then, tried then…but it had been too late…

Quickly she veiled her eyes with her lashes just in case either Honor or the nurse might read what she was feeling.

‘We’ll need to take some X-rays and of course she’ll have to see the doctor, although it doesn’t look as though anything’s wrong,’ the nurse assured Verity.

‘You’ll wait here for me. You won’t leave without me, will you?’ Honor begged Verity as the nurse indicated that she was to follow her.

‘I…’ Verity hesitated. She too knew what it was like to feel alone, to feel abandoned, to feel that you had no one.

‘Your father—’ the nurse was beginning firmly, but Honor shook her head.

‘No,’ she said quickly. ‘I don’t want…He’s away…on business and he won’t be back until…until next week,’ she responded.

The nurse was pursing her lips.

‘Look, if it helps, I’ll wait…and take full responsibility,’ Verity offered.

‘Well, I don’t really know. It is most unorthodox,’ the nurse began. ‘Are you a relative, or—?’

‘She’s…she’s going to be my new mother,’ Honor cut in before Verity could say anything, and then looked pleadingly at her as the nurse looked questioningly at Verity, seeking confirmation of what she had just been told.

‘I…I’ll, er…I’ll just wait here for you,’ Verity responded, knowing that she ought by rights to have corrected Honor’s outrageous untruth, but suspecting that there was more to the girl’s fib than a mere desire to short-circuit officialdom and avoid waiting whilst the hospital contacted whoever it was that her father had left in official charge of her.

It baffled Verity that a parent—any parent, male or female—could be so grossly neglectful of their child’s welfare, but she knew, of course, that it did happen, and one of the things she intended to do with her new-found wealth was to make sure that children in Honor’s situation were not exposed to the kind of danger Honor had just suffered. What Verity wanted to do was to establish a network of secure, outside-school, protective care for children whose parents for one reason or another simply could not be there for them. She knew that what she was taking on was a mammoth task, but she was determined and it was also one that was extremely dear to her heart.

It was almost an hour before the nurse returned with Honor, pronouncing briskly that she was fine.

‘I’ll run you home,’ Verity offered as they walked back out into the early summer sunshine.

Honor had paused and was drawing a picture in the dust with the toe of her shoe.

‘What is it? What’s wrong?’ Verity asked her.

‘Er…Dad doesn’t have to know about any of this, does he?’ Honor asked her uncomfortably. ‘It’s just…Well…’

Verity watched her gravely for a few seconds, her heart going out to her, although she kept her feelings to herself as she told her quietly, ‘Well, I’m certainly not going to say anything to him.’

Wasn’t that the truth? The thought of having anything…anything whatsoever to do with Silas Stevens was enough to bring her out in a cold panic-induced sweat, despite the fact that she would dearly have loved to have given him a piece of her mind about his appalling neglect of his daughter’s welfare.

‘You’re not. That’s great…’ A huge smile split Honor’s face as she started to hurry towards Verity’s car.

When they did get there, though, her face fell a little as she saw the dent and scraped paintwork where she had collided with the car.

‘It’s a BMW, isn’t it? That means it’s going to be expensive to repair…’

‘I’m afraid it does,’ Verity agreed cordially.

She sternly refused to allow her mouth to twitch into anything remotely suspicious of a smile as Honor told her gravely, ‘I will pay you back for however much it costs, but it could take an awfully long time. Dad’s always docking my pocket money,’ she added with an aggrieved expression. ‘It isn’t fair. He can be really mean…’

You too, Verity wanted to sympathise. She knew all about that kind of meanness. Her uncle had kept her very short of money when she’d been growing up, and even now she often found it difficult to spend money on herself without imagining his reaction—which was why her cupboards had been so bare of designer clothes and the car she had driven before kind-heartedness had driven her to purchase Charlotte’s BMW had been a second-hand run-of-the-mill compact model.

‘I get my spending money every week. I wanted to have a proper allowance but Dad says I’m still too young…Where do you live?’ she asked Verity.

Calmly Verity told her, watching as she carefully memorised the address.

‘Can you stop here?’ Honor suddenly demanded urgently, adding, when Verity looked quizzically at her, ‘I…I’d rather you didn’t take me all the way home…just in case…well…’

‘I won’t take you all the way home,’ Verity agreed, ‘but I’m not going to stop until I can see that you get home safely from where I’m parked.’

To her relief Honor seemed to accept this ruling, allowing Verity to pull into the side of the road within eyesight of her drive.

‘Will there be someone there?’ Verity felt bound to ask her.

‘Oh, yes,’ Honor assured her sunnily. ‘Anna will be there. Anna looks after me…us…She works for Dad at the garden centre when I’m at school…I won’t forget about the money,’ she promised Verity solemnly as she got out of the car.

‘I’m sure you won’t,’ Verity agreed, equally seriously.

So Silas still had the garden centre.

She remembered how full of plans he had been for it when he had first managed to raise the money to buy it. Her uncle had been scornful of what Silas had planned to do.

‘A gardener?’ he had demanded when Verity had first told him about Silas’ plans. ‘You’re dating a gardener? Where did you meet him?’

Verity could remember how her heart had sunk when she had been forced to admit that she had met Silas when he had come to do the gardens at the house. She had hung her head in shame and distress when her uncle had demanded to know what on earth she, with her background and her education, could possibly see in someone who mowed lawns for a living.

‘It isn’t like that,’ Verity had protested, flying to the protection of her new-found love and her new-found lover. ‘He’s been to university but…’

‘But what?’ her uncle had demanded tersely.

‘He…he found out when he was there that it wasn’t what he wanted to do…’

‘What university has taught me more than anything else,’ Silas had told her, ‘is to know myself, and what I know is that I would hate to be stuck in some stuffy office somewhere. I want to be in the fresh air, growing things…It’s in my blood, after all. My great-grandfather was a gardener. He worked for the Duke of Hartbourne as his head gardener. I don’t want to work for someone else, though—I want to work for myself. I want to buy a plot of land, develop it, build a garden centre…’

Enthusiastically he had started to tell Verity all about his plans. Six years older than her, he had possessed a maturity, a masculinity, which had alternately enthralled and enticed her. He had represented everything that she had not had in her own life and she had fallen completely and utterly in love with him.

Automatically, she turned the car into the narrow road that led to the house originally owned by her uncle—the house where she had grown up; the house where she had first met Silas; the house where she had tearfully told him that her responsibility, her duty towards her uncle had to take precedence over their love. And so he had married someone else.

The someone else who must have been Honor’s mother. He must have loved her a great deal not to have married for a second time. And he had quite obviously cherished her memory and his love for her far longer than he had cherished his much-proclaimed love for her, Verity acknowledged tiredly as she reached her destination and drove in through the ornate wrought-iron gates which were a new feature since she had lived in the house. Outwardly, though, in other ways, it remained very much the same. A large, turn-of-the-century house, of no particular aesthetic appeal or design.

Both her uncle and her father had spent their childhood in it but it had never, to Verity, seemed to be a family house, despite its size. Her uncle had changed very little in it since his own parents’ death, and to Verity it had always possessed a dark, semi-brooding, solitary air, totally unlike the pretty warmth she remembered from the much smaller but far happier home she had shared with her parents.

After her return from America her uncle had sold the house. His own health had started to deteriorate, during Verity’s absence, so he had set in motion arrangements to move the manufacturing side of the business to London. It had seemed to make good sense for both he and Verity to move there as well, Verity to her small mews house close to the river and her uncle to a comfortable apartment and the care of a devoted housekeeper.

Stopping her car, she reached into her handbag for the keys the letting agent had given her and then, taking a deep breath, she got out and headed for the house.

She wasn’t really sure herself just why she had chosen to come back, not just to this house but to this town. There was, after all, nothing here for her, no one here for her.

Perhaps one of the reasons was to reassure herself that she was now her own person—that she had her own life; that she was finally free; that she had the right to make her own decision. She had done her duty to her uncle and to the business and now, at thirty-three, she stood on the threshold of a whole new way of life, even if she had not decided, as yet, quite what form or shape that life would take.

‘What you need is a man…to fall in love,’ Charlotte had teasingly advised her the previous summer when Verity had protested that it was impossible for her to take time off to go on holiday with her friend and her family. ‘If you fell in love then you would have to find time…’

‘Fall in love? Me? Don’t be ridiculous,’ Verity had chided her.

‘Why not?’ Charlotte had countered. ‘Other people do—even other workaholics like you. You’re an attractive, loving, lovable woman, Verity,’ she had told her determinedly.

‘Tell that to my shareholders,’ Verity had joked, adding more seriously, ‘I don’t need any more complications in my life Charlie. I’ve already got enough and, besides, the men I get to meet aren’t interested in the real me. They’re only interested in the Verity Maitland who’s the head of Maitland Medical…’

‘Has there ever been anyone, Verity?’ Charlotte had asked her gently. ‘Any special someone…an old flame…?’

‘No. No one,’ Verity had lied, hardening her heart against the memories she’d been able to feel threatening to push past the barriers she had put in place against them.

She’d had her share of opportunities, of course—dates…men who had wanted to get to know her better—but…but she had never really been sure whether it had been her they had wanted or the business, and she had simply never cared enough to take the risk of finding out. She had already been hurt once by believing a man who had told her that he loved her. She wasn’t going to allow it to happen a second time.

Squaring her shoulders, she inserted the key into the lock and turned the handle.

CHAPTER TWO

AS SHE stepped into the house’s long narrow hallway, Verity blinked in astonished surprise. Gone was the dark paint and equally dark carpet she remembered, the air of cold unwelcome and austere disapproval, and in their place the hallway glowed with soft warm colours, natural creams warmed by the sunlight pouring in through the window halfway up the stairs. The house felt different, she acknowledged.

Half an hour later, having subjected it to a thorough inspection, she had to admit that its present owners had done a wonderful job of transforming it. Her uncle would, of course, have been horrified both by the luxury and the total impracticality of the warm cream carpet that covered virtually every floor surface. Verity, on the other hand, found it both heart-warming and deliciously sensual, if one could use such a word about something so mundane as mere carpet. The bedroom carpet, for instance, with its particularly thick and soft pile, was so warm-looking that she had had to fight an urge to slip off her shoes and curl her bare toes into it. And as for the wonderful pseudo-Victorian bathroom with its huge, deep tub and luxurious fitments, not to mention the separate shower room that went with it—it was a feast for the eyes.

‘It’s the best we’ve got on our books,’ the agent had told her. ‘The couple who own it had it renovated to the highest standard and if his company hadn’t transferred him to California they would still be living there themselves.’

Well, at least she had plenty of wardrobe space, Verity acknowledged a couple of hours later, having lugged the last of her suitcases up the stairs and started to remove their contents.

It had been Charlotte who had decided that they should have a ceremonial clear-out of all the plain, businesslike suits Verity had worn during her years as Chief Executive and Chairperson of the company.

‘Throw them out!’

Verity gasped in shock as she listened to what Charlotte was proposing.

‘They’re far too good for that. That cloth…’

‘…will last forever. I know. I remember you telling me so when you originally ordered them—and that was five years ago.’

‘Just after Uncle Toby died, yes, I know,’ Verity agreed sombrely.

‘I hated them on you then and they don’t have any place in your life now,’ Charlotte reminded her, adding, ‘and, whilst we’re on the subject, I just never, ever, want to see you wearing your hair up again—especially when it looks so wonderful down. Nature is very, very unfair,’ she continued. ‘Not only has she given you the most wonderful skin, a profile to die for and naturally navy blue eyes, she’s also given you the most glorious honey-blonde hair. It’s every bit as thick and gorgeous-looking as Cindy Crawford’s and it curls naturally…’

‘Cindy who?’ Verity teased, laughing when Charlotte began to look appalled and holding her hands up in defeat as she admitted, ‘It’s okay. I do know who she is…’

‘What you need to do is to cultivate a more natural, approachable look,’ Charlotte counselled her. ‘Think jeans and white tees, a navy blazer and loafers, with your hair left down and just a smidgen of make-up.’

‘Charlie,’ Verity warned, telling her friend, ‘I’ve been in business far too long not to recognise someone trying to package an item for sale.’

‘The only person you need selling to is yourself,’ Charlotte countered. ‘I’ve lost count of the number of men I’ve introduced you to who you’ve simply frozen out…One day you’re going to wake up on your own heading for forty and—’

‘Is that such a very bad deal?’ Verity objected.

‘Well, there are other things in life,’ Charlotte reminded her, ‘and I’ve watched you often enough with my two to know how good you are with children.’

It wasn’t a subject which Verity wanted to pursue. Not even Charlie, who was arguably her closest friend, knew about Silas and the pain he had caused her, the hopes she had once had…the love she had once given him, only to have it thrown back in her face when he had married someone else, despite telling her…But what was the point in going back over old ground?

She had been nineteen when she and Silas had first met; twenty-two when he had married—someone else—and what time they had had together had been snatched between her years at university, followed by a brief halcyon period of less than six months between her finishing university and being sent to America by her uncle. Halcyon to her, that was. For Silas?

Face it, she told herself sternly now as she hung the last of her spectacular new clothes into the wardrobe. He was never really serious about you, despite everything he said. If he had been he’d have done as he promised.

‘I’ll love you forever,’ he had told her the first time they had made love. ‘You’re everything I’ve ever wanted, everything I will ever want…’

But he had been lying to her, Verity acknowledged dry-eyed. He had never really loved her at all. And why on earth he had encouraged her to believe that he did, she really could not understand. He had never struck her as the kind of man who needed the ego-boost of making sexual conquests. He was tall, brown-haired and grey-eyed, with the kind of physique that came from working hard out of doors, and Verity had fallen in love with him without needing any encouragement or coaxing. She had just finished her first year at university and come home for the holidays to find him working in her uncle’s garden. He had introduced himself to her and had watched her quizzically as she had been too inexperienced, too besotted, to hide her immediate reaction to him, her face and her body blushing a deep vivid pink.

Verity tensed, remembering just how betrayingly her over-sensitive young body had revealed her reaction to him, her nipples underneath the thin tee shirt she had been wearing hardening so that she had instinctively crossed her arms over her breasts to hide their flaunting wantonness. He, Silas, had affected not to notice what had happened to her or how embarrassed she had been by it, tactfully turning his head and gently directing her attention to the flower bed he had been weeding, making some easy, relaxed comment about the design of the garden, giving her time to recover her equilibrium and yet, somehow, at the same time, closing the distance between them so that when he’d started to draw her attention to another part of the garden he’d been close enough to her to be able to touch her bare arm with his hand.

Verity could remember even now how violently she had quivered in immediate reaction to his touch.

Fatefully she had turned her head to look at him, her wide-eyed gaze going first to his eyes and then helplessly to his mouth.

He had told her later that the only thing that had stopped him from snatching her up and kissing her there and then had been his fear of frightening her away.

‘You looked so young and innocent that I was afraid you might…I was afraid that if I let you see just how much I wanted you, I’d frighten you, terrify the life out of you,’ he had told her rawly, weeks later, as he’d held her in his arms and kissed her over and over again, the way she had secretly wanted him to and equally secretly been afraid that he might that first day in the garden.

Looking back with the maturity she had since gained, she could still see no signs, no warnings of what was to be or the full enormity of how badly she was going to be hurt.

She had believed Silas implicitly when he had told her that he loved her. Why should she not have done? He, after all, had been the one who had pursued her, courted her, laid seige to her heart and her emotions, her life.

That first summer had been a brilliant kaleidoscope of warmth, love and laughter, or so it seemed looking back on it. She had still been talking to Silas hours later when her uncle had returned home, her bags still standing on the drive where the taxi driver had dropped them and her off. She had been blissfully unaware of just how late it had been until she’d seen her uncle draw up.

‘Still here?’ he asked Silas curtly, nodding dismissively to him as he turned to Verity and demanded frowningly, ‘I should have thought you’d have too much studying to do to waste your time out here, Verity…’

Chastened, Verity bade Silas a mumbled ‘goodbye’ and turned to follow her uncle into the house. But when she went to pick up her bags, Silas had got there first, gathering up the two heaviest cases as though they weighed a mere nothing.

To Verity, used as she was to the far more frail frame of her elderly uncle, the sight of so much raw, sexual, male strength was dizzyingly exciting.

Her uncle lectured her over supper about the need for her to allocate time during her summer vacation for working hard at her studies.

‘Of course, you’ll come to the factory with me during the day,’ he informed her, and Verity did not attempt to argue. Every holiday since she had turned sixteen had been spent thus, with her learning every aspect of the business from the factory floor upwards, under her uncle’s critical eye.

But fate, it seemed, had had other plans for her. The following morning when she went downstairs—her uncle always insisted on leaving for the factory well before seven so that he could be there before the first workers arrived at eight—she learned that her uncle had received a telephone call late the previous evening informing him that the firm’s Sales Director had been taken to hospital with acute appendicitis, which meant that her uncle was going to have to step into his shoes and fly to the Middle East to head a sales delegation.

He would, he informed Verity, be gone for almost a month.

‘I shall have to leave you here to your own devices,’ he told her. ‘I can’t have you going into the factory without my supervision. Had this happened a little earlier I could have made arrangements for you to come with me. It would have been excellent experience for you but, unfortunately, it’s far too late now for you to have the necessary inoculations and for me to get a visa for you. Still, you must have brought work home with you from university.’

‘Yes,’ she agreed meekly, eyes downcast, her heart suddenly bounding so frantically fast against her chest wall that she felt positively lightheaded.

Even with her uncle gone she was still unable to acknowledge the real reason for her excitement and sense of freedom, nor for her sudden decision to work in the sitting room which overlooked the part of the garden which Silas had been working on the previous day and to wear a pair of cotton shorts which showed off her long slim legs.

Silas arrived within an hour of her uncle’s departure, and from her strategic position in the sitting room Verity was able to discreetly watch him as he worked. As the day grew hotter he stopped working and stood up, stretching his back before removing his soft cotton tee shirt.

Dry-mouthed, Verity watched him, her body shaking with the most disturbing sensation she had ever experienced.

‘Lust,’ she told herself angrily now as she folded the last few pairs of briefs and put them neatly into one of the wardrobe drawers.

Lust: she had been too naive to know just what that was or how powerful it could be then. All she had known was that, no matter how hard she tried to concentrate on her work and the words on the paper in front of her, all that she could really see was Silas’ image imprinted on her eyeball.

At lunch time she had gone outside to offer him a cold drink and something to eat. Gravely he had accepted, following her into the kitchen, and it had only been later that he had admitted to her that he had brought his own refreshments with him but that the opportunity to spend some time with her had been too much of a temptation for him to resist.

Over the light salad lunch she had quickly and nervously prepared for him—Verity had possessed very few domestic skills in those days; her uncle had considered that learning them was a waste of time when she was going to take over his business and they had a housekeeper who lived in, but who fortuitously was away at that time taking her annual period of leave—Verity had listened wide-eyed whilst Silas had described to her his work and his plans.

‘That’s enough about me,’ he announced gruffly when they had both finished eating. ‘What about you? What do you intend to do with your life?’

‘Me? I’m going to take over my uncle’s business,’ Verity told him gravely. ‘That’s what he’s training me for. I’m the only person he’s got to inherit it, you see. It’s his life’s work and—’

‘His life’s work, but you have your own life and the right to make your own choices, surely?’ Silas interrupted her sharply, before telling her pointedly, ‘My parents originally wanted me to train as a doctor like my father, but they would never impose that kind of decision on me, nor would I allow them to…’

‘I…my uncle…My uncle took me in when my parents were killed,’ Verity explained low-voiced to him. ‘I’ve always known that he expects me…that he wants me…I’m very lucky, really, it’s a wonderful opportunity…’

‘It’s a wonderful opportunity if it’s what you really want,’ Silas agreed, ‘otherwise it’s…Is it what you want, Verity?’

‘I…I…It’s what’s expected of me,’ Verity told him a little unsteadily. It was proving virtually impossible to concentrate on what he was saying with him sitting so close to her—close enough for her to be intensely, embarrassingly aware of his body and its evident physical masculinity, its tantalising male scent. He had asked her permission to ‘clean up’ before sitting down to lunch with her and his discarded shirt was now back on.

Every time she dared to look at him she was swept with such an intense and heightened awareness of him that she could feel her face starting to flush with hot self-consciousness.

‘What’s expected of you? Listen,’ Silas commanded her, reaching out and taking hold of her hand, keeping it between his own with an open easiness which robbed her of the ability to object or protest. ‘No one has the right to expect anything of you. You have the right to choose for yourself what you do with your life. It is your life you’re living you know, and not your uncle’s…’

Verity bit her lip.

‘I…I know,’ she responded uncertainly, ‘but…’

‘I’m having a day off tomorrow,’ Silas told her, changing the subject. ‘There’s a garden that’s open to the public twenty miles away—I was planning to go and see it. Would you like to come with me?’

Shiny-eyed and flushed with delighted happiness, Verity nodded.

‘Good,’ he told her. ‘I’ll pick you up at nine, if that’s okay.’

Once again Verity nodded, not trusting herself to speak.

Silas was still holding her hand and she had to tug it before he released it, giving her a rueful smile as he did so.

Of course, she didn’t do any work for the rest of the day, nor did she sleep that night.

Three outfits were tried on and discarded before Silas arrived to pick her up, and she blushed betrayingly at the appraising look he gave her as he studied her jeans-clad figure and the neat way the denim hugged her small firm bottom.

Jeans. How long had it been since she had worn a pair of those? Verity wondered grimly now, as the rest of her underwear joined the items she had already put away.

She had acquired a couple of pairs from Charlotte, designer labelled and immaculately tailored.

‘You could have taken these with you,’ Verity had protested when Charlotte had handed them over to her.

‘What? Wear Lauren where we’re going? Do you mind? The jeans I’ll be wearing now are a pair of sturdy 501s,’ she had told Verity, her face breaking into a wide grin as she had caught sight of the raised-eyebrowed look her friend had been giving her.

‘Oh, 501s. Poor you,’ Verity had commented dryly.

‘Well, they might be “in” fashion-wise but they are also ideally designed for working in and, besides, the Lauren ones are too tight. I can barely move in them. They’ll fit you much better—you’re slimmer than I am right now.’

Jeans. Verity went to the wardrobe and pulled them out, touching the fabric exploratively, smoothing it beneath her fingertips.

The jeans she had worn on that first date with Silas had been a pair she had bought from her allowance. Thus far, she had not worn them in front of her uncle, knowing that he would not have approved. He had been a rather old-fashioned man who had not liked to see women wearing ‘trousers’—of any kind.

Courteously Silas had held the door open for her on the passenger side of his small pick-up. The inside of the vehicle had been spotlessly clean, Verity had noticed, just as she had noticed that Silas was a good and considerate driver.

The gardens they had gone to see had been spectacularly beautiful, she acknowledged, but she had to admit that she had not paid as much attention as she ought to have done to them, nor to Silas’ explanation of how the borders had been planted and the colour combinations in them constructed. She had been far too busy studying how he was constructed, far too busy noticing just how wonderfully dedicated to her task nature had been when she had put him together with such spectacular sensuality. Even the way he’d walked had made her heart lurch against her ribs, and just to look at his mouth, never mind imagining how it might feel to be kissed by it…by him…

‘What’s wrong? Are you feeling okay?’ Silas asked her at one point.

‘I’m fine,’ Verity managed to croak, petrified of him guessing what she was really feeling.

He had brought them both a packed lunch—far more tasty and enjoyable than the meal she had prepared for him the previous day, Verity acknowledged, assuming, until he told her otherwise, that his mother had prepared it for them.

‘Ma? No way,’ he told her. ‘She believes in us all being self-sufficient and, besides, she works—she’s a nurse. My two brothers are both married now and I’m the only one left at home, but Ma still insists on me making my own packed lunches. One thing she did teach us all as a nurse, though, was the importance of good nutrition. Take these sandwiches. They’re on wholemeal bread with a low-fat spread, the tuna provides very important nutrients and the salad I’ve put with it is good and healthy.’

‘Like these,’ Verity teased him, waving in front of him the two chocolate bars he had packed.

Silas laughed.

‘Chocolate is good for you,’ he told her solemnly, adding with a wicked smile, ‘It’s the food of love, did you know that…?’

‘Want me to prove it?’ he tempted when Verity shook her head.

He enjoyed teasing her, he admitted later, but what he enjoyed even more, he added, was the discovery that beneath her shyness she possessed not just intelligence but, even more importantly, a good sense of humour.

They certainly laughed a lot together that first summer; laughed a lot and loved a lot too.

She could still remember the first time he kissed her. It wasn’t sunny that day. There was thunder in the air, the sky brassy and overcast, and then late in the afternoon it suddenly came on to rain, huge, pelting drops, causing them to take refuge in the small summer house several yards away at the bottom of the garden.

They ran there, Silas holding her hand, both of them bursting into the small, stuffy room, out of breath and laughing.

As the door swung closed behind them, enclosing them in the half-light of the small, airless room, Silas turned towards her, brushing her hair off her face. His hands were cool and wet and, without thinking what she was doing, she turned her head to lick a raindrop off him, an instinctive, almost childish gesture, but one which marked the end of her childhood, turning her within the space of an afternoon from a child to a woman.

Even without closing her eyes she could still visualise the expression in Silas’ eyes, feel the tension that suddenly gripped his body. Outwardly, nothing had changed. He was still cupping her face, they were still standing with their bodies apart, but inwardly everything had changed, Verity acknowledged.

Looking into Silas’ eyes, she felt herself starting to tremble—not with cold and certainly not with fear.

‘Verity.’

Her name, which Silas started saying inches from her face, he finished mouthing with his lips against her own, his body against her own. And there was nothing remotely childish about the way she reached out to him—for him—Verity remembered; nothing remotely childish at all in the way she opened her mouth beneath his and deliberately invited him to explore its intimacy. They kissed frantically, feverishly, whispering incomprehensible words of love and praise to one another, she making small keening sounds of pleasure against Silas’ skin, he muttering rawly to her that he loved her, adored her, wanted her. Over and over again they kissed and touched and Verity felt incandescent with the joy of what she was experiencing; of being loved; of knowing that Silas loved her as much as she knew she loved him.

They weren’t lovers that day. She wanted to but Silas shook his head, telling her huskily, ‘We can’t…I can’t…I don’t have…I could make you pregnant,’ he explained to her, adding gruffly, ‘The truth is I would want to make you pregnant, Verity. That’s how much I love you and I know that once I had you in my arms, once my body was inside yours, there’s no way I could…I want to come inside you,’ he told her openly when she looked uncertainly at him, explaining in a low, emotional voice, ‘I want to have that kind of intimacy with you. It’s man’s most basic instinct to regenerate himself, to seed the fertility of his woman, especially when he loves her as much as I love you.’

‘I…I could go on the pill…’ Verity offered, but Silas shook his head.

‘No,’ he told her gently, ‘taking care of that side of things is my responsibility. And besides,’ he continued softly, looking around the cramped, stuffy summer house, ‘this isn’t really the right place. When you and I make love I want it to be…I want it to be special for you…perfect.’

Verity moistened her lips.

‘My uncle is still away,’ she offered awkwardly. ‘We could…’

‘No. Not here in another man’s house. Yes, I know that it’s your home, but no, not here,’ Silas said quietly.

‘Where, then?’ Verity breathed eagerly.

‘Leave it to me,’ Silas told her. ‘Leave everything to me…’

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.

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.

‘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.

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