Wanting His Child. PENNY JORDAN
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