‘…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