Читать книгу Wanting His Child - Пенни Джордан, Penny Jordan - Страница 6

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.