‘No. It’s probably best if she stays with you. I don’t know what time I’m going to be through here…’
‘Don’t worry,’ Verity assured him. ‘She’ll be fine here with me. Would you like to speak with her?’
Without waiting for his response, she handed the receiver over to Honor, before walking over to the window and putting her hands to her suddenly hot face.
What on earth was the matter with her? She was reacting like…like a woman in love…A deep shudder ran through her. Impossible. No. No way. Not again. Not a second time.
‘Not a second time what?’ Honor asked her curiously.
Wide-eyed, Verity turned round and looked at her. She hadn’t heard Honor replace the telephone receiver, never mind realised that she had spoken out loud.
‘Er…nothing…Look, it could be some time before your father gets here. If you want to go to bed…’
‘No. Well, yes, perhaps that might be a good idea,’ Honor allowed. ‘I haven’t got anything to wear, though,’ she reminded Verity.
‘That’s okay, you can sleep in your undies for tonight,’ Verity told her practically.
‘I don’t very much like the dark,’ Honor said as they walked upstairs. ‘Will you…will you stay with me until I go to sleep?’
Once again Verity was reminded of the fact that Honor was only a very young girl—a motherless young girl—and Verity herself knew what that meant and all about the private desperate tears cried into one’s pillow at night. Tears for the love and want of a mother’s arms—a mother’s care. Honor had her pride, Verity could see, but she could see as well that she also had her vulnerability, her need to be reassured, her need to be mothered.
‘Yes, of course I will,’ Verity agreed warmly, giving her hand a small squeeze.
‘I’m not very keen on the dark myself,’ she added.
In the end it was another hour before Honor was finally in bed—Verity’s bed, since it was the only one that was made up and since Honor had announced that she liked Verity’s room best of all. ‘Because it smells of you,’ she had so engagingly told Verity.
Who could resist that kind of persuasion? And, for the second time, Verity had been all too intimately reminded of hearing Honor’s father make just such a similar comment, although in a vastly different context—a context far too intimate and personal to even allow herself to think about in the presence of anyone else, never mind Silas’ young daughter.
‘Why not? Why don’t you want me to?’ he had asked her thickly when she had tried to push him away the first time he had bent his head towards the most intimate part of her body.
‘Because…because…’ Awkwardly she had struggled to explain how both shocked and excited she had felt at the thought of being caressed so, so personally by him, of having his lips, his mouth, kiss the most delicate and sensitive part of her body.
‘It just doesn’t seem right,’ she had told him shakily in the end. ‘I mean, it’s…’ Pleadingly she had lifted her gaze to his. ‘Silas, I don’t…it’s…’
‘It’s just another way of showing you how much I love you,’ Silas had told her gently. ‘If you don’t want me to then I won’t, but I want to enjoy the scent and taste of you—the real you—so much, Verity. I know what you’re thinking…how you’re feeling…but I promise you that it will be all right.’
‘It seems so…It makes me feel so…so nervous and afraid and so…excited at the same time,’ she had confessed. ‘All sort of squirmy and…and…’
‘It makes me feel the same,’ Silas had told her in a deep voice. ‘Only even more so. Will you let me, Verity? I promise I’ll stop if you want me to. It’s just…’ He had paused and looked deep into her eyes, making her heart thump against her chest wall in great shuddering thuds.
‘I want to make you mine in every way there is. To know you so completely; to love you so completely.’
And when eventually he had lain her tenderly on the bed and bent his head over her body, when she had felt his tongue tip gently rimming the very centre of her sexual being, Verity hadn’t wanted him to stop at all, not at all, not ever, as she had cried out frantically to him when the racking paroxysms of pleasure had seized hold of her, caught her up and dislodged from her mind any thought she might ever have had about not wanting the pleasure that Silas had been giving her, the intimacy…
‘Verity…’
With a start Verity dragged her mind and her thoughts back to the present.
‘It’s a very big bed, isn’t it?’ Honor told her in a small voice. ‘Do you always sleep in a big bed like this?’
‘M…mostly,’ Verity confirmed.
‘It must feel very lonely. Haven’t you ever wanted to get married, have children?’ Honor asked her.
‘It’s after eleven o’clock,’ Verity warned her, sidestepping the question, knowing that the only honest answer she could give her was no answer to give the ten-year-old daughter of the man whose wife she had hoped to be.
/> ‘Stay with me,’ Honor whispered again, a small hand creeping out from beneath the bedclothes to hold onto Verity’s.