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
