CHAPTER THREE
BENEDICT frowned. Their spat temporarily forgotten, he put an instinctive hand out towards Verity. For one moment there he had been convinced that she was about to go and faint on him. What on earth had he said? he wondered with genuine alarm and confusion. She looked as though she had just seen a ghost!
‘Are you OK?’ he queried solicitously, and then nodded with memory. ‘Of course! Gisela said you weren’t feeling very well—please sit down. Let me fetch you a glass of water—’
‘No!’ Verity’s words rang out as clear as a bell. Her mind was made up. She would have to go through with it—she must! For Sammi’s sake more than Benedict’s. For didn’t her daughter have a right, too, to begin to know her father? And the sooner the better. ‘Benedict—’ she began huskily, when the door opened and a whole bevy of theatre nurses walked in, chatting away merrily.
Something in her voice stilled him. ‘What?’
She shook her blonde head impatiently, casting a frustrated look at the blue-clothed women who had seated themselves at the next table and were casting curious looks in their direction. ‘It’s nothing,’ she said, then shook her head again as he frowned. ‘I mean—Oh, heck! Listen, come round to my flat—’
For a moment he thought that he must have misheard, in view of everything which had gone before. ‘What?’ he queried incredulously.
‘Come round to my flat,’ she repeated, aware that the nurses on the next table were almost falling off their chairs trying to listen in to their conversation. She shook her head. ‘I’ll talk to you about it later,’ she said abruptly and headed for the door but Benedict moved as swiftly and as gracefully as a panther and he stayed her with one strong hand resting loosely around her tiny wrist.
‘When?’ he asked immediately.
The room had lapsed into silence. The nurses sat agog, self-consciously pretending to eat their sandwiches. Verity distractedly shook his hand off. For heaven’s sake! she thought despairingly. He may not care about his own reputation—but he might have the decency to consider hers! She marched out of the staff-room and he followed her along the corridor until she was forced to stop and stare into those green eyes which, even against her will, she still found so mesmerising.
‘When?’ he persisted, a slight urgency deepening his voice as though he was thinking that he might have imagined her invitation.
When indeed? Verity gave an inward sigh. Why put it off? The longer she worked with him and the more she grew used to him as a colleague then the harder it would be to tell him. ‘Tonight.’
He gave an exaggerated grimace. ‘Tonight isn’t good,’ he told her. ‘I’m on call.’
Verity suppressed a sigh. No, it wasn’t good. But the alternative was another day of existing in this highly unsatisfactory limbo while her imagination ran riot wondering just how Benedict would greet her momentous news. And what if someone else told him that she had a child? What if clever Benedict Jackson managed to work it out for himself? She wouldn’t put it past him. What then?
She pulled her narrow shoulders back, her resolution strengthened. ‘I don’t live that far from the hospital,’ she informed him. ‘You could be back here in minutes if there was an emergency—it would take you about the same time as from the mess.’ Then she wished to high heaven that she hadn’t mentioned the mess, with all its associations.
‘Tonight it is, then,’ he agreed in a murmur, his voice still edged with surprise.
Verity saw the instinctive light of desire which lit his eyes from within and bile rose up in her stomach. She swallowed, almost changing her mind, but some deep and instinctive need to tell him urged her on from within. ‘Oh, don’t get your hopes up, Benedict,’ she advised cuttingly. ‘It isn’t what you’re thinking.’
He didn’t bat an eyelid. A woman hadn’t spoken to him this way in years; he was rather enjoying it. ‘And what am I thinking, Verity?’
‘That we’re going to pick up where we left off!’ she accused bluntly. ‘And we all know where that was!’
He hadn’t been, actually. He had been thinking the very opposite, wishing that he had given himself more time to get to know her before. That the physical thing between them had not been so swamping and that they had not fallen into bed within hours of meeting one another. Somehow, with the benefit of maturity, he suspected that Verity Summers had hidden depths that he hadn’t even been close to tapping.
‘Why don’t we meet tomorrow night instead?’ he suggested with a smile. ‘I’m not on call then and we could have dinner together. There must be some superb restaurants round here.’
Verity sucked in a breath. To tell him in the neutral setting of a restaurant might be better. But even if she had wanted to have dinner with him, it was impossible. Tomorrow was Tuesday and the woman who lived downstairs and who babysat when Verity was on call was at college on Tuesday nights. And she would never get another trustworthy babysitter at such short notice, not in the city. But she didn’t want to start on the subject of childcare difficulties because that would prompt all kinds of questions.
And although Verity knew that by the end of today she would face being interrogated by Benedict she didn’t think that she could handle it now. Not at work, where she might dissolve into tears and make a complete fool of herself. And, besides, she didn’t even want to have dinner with him. She shook her head. ‘I’d rather speak to you tonight,’ she said.
‘What time?’ he asked calmly.
‘About nine?’ she managed, with an air of quiet self-possession that almost matched his. At nine he would already have eaten and Sammi would be safely tucked up in bed. Surely that would be the best way?
‘OK. Tell me where you live.’
She recited her address and he nodded—not bothering to write it down, she noticed.
Benedict gave a smile that didn’t quite meet his eyes and nodded. ‘Until later, then,’ he said, and headed off in the direction of the lift.
Verity watched him go in silence, realising that his words hadn’t been entirely accurate.
She still had an afternoon’s operating to get through before she was able to confront him with the truth...
By the time the list had finished Verity was bushed. Benedict came up behind her as she was discarding her blood-stained pale blue gown, the tension of the last operation draining from his face by the second. He had opened up a forty-year-old woman who had presented with vague symptoms of abdominal discomfort to discover that she had carcinoma of the ovary—and that the disease had spread, her body so riddled with it that Benedict had had no choice but to close the patient’s abdomen up again.
The appalled atmosphere in Theatre as he had silently sutured had been almost palpable, everyone present realising with horror that this relatively young mother of three would be dead before the year was out.
And during that operation Verity had never worked so instinctively with a surgeon before, not even Jamie—she had seemed to anticipate what Benedict needed almost before he realised himself. It had made her think, too, her own problems suddenly seeming terribly insignificant when compared with what lay ahead of the patient on the table.
As he approached, Benedict suddenly saw the long, slender line of Verity’s neck and he felt his pulse quicken. ‘Hi!’ he said softly.
She turned around, suddenly embarrassed, realising that whatever tenuous camaraderie existed between them at present it would not survive tonight’s heart-to-heart. ‘Hi,’ she said quietly.
‘Thanks for your help back there.’
She shook her head. ‘It was just—’
‘No,’ he interrupted, with a smile, the most genuine smile she had seen all day. ‘It wasn’t “just” anything. That was a pig of an operation.’
‘Those types always are,’ she observed with quiet perception.
‘I know.’ He hesitated, wanting to say something nice to her—something that might stop her looking either angry or fearful when she saw him. He suddenly found that he wanted to make that wide, soft mouth curve into the kind of welcoming smile he remembered so well. ‘You’re a superb scrub nurse, Verity.’
And stupidly she blushed, the compliment mentally demolishing her. It meant too much; that was the trouble. A few words of professional appreciation somehow implied a respect that had never been there when she’d been nothing more than his willing bed-partner. ‘Th-thanks,’ she stumbled, then let herself relax enough to smile. ‘A good surgeon makes it so much easier,’ she told him honestly.
The smile dazzled him; started his heart beating in a way it hadn’t beaten for years. ‘Listen,’ he said huskily, ‘are you quite sure you won’t change your mind about having dinner with me?’
And she was tempted, so terribly tempted. If they had just met she wouldn’t have given the question a moment’s hesitation. But, then, if they had just met she wouldn’t have invited him round to her flat like that. And probably given him entirely the wrong idea... ‘No, thanks.’
Not bothering to pursue it, he said, ‘Do you have a car?’
She shook her head and laughed. ‘On a nurse’s salary? You must be kidding!’
‘Then at least let me drive you home. It’s still raining.’
‘I have an umbrella—’
‘I know.’
She raised her eyebrows questioningly.
‘I saw you arrive this morning.’ His voice deepened with appreciation. ‘In a tartan suit. With a matching green velvet cap. You looked—superb.’
‘I was soaking wet,’ she answered disbelievingly.
‘Mmm,’ he agreed, the corners of his green eyes crinkling, ‘I know.’
He had somehow managed to make getting wet sound like the ultimate in sensuality. Another compliment. It made her realise how emotionally barren she must have become if these small words of praise could have her warming like a schoolgirl.
‘So, shall I pick you up outside in, say—’ he glanced at his watch ‘—twenty minutes?’
Verity shook her head. ‘I told you—it isn’t far from the hospital.’ Which was true. What he did not know was that she always had to go to and from work via the circuitous route to the childminder’s —to collect Sammi. It was just her luck that the only childminder who measured up to Verity’s exacting standards lived in the opposite direction to the hospital. The journey was a pain but she would rather have a pain of a journey and the peace of mind that came from knowing that her daughter was in the best possible hands.
Verity glanced down at her watch and realised what the time actually was and gave a squeak. ‘No, thanks,’ she told him breathlessly. ‘I have to...go to the supermarket on the way home.’ She could see that he was about to offer to drive her there, too, and so she gave him a brief smile, said, ‘Excuse me,’ and headed off to the changing room, thinking that he was much harder to cope with when he was being nice to her.
It turned into one of those days. The bus was late and Sammi was sulking by the time she picked her up from the childminder’s. Consequently she dragged her heels going home and by the time Verity pushed the front door open the two of them were very wet and very disgruntled.
The normal evening routine of cartoons, tea, playtime, bath and story did not follow their usual fairly smooth progress.
Time marched on and every time that Verity tried to hurry Sammi along the child responded by slowing her pace right down.
‘Darling, please eat your carrots!’
‘I don’t want them.’
‘Your peas, then.’
‘Don’t want them, either!’
‘There’ll be no pudding if you don’t eat some vegetables!’ said Verity automatically and Sammi completely overreacted by having a tantrum, sending her fork spinning across the kitchen table.
‘Anyway!’ she sobbed loudly. ‘You’re not eating your supper, Mummy!’
‘I don’t feel like eating,’ answered Verity quietly, so edgy about Benedict’s visit that she actually felt nauseous.
‘And neither do I!’ shrieked Sammi, the tantrum growing in volume. Which made two in one day, thought Verity wearily, as she gave in without a fight and cleared away the plates before going to run a bath.
But even bathtime failed to work its usual magic or perhaps Sammi was simply too tired to enjoy what was left of the day. Verity seemed to end up wetter than her daughter and didn’t even attempt to wash the butter-coloured mop of curls, just battled to get Sammi into her nightie and helped her brush her teeth.
She read aloud the story of Pigling Bland but Sammi heard it through, still determinedly wide-eyed by the end of it so that Verity was forced to wade through Jemima Puddleduck before her daughter began to look even remotely sleepy. It wasn’t until she had reached the end of the Tale of the Pie and The Patty-Pan that Sammi’s eyelids drifted down to cover her eyes and she dozed off into a fitful sleep.
Verity sat on the edge of the bed for a moment or two, just watching her.
Strange how, since meeting up with Benedict again today, she could see the facial similarities between the two of them so clearly. The lack of likeness between father and daughter was only superficial, Verity realised with a rapidly beating heart. OK, so Sammi might be blonde and blueeyed where Benedict had dark hair and eyes of jade but that determined little jut of the lower lip, the strong squareness of the chin...
Oh, the similarities were there all right, if you cared to look for them... It was just that in the past there had seemed no point and Verity had firmly pushed them to the back of her mind.
The loud ring of the doorbell startled her and she glanced at her wrist in horror to see that it was nine o’clock already and that Benedict was prompter than she remembered. But, then, she had been so cloyingly eager before that she would probably not have murmured a word if he had turned up an hour late for a date!
But it’s not a date, she reminded herself as she snapped on the night-light, her skin going cold as she realised what a state she had left the flat in in her battle to get Sammi to bed.
Oh, dear Lord! The tea-things were still on the table and there were toys all over the sitting-room floor. And she hadn’t even emptied the bath-tub.
She glanced in the mirror. Add to that her ruffled hair and the old jeans and shirt she had changed into—now all crumpled after the bathtime exertions—and she hardly exuded the quiet air of calm needed to impart her momentous news.
The doorbell rang again; there wasn’t even going to be time to scoop up some of the plastic toys that lay scattered around haphazardly all over the hideously patterned carpet.
Verity walked towards the front door, feeling irritated. She was by nature a tidy person and first impressions counted. Benedict would look around then surn her up as a slob. And she was no slob.
But you aren’t trying to impress him, are you? taunted an inner voice. Leastways, you shouldn’t be.
She pulled the door open to find him on the doorstep, his arms full of packages, the green eyes all crinkling up at the corners and droplets of rain glinting off the dark, ruffled hair.
‘Hi!’ He held out a bag of macadamia nuts, a box of Belgian chocolates and a foil-wrapped package of coffee so good that Verity could smell it from where she stood.
She took the packages awkwardly, disarmed by his thoughtfulness and making the prospect of what she was about to tell him all the more difficult. ‘Oh. Thanks. You shouldn’t have bothered to bring anything.’
‘On the contrary. You refused my invitation to dinner and as I’m on call I couldn’t bring wine. This was the least I could do. Unless, of course,’ he added teasingly, ‘you aren’t going to invite me in?’
‘I’m sorry.’ She held the door open, holding her breath and waiting to hear his first words as he walked into her home. Somehow they were terribly important to her.
At least he didn’t break into a flood of false compliments—that would have been just too much. The flat was small and cheaply furnished but it was all she could afford. And although tonight it looked like a pigsty underneath the debris it was fundamentally clean and she hoped against hope that Benedict would realise that.
She heard his inrush of breath as he registered the toys.
He turned round to face her, shocked. ‘You have a child?’ he demanded.
Straight to the point, at least. ‘Yes, I have a child.’
‘But you told me you weren’t married!’
She almost smiled. ‘I’m not married,’ she answered gently. ‘It isn’t mandatory.’
‘No.’ He was clearly having trouble imagining her as a mother. ‘So there’s no husband?’
She shook her head. ‘No. No husband. Sammi’s father didn’t—marry me.’
Something niggled at him. Something that wasn’t quite right. Verity a mother! She looked too young, too slim, too damned innocent! He struggled to find something neutral to say. ‘And how old is your daughter?’ he asked politely. ‘Sammi—wasn’t it?’
Still clutching the goodies he had given her, Verity realised that there was going to be no easy way to do this. No right time to tell him. Why bother settling him down with his coffee and his nuts and his fine chocolates? Would that somehow lessen the blow?
‘She’s five,’ she told him, her voice sounding oddly calm.
He nodded. ‘That’s a nice age,’ he murmured dutifully, desperately searching around for the kind of remarks that his married sisters always seemed to make about other people’s children. ‘Bit of a handful, I expect?’
And then he froze.
It wasn’t just the time span; it was the measured way that she had told him—the slightly diffident expression in her eyes as she waited for his reaction.
He narrowed his eyes and stared at her from beneath dark, suspicious brows.
Verity prayed for strength. ‘Benedict...’ she began, but her words tailed off hopelessly.
The twist of his mouth became ugly. ‘Just what are you trying to say, Verity?’ he demanded harshly.
She hadn’t rehearsed it; it came out in a tumbled rush. Perhaps that was the only way that it could have come out. ‘That you are... That Sammi is... She’s your daughter,’ she finished huskily.
The words seemed to spill into his mind like cold, hard pebbles. He felt strangely powerless, as though the gods had decided to play poker with his future. And there stood Verity, her beautiful face pale and calm and her icy blue eyes steady, as though she had not just dropped into his lap the unwelcome news that he was the father of her child.
Or was he?
His mouth twisted as his eyes scanned the room as if searching for something and then he seemed to find it for he strode over to the mantelpiece above the mock-coal fire and picked up the framed photograph that stood there.
His eyes raked over it. He found himself looking at a stranger. A stranger, moreover, with floppy curls of honey-coloured hair and eyes as blue as a hyacinth. If someone had asked him to sit down and draw his imagined child’s portrait then this fair little girl, with her soft pink and white complexion, would be its very antithesis. His relief and his anger knew no bounds. With a trembling hand he replaced the photo, then turned on Verity.
‘Is this your idea of a joke?’ he demanded furiously, and he noticed almost dispassionately that his hands were still shaking. ‘What or who in the hell do you think I am, Verity? Some kind of patsy? A willing sucker? Do I look like the kind of man who would just calmly accept paternity from someone he hadn’t seen in years? Someone, moreover—’ he paused deliberately; the chance to wound her just too tempting to resist ‘—with whom he had had nothing more than a brief affair?
‘Or maybe—’ and his green eyes glittered ‘—maybe I’m not the only lover you’ve confronted like this. Will anyone do? Perhaps,’ he suggested cruelly, ‘you’ve worked your way down a long list before you finally reached me.’
The implication behind his words was shocking—that she had entertained a whole series of men in her bed. Verity trembled violently and the packages in her hands slid unnoticed to the ground as he continued to storm at her.
‘What were you hoping for?’ he demanded harshly. ‘Some kind of financial support?’ His eyes slid around the untidy room with contempt. ‘You sure look as though you could use some!’ And somehow her passivity enraged him even further.
‘Let me give you a tip, shall I, Verity. Hmm? That the next time you attempt to entrap a man you ought to go about it with a little bit more finesse. At least tidy up a bit! Soft lights and music are the traditional accompaniments to such ploys, you know—not showing a man into a pigsty where you couldn’t even be bothered to clear away your supper plates! Being a slattern doesn’t have a great deal to commend it!’
The anger continued to flare over him like an all-consuming flame. He wouldn’t let up. He couldn’t let up.
He was caught in the blue light of her startled eyes but let his gaze sweep downwards, disparagingly taking in her crumpled clothes. He could hardly believe that this was the same woman he had seen from the car park this morning, who had worn that outrageously fashionable tartan miniskirt with the matching jacket and the jaunty green velvet cap.
His voice was as hard as stone. ‘Jeans may look sexy but they aren’t very practical for seduction. I assume that that was what you had in mind, was it, Verity?’ He paused to draw breath, the blood thundering furiously in his ears, when his bleeper shrilled loudly in his ears and the sound brought him back to his senses. Barely able to bring himself to look at her, he shot out a terse question, ‘Where’s the phone?’
‘Over there.’ She pointed to the phone, which had been chosen by Sammi and which was fashioned in the shape of Donald Duck.
But as Benedict picked up the receiver, punched out the number and began speaking into the bilious yellow beak not a glimmer of a smile appeared on his lips.
‘Mr Jackson here,’ he bit out, and there was a tense, awkward silence while he listened.
‘What’s her blood pressure like now?’ he demanded, and nodded his head while he listened. Even in her distress, Verity could tell by the look on his face that whatever the case was it was, indeed, very serious.
‘I’m on my way,’ he said curtly and put the receiver down, drawing a deep breath as he sought to control his breathing and to calm himself down enough to safely get into a car and drive it. And, then, to perform an emergency Caesarean on a woman who had gone into premature labour.
The midwives were worried about her: there was protein in her urine; she was oedematous, which meant that she was retaining fluid in her tissues, and her blood pressure was now dangerously high. These three signs meant that she was imminently in danger of having what was termed as a pre-eclamptic fit. And both mother and baby were at risk.
He stared at Verity as though he had only just seen her for the first time and his mouth tightened with distaste.
‘I’m needed on the labour ward.’ Still she said nothing and still he felt the urge to lash out at her as he moved swiftly towards the door. ‘If you think that I have a case to answer; if you persist in accusing me of fathering your child—’
‘“Accusing”?’ she blurted out in dismay. Had there been accusation in her words to him? She had thought that she had told him gently and without blame or recrimination. She felt indignant and, with her indignation, a little of her normal spirit returned. ‘I wasn’t accusing you of anything, Benedict!’
He gave her a cold, hard look, as if she hadn’t spoken. ‘If you persist with your claim,’ he repeated softly, ‘then you’ll have to prove it in a court of law!’ and, turning on his heel, he opened the door and walked straight out of the flat and Verity despised herself for feeling grateful that at least he hadn’t slammed it and woken up his daughter.