CHAPTER FOUR
AS SOON as Benedict had gone off to deal with his emergency in Theatre Verity began moving around the flat, bending to pick up the toys from the floor and then putting the larger ones in the big, plastic box that stood hidden behind the sofa. Trying not to see how it all looked through his eyes. Cramped and untidy—a pigsty. He had actually said that himself.
And trying not to dwell on how he saw her—a broke, single mother desperate enough to try anything to try to foist paternal responsibility onto him.
She began to straighten up all the pieces of furniture in Sammi’s doll’s house—something that she hadn’t done for a long time. It was tedious but satisfying for the small girl in the morning and useful in its way to Verity herself. Because if she kept busy, she kept telling herself fiercely, then she wouldn’t have time to think; to dwell on Benedict’s appalling reaction to the news that he was her child’s father.
After the toys had been cleared away she picked up the coffee and chocolates which he had brought—still lying on the ground where she had dropped them—and carried them through into the kitchen, where she stuffed them angrily into the store cupboard. Then she filled the sink with water and began washing up almost, she thought rather grimly, as though she was trying to punish herself in some obscure way. Because washing up she normally hated but tonight she almost welcomed the dreaded chore.
It took her a good hour and a half to clean the place to her satisfaction and she went about it rather obsessively, wiping down all the cupboards with lemon-smelling cleanser and even polishing the pine kitchen table with wax so that by the time she had finished the small flat was gleaming.
Verity looked around and gave a small nod of approval. If Benedict could see it now he wouldn’t be so jolly critical, she thought proudly, and then her knees buckled and threatened to give way and she sat down abruptly in the nearest chair and began to cry.
It wasn’t a loud crying session. She didn’t dare; she certainly didn’t want to wake Sammi. Instead the tears just slid silently down her pale cheeks; kept on coming and coming until there were no tears left to cry and it was only then that she rose to her feet, washed her face and blew her nose, brushed her hair and made a strong cup of tea.
She was tempted to put a drop of whisky in it but it would only guarantee that she woke in the morning with a headache, and that she could do without. Besides, the alcohol might dull her senses and she needed all her senses about her while she worked out what to do next.
She should not have told him—it was as simple as that.
And whether or not she had been influenced by a soft heart and a guilty conscience that made no difference at all. She had not thought it through properly before she’d blurted it all out to Benedict. And if she was being perfectly honest just what had she expected his reaction to be?
That he would embrace without question a five-year-old child as his own? Start taking her to the zoo on Saturdays and the park on Sundays?
Verity put her cup down on the table with a trembling hand. And he had said...had said...
That had been so hurtful—the way he had implied that he was simply one in a long line of lovers.
But...
Had she not done the same to him? Assumed that he had had hundreds of other women?
When the stark reality was that neither of them really knew anything about the other. Their affair had been of the short, sweet, passionate variety—although the ending had been inevitably bitter. Verity sighed. It seemed such a long time ago, as though it had happened to a different person.
They had met at a disco at the doctors’ mess—hardly the most thrilling location in the world! Verity’s set of nurses had that morning received the results of their nursing examinations. Verity had passed! A whole group of them had decided to go to the disco.
Verity had been dancing with a couple of her friends, not exactly boogying around her handbag but pretty close to it!
But she was in a devil-may-care mood and having the time of her life. She had drunk no more than a glass of wine but that had been on an empty stomach on what was her first night off after a week of night duty on a very heavy geriatric ward. Some of the patients had been extremely sick and some of them terribly lonely and frightened.
It had been a depressing week, the most depressing since her nursing career had begun two years previously, and maybe that was what had made Verity throw caution to the wind. That night she had suddenly felt like celebrating her youth and vitality and good health. She had never been to a party in the mess before; the rumours that she had heard about their wildness had put her off!
An only child, Verity had been brought up strictly by extremely old-fashioned parents. They had been delighted at her choice of nursing for a career but reluctant to let her leave home at just eighteen. But there had been no alternative to moving away because there was no local hospital where she could have done her nurse training and continued to live at home.
Verity’s family doctor had been influential; he could see that, given the opportunity, Verity’s parents would allow her no personal freedom at all. It had been he who had encouraged her to try for the biggest and the best of the London training hospitals, even though it was a good distance from the quiet village where she had grown up.
Which was how Verity had ended up at St Thomas’s, thrilled and yet rather daunted by training at a hospital with such a high-powered international reputation!
But her fears had proved groundless; she had adapted to the hard, physical work and additional study of anatomy and physiology like a duck to water. And she had warily steered clear of any social functions, preferring to study or to take advantage of the city’s galleries and become a ‘culture vulture’.
Until that night.
Being more the jeans and T-shirt type, Verity had borrowed a dress from one of the other nurses. Short, shiny and silver, it had been the last thing that she would have chosen normally. Though maybe that might all change in the future, she’d though as she’d given a twirl in front of the full-length mirror in her room.
She had not been a vain girl but even she could not fail to see that the silver dress had looked an absolute knockout, with her long, pale blonde hair flowing freely down her back. She had been acutely aware that she had never been stared at by the opposite sex quite so much as when she’d walked into the darkened room, where the flashing coloured lights and the loud, throbbing music had made it seem like a different world. But no one had caught her eye.
Until she’d noticed that every woman on the dance floor seemed to be gravitating towards one corner of the room.
And then she’d seen why and had swallowed.
He had been standing there grinning, drinking a glass of beer and surrounded by members of both sexes who had all been vying for his attention, as courtiers would a king. He was, in the most corny way imaginable, very tall and very dark and very, very handsome. Astonishingly so. Verity had likened it to going out to buy some paste earrings and being tempted by the most costly diamonds.
There was no point.
So she’d turned away and given herself back to the sway of the music, not knowing that Benedict had observed the movement with interest, experienced enough to realise that she was not being intentionally provocative and yet he’d still been young enough to have known an almost unbearable, swamping desire that had driven every other thought from his mind, bar the one that had said he must have her.
For no woman had ever subjected Benedict Jackson to a cool once-over and then turned her back on him.
Benedict was an instinctive master where women were concerned. Where other men might have gone straight up to her or tried to catch her eye he did neither. He carried on listening, sometimes talking, and only occasionally did he let his gaze drift to the supple, shimmering beauty with the hair like pale moonlight all the way down her slender back.
And of course, Verity, even with all her inexperience, soon became acutely aware that her eyes seemed to be having some kind of dark, tingling two-way conversation with the best-looking man in the room.
So by the time that he did actually come up to her, smiled that devastatingly careless smile and said, ‘You look much too hot to dance any more—come and have a drink with me,’ Verity was in no mood to resist. She let him buy her a drink and introduce her to all his friends and it took for ever before slow music succeeded the frantic throb and he was able to pull her into his arms and bury his head in the fragrance of her lovely hair as he had been longing to do all evening.
Benedict resisted the strongest sexual urge that he had ever had and made no attempt to seduce her that night, arranging—most uncharacteristically for him—to see her the very next evening.
But a sleepless night for both of them and the sultry heat of summer, adding to a torment which neither had experienced before, conspired against them and Verity had ended up in Benedict’s bed, unable to resist the inner storm which raged and convinced that she had fallen in love with him.
For the first time in his life Benedict felt out of his depth. Before, lovers had been one very pleasant part of a very pleasant life and he had enjoyed his love affairs immensely. But something about Verity was different. He found that he felt an almost ugly, primitive need to stamp his domination on her. He wanted to make love to her constantly and they rarely left his room in the mess.
Consequently, his work suffered and Benedict was an intensely ambitious young man. In his more unreasonable moments he blamed Verity and the spell she had cast on him, which he seemed powerless to resist. Benedict found himself in a situation where he was not completely in control and mentally, if not physically, he tried to retreat.
And while all his inner turmoil had been taking place, Verity had been given a ‘friendly’ warning by another nurse that Benedict was infamous for being the ‘love ’em and leave ’em’ type. She was petrified that it was going to happen to her, too, and she began to question him when he was late, convinced that he had started to see someone else. She would confront him and they would row and the row would end up passionately in bed but each spat somehow diminished the relationship as a whole.
The news that he was leaving St Thomas’s came to Verity like a thunderbolt out of the blue. The same nurse who had warned her of his reputation took it upon herself to say slyly, ‘I suppose you’ve heard? Benedict’s landed the surgical rotation at the Manchester General!’
Verity nearly choked on her coffee. Manchester? But that was miles away!
The nurse must have registered the shock and the hurt on Verity’s face but it didn’t stop her. ‘Don’t say he hasn’t bothered to tell you he’s going, Verity?’
No, thought Verity with a grim, numb ache. He hadn’t bothered to tell her.
He had given her a key to his room and so Verity was waiting for him, white-faced and trembling, when he came off duty.
Benedict had been up all the previous two nights assisting in emergency operations. He had then had to work his normal long days on the wards. He had seen a girl of nine die, had not slept in almost forty hours and felt almost ill with fatigue. He saw the accusation in her eyes and gave a silent groan. A ding-dong with Verity was just about the last thing he needed right now.
‘Why didn’t you tell me you were leaving?’ she demanded as soon as he had closed the door behind him, her hands on her hips like a fishwife.
Not even a kiss, he noted sourly. Or the opportunity to lose himself in the magic of her embrace. He sighed, took a can of cola from the fridge and drank from it before answering. ‘You must have known that I was coming to the end of my house jobs,’ he pointed out, wondering why he was evading her question. Just why hadn’t he discussed moving hospitals with her? Was it because his obsession with Verity Summers was becoming like a thorn in his side?
‘Why didn’t you tell me?’ exploded Verity furiously, with far more vehemence than she had intended. She rubbed her temple abstractedly; it was odd how up and down she had been of late—not like her normal self at all.
Benedict repressed a yawn. What he needed above everything else was sleep. Comforting, restorative sleep—and lots of it. What he did not need was an endless tirade of clichéd accusations. ‘Verity, sweetheart,’ he shrugged, ‘I need to go to bed—’
She misinterpreted his words completely. ‘I’ll bet you do!’ she shot out wildly. ‘That seems to be all you ever do want to do, doesn’t it! Making hay while the sun shines; is that it, Benedict? Is that why you didn’t tell me you were leaving? Have you got another eager and willing lover lined up for you at your next hospital?’
His temper snapped and he said the unspeakable. ‘Not yet,’ he drawled and put the half-drunk can of cola down on the table. ‘I plan to exercise a little more discretion next time around—I’m steering clear of women who feel that they have some God-given right to interrogate me as if we’re married, or something—’
Verity didn’t stop to think. She picked up the can of cola and hurled it at his head.
With the instincts of a survivor and a sportsman, Benedict ducked. The can hit the wall and exploded in a spray of brown, sticky foam, most of it gushing over Verity but some spotting Benedict’s white coat. The absurdity of the situation made him burst out laughing. He was about to take her into his arms to kiss her and then to maybe lick a few of those sweet drops of cola from that long, smooth neck of hers...
But Verity heard nothing but the mocking laughter; registered little but the fact that he was going away and that he hadn’t even bothered to tell her. ‘I hate you, Benedict Jackson!’ she screamed, and there was an angry thumping on the wall from the occupant of the room next door.
Desire died. Benedict’s mouth twisted with scorn, fatigue and anger. ‘Keep your voice down,’ he told her cuttingly. ‘You may have got your obligatory eight hours last night but a great many of us didn’t. Including me. And now, if you don’t mind, Verity, I’m really very tired...’
She took one last, lingering look at him, her heart breaking into tiny pieces and her pride all she had left—urging her to be the one to end it. ‘And I am very tired of this relationship,’ she returned shakily. ‘That’s if you could have ever called it a relationship. Somehow I doubt it.’
She allowed herself one final look into those flinty green eyes and then she walked out of his room, not even bothering to shut the door behind her...
The shrill ringing of the doorbell broke into her tortured memories and Verity started, to discover that it was two in the morning and that she had been sitting and staring into space for hours, raking over memories which were probably best left forgotten. As she came to, she sniffed with surprise as she looked around at the remarkably spotless flat, remembering the scene before Benedict’s bleeper had taken him tearing back to the hospital.
The doorbell rang again.
Just a brief, sharp and short ring, but it could be no one else but him. She rose to her feet as reluctantly as a heavily pregnant woman and pulled the door open.
She was shocked at Benedict’s appearance. His face was ashen, his hair a mess and the green of his eyes was almost completely obscured by the hardened jet of his glittering pupils. Poignantly, there was a drop of bright red blood above one eyebrow which had obviously splashed there while he had been operating. There was no warmth in the green eyes when they looked at her.
‘I want to see her,’ he said.
‘You can’t. She’s asleep.’
‘I want to see her,’ he repeated obstinately.
Verity sighed. She had neighbours on both sides and it was two in the morning. ‘You’d better come in.’
But she couldn’t help but notice the way that he almost flinched from the contact as her arm brushed briefly against his, as though she repulsed him. Though maybe she did—and who could blame him? Did she have the right to have kept his child a secret from him for all these years?
He stood in the centre of her tiny sitting room, dark and brooding and thoroughly dominating. ‘Where is she?’ he demanded, looking around the room as if expecting to find Sammi tucked up on the sofa.
‘Benedict,’ she told him in a soft, protective voice, ‘Sammi is sound asleep and she has school in the morning. If she is woken up in the middle of the night by a total...’ She bit her lip and her words tailed off as she realised just what she had been about to say so tactlessly. And truthfully.
‘Stranger?’ he supplied acidly, and then his mouth curved with scorn. ‘I may be a novice where children are concerned, Verity, but I’m not completely stupid. I don’t intend to wake her up and frighten her. I—just—want—to—see—her.’ He emphasised every word of his final sentence as though he was talking in a foreign language.
It was a bald entreaty which Verity could not ignore. In fact, its very starkness gave her a brief sensation of comfort. Better that he cared and was bitter than not to care at all. Verity nodded. ‘Very well.’ She gestured with her head. ‘Come with me.’
Sammi’s tiny bedroom was off a short corridor which led from the sitting room. Verity pushed the door open and went soundlessly inside, her heart in her mouth, aware of Benedict just behind her.
The bedroom was, at least, something that she could be proud of. Sammi had just graduated from popular Disney characters to girly-girly toys and Verity had decorated the room in just about every permutation of pink that she could think of! She bent over to check that Sammi was sleeping, twitched the duvet unnecessarily and then rather reluctantly moved away to allow Benedict to approach the bed.
He stood there for some time, not moving—so silent that Verity could not even hear the sound of his breathing as he watched the steady rise and fall of Sammi’s chest.
Something prompted her—some instinct, Verity could not have said what it was—to leave him there alone with Sammi and she retreated noiselessly from the room, going straight into the kitchen where she made a pot of strong coffee, though she used her own brand and not the stuff that he had brought with him. Then she took it into the sitting room and waited.
In the bedroom Benedict stared down at the little girl with something approaching awe. He was used to dealing with new-born babies or, very occasionally, his nephews and nieces.
But this was different.
She was... He almost trembled with emotion as recognition stirred deep within his soul.
She was his.
She looked so small and so very perfect. He stared at the pink and white bloom of her skin which was illuminated by the soft glow of the night-light. At the dark blonde lashes that brushed in perfect half-moons against her chubby, childish cheeks. At the tumble of golden, mussed curls which lay in silken coils over her pillow. And something dug at his heart as again he remembered how her mother’s hair had used to lie like that.
For it never occurred to Benedict to ask himself whether Verity might be lying. He knew without doubt and without question that he was Sammi’s father.
Abruptly he left the sleeping child and walked blindly back into the sitting room, his eyes focusing to find Verity perched on the edge of the sofa with a tray of coffee steaming on the small table in front of her.
How pale she looked, he thought dispassionately—her aquamarine eyes bruised by shadows and the pale blonde bob badly in need of brushing. She still wore the old jeans and crumpled shirt that he had been so critical of earlier, though the bathtime splashes had naturally dried by now. And yet she must have known that he would return.
Stupidly, her obvious neglect of her appearance touched him far more than the stirring of desire that he had felt for her in Theatre earlier that day, in what now seemed like a lifetime ago.
When was the last time he had been in the company of a woman who had not spent her whole time preening herself? The women he dated wore clothes that probably would have cost what Verity earned in a single month at the hospital. How the hell did she manage to bring up a child on her meagre wages? he wondered, with sudden savagery. Were her parents helping her out?
‘W-would you like some coffee?’ asked Verity nervously as she recognised the renewed anger in his eyes, not sure whether he would storm out or insult her again or what.
The incongruousness of the polite question brought a brief quirk to the corners of his mouth but then the reality of the situation hit him like a blow to the solar plexus. What the hell was he going to do about it? He met her questioning stare and brought himself back to the present with difficulty.
‘Thank you.’ He nodded his dark head formally. ‘I could use some coffee.’
‘You—you’ve got blood on your forehead,’ she told him distractedly. ‘It looks like arterial,’ she added, though she couldn’t for the life of her have said why.
Benedict walked over to the mirror that hung above the mantelpiece and frowned. So he had. His mouth tightened as the sight of the blood brought the horror of the case he had just operated on after rushing back. He had been in Theatre within minutes of leaving Verity’s house, to find that a Caesarean section was not just preferable but essential.
Benedict sighed. There were attendant risks to all surgical interventions and a Caesarean was no exception. The hazards of this particular operation were those of anaesthesia, particularly aspiration of vomit in the unprepared patient. Also haemmorrhage at the time of operation and, immediately following it, thrombosis or embolism which could occur—deadly clots which could lodge in a woman’s veins and halt circulation of blood flow to the main vessels of the body. Causing death.
Advanced maternal age meant that the dangers were accentuated and the patient that Benedict had operated on was thirty-five.
By the time that Benedict had pulled the baby boy free he was flat, registering 0 on the Apgar scale which assessed a new-born’s condition. The tiny infant was pale blue due to lack of oxygen, had limp muscle tone and his heart rate was absent. They had managed to get him breathing again and he was now lying in a cot in the special care baby unit under the care of the neonatal paediatrician and hanging onto life by a thread.
Every second that he survived now counted considerably. He might make it until the morning with a bit of luck or help from the Almighty—depending on whether or not you believed in a God. Benedict had met very few surgeons who did.
Meanwhile, the baby’s mother was being nursed in the intensive care unit.
Benedict rubbed ineffectually at the spot of blood, emerging from his thoughts to see concerned aquamarine eyes set in a pale face staring at him in the mirror with concern.
‘Do you mind if I wash?’ he asked brusquely.
‘Of course not,’ Verity answered quickly, sensing his inner distress. It must have been some emergency, she thought. ‘The bathroom is next door to Sammi’s room—’
‘Thanks,’ he said shortly. ‘I’ll find it.’
She heard the sounds of taps being run. It sounded strangely and falsely intimate—to have a man in her bathroom like that. Her hand shook suddenly with the irony that it should be Benedict in there. The only man she had ever been intimate with... Sad, really, that she should never have recovered emotionally from a relationship which had clearly been so one-sided.
The sound of running water stopped and she watched him walk slowly back into the room. He had obviously dampened his hair down, too, and then run his fingers through it in the absence of a comb or brush. He had always done that, she remembered with a pang. His hair had usually been mussed if he was called in the middle of the night when they were in bed.
He used to stumble around, trying to get dressed in the dark, until she would murmur and tell him that she was awake anyway and she would lie back on her pillows watching him slick the dark waves into some semblance of order.
Because she would stay awake for him, no matter how tired she was or how long he took to operate. So that when Benedict came back to bed it was always to her open arms and soft kisses.
Benedict saw the wide-eyed way she was looking at him and he remembered, too. But remembering was a big mistake, the erotic yet sharp pull of lust momentarily distracting him. And distraction was the last thing he needed in this bizarre situation, which was quite new to him.
Hell’s fire, he thought distractedly as pure feeling and the need for comfort flooded through his veins and he forgot all else other than how good it had felt to have Verity so soft and compliant in his arms all those years ago. And remembering suddenly, too, how she had always waited for him to finish a case, no matter how late. How he had always made love to her on his return and how easily she had soothed his troubled mind and body. He found himself longing for that incomparable release right now.
He shifted uncomfortably in an effort to dispel the yearning and moved to sit on a chair on the opposite side of the room to Verity, who was trying very hard to act as though nothing was untoward.
‘How do you like your coffee?’ she enquired. ‘Still black, with sugar?’
‘The very same.’ He gave her a look of wry surprise.
She silently poured him a cup and handed it to him, then sat back and sipped her own coffee and waited for him to speak.
But Benedict didn’t speak. He drank his coffee in the hope that it might get rid of the fatigue and the confusion but it didn’t. He felt the dull ache of hunger in his stomach and realised that he had had nothing since his sandwich in Theatre at lunchtime.
Verity recognised his dazed look for what it was. Emotionally and physically the man was overloaded. ‘Have you eaten, Benedict?’ she asked softly.
‘Not unless you count the sandwiches that Gisela gave me.’
Hell, that was hours ago. She rose to her feet. ‘I’ll get you something.’
He didn’t attempt to dissuade her. He was pleased to have her out of the room, to be alone with thoughts that were whirling around in his head like clothes in a spin-drier.
Verity bustled around in the kitchen for something quick, easy and filling to give him.
In ten minutes she returned, carrying in a tray of fresh pasta with a basil-flecked tomato sauce topped with Parmesan shavings and an accompanying side dish of salad. Fragrant on a side plate sat a hunk of warmed Ciabatta bread.
Benedict almost drooled and took the tray from her with a grateful smile, the burden of their undiscussed daughter forgotten as his body went into survival mode and demanded the food that it craved.
He ate quickly, thought Verity, like all surgeons on call who had no idea when they might get the chance to eat again. When he had finished every mouthful and wiped the last trace of sauce off his plate with his bread, Verity went back into the kitchen to make more coffee. They were sure as hell going to need it.
She washed up while she waited for the kettle to boil and when she carried the tray next door she almost dropped it in surprise for Benedict was sprawled along her sofa, long legs hanging over the edge and his eyes closed, sleeping the sleep of the exhausted.
In sleep there was much more of the man she remembered. His lashes curved in two symmetrical charcoal arcs on his cheeks. The cynical lines had relaxed; he looked young and quite, quite... Verity swallowed back the salt taste of what felt suspiciously like tears... Quite beautiful, she decided, the wistful expression on her face betraying the ache that she felt in her heart.
She hesitated, knowing that she should wake him and yet reluctant to cut short the sleep that he so obviously needed.
‘Benedict,’ she whispered softly.
‘Mmm,’ he murmured into the cushion and, moving his body one hundred and eighty degrees, he turned to face the other way, nestling as he did so and sliding his hip ever deeper into the sofa.
Compassion won out over common sense and Verity went over to the sleeping man. I’ll take his shoes and socks off, she decided, and if he sleeps through that then he deserves to sleep.
She removed both, shocked by her desire to run her fingertips over his bare feet, then went to fetch a blanket from the store cupboard and tucked it around his sleeping frame as tenderly as she would a patient.
I’ll set my alarm for six, she thought as she snapped the light out. That way he can be out of here before Sammi even wakes up.
She allowed herself one last, lingering look. ‘Goodnight Benedict,’ she murmured softly but he could not hear her.