CHAPTER SEVEN

SAMMI was settled in bed and Verity had just finished changing when she heard Benedict at the door.

She gave the sitting room one final, satisfied glance before going to the front door. One thing was for sure. He certainly would not be able to make any snide comments about the state of the place tonight, she thought. Every toy was packed neatly away and not a mug or a book littered any of the gleaming surfaces.

She had even managed to stop off at the market after she had collected Sammi from the childminder’s and had bought a huge armful of flowers at a fraction of their normal price. Already they were in full bloom and in a day or two the flowers would be dead but, for tonight at least, they transformed the flat into a scented heaven. Daisies and roses, freesias and lilies—she had arranged them artistically in vases made out of the blue-coloured glass she collected and had dotted them all round the sitting room. It might not be large or luxurious, Verity thought defiantly, but at least it’s home.

She pulled the door open and there stood Benedict, slightly grim-faced. No gifts tonight, she thought. ‘Hi.’

‘Hello.’

‘You’d better come in.’

‘Thanks.’

He glanced from right to left, ridiculously disappointed not to see the butter-haired angel. ‘Is Sammi in bed?’

Verity fiddled with the tiny silver ring on her little finger, the oddest pang shooting through her as she observed his reaction. ‘Of course. She’s always in bed by seven. Well,’ she amended, with a slight smile. ‘Nearly always! Can I get you some coffee?’

‘Do you have any beer?’

‘I think so.’

‘A beer would be great.’

While she was clattering around in the kitchen fetching the beer Benedict sat down in one of the chairs and looked around. It amused and rather touched him to see that she had obviously gone to a lot of trouble tidying the flat up—it was barely recognisable as the same place he had walked into last night. And the flowers were glorious.

Verity handed him a bottle of beer and a glass—which he declined—but was unprepared for his next question.

‘Who bought you the flowers?’

‘I bought them myself.’

He took a long mouthful of beer, drinking it directly from the bottle like a cowboy in a film, his eyes never leaving her face as his tongue flicked out to remove the slick of white froth that outlined his upper lip. ‘A woman shouldn’t have to buy her own flowers,’ he observed deliberately.

Which Verity thought was beside the point. He was even sounding like a cowboy now! And the last thing she wanted was to go all weak at the knees at such brazen masculinity. She didn’t reply but sat in the opposite chair sipping at her fruit juice, her ankles locked primly together.

‘Doesn’t Jamie buy you flowers?’

‘That isn’t any of your business.’

‘Isn’t it?’

‘No.’

Benedict was discovering another new emotion. Jealousy. He felt some thunderous black cloud invade his mind and it was not a sensation he enjoyed one little bit.

There was an angry silence for a long moment until Benedict finally sat back and looked at her squarely, his face suddenly serious—flowers and Jamie forgotten. Only one thing was important, he reminded himself. One thing. ‘Will you tell me about it?’ he asked.

‘How much do you want to know?’

Not want, he thought, suddenly urgent—need to know. ‘Everything,’ he said quietly. ‘Tell me everything.’

They were, she realised suddenly, talking in the kind of shorthand normally used by a couple who had been together for years. And things like that could stir foolish hope in the heart of a woman who should know better.

‘It’s almost impossible to know where to begin...’ She looked at him hopefully but he did not say a word. It was initially difficult to talk openly about something which she had kept concealed for so long and particularly difficult when it had to be done while facing the other protagonist and that steady, green stare of his.

‘After we—’ she faltered, then tried again. ‘After you left St Thomas’s I carried on pretty much as normal.’ Well, her behaviour would have been stretching most people’s conception of normality, but still...

There was no need to tell him of the bucket of tears that she had cried over him late into the night, every night. Or the fact that she had been so distraught that she had put the lateness of her period down to the stress of Benedict leaving. But when her breasts had grown swollen and acutely tender she had been unable to hide the truth from herself any longer. ‘And then I discovered that I was pregnant,’ she said quietly.

‘That must have been pretty traumatic.’ Benedict spoke almost to himself, holding onto the bottle of beer as if it was a lifeline.

‘Something of an understatement,’ she observed rather drily. ‘But, yes, I suppose you could say that it was traumatic.’

He put the beer bottle down as he heard her speak in that wooden little voice, his face suddenly alive and vibrant and accusing and angry. ‘But why the hell didn’t you contact me, Verity? Tell me!’ he demanded hotly.

Verity chose her words carefully. ‘What would have been the point? We had split up. There was no love between us—’

His mouth hardened. ‘The point,’ he emphasised slowly, ‘was that as the father I bore a certain responsibility towards you—’

Verity’s chin went up sharply in defiance and the moon-pale hair sparked silken fire at the sudden movement. ‘But I didn’t want to be your responsibility!’ she retorted proudly, but he shook his head in a remonstrative way that made her feel, most peculiarly, ashamed. ‘That’s why!’

‘You shouldn’t have shut me out like that,’ he objected quietly. Shouting wasn’t going to solve anything. ‘I should have shared it with you. Didn’t it ever occur to you that I had a right to know?’

The secret, the second secret that she had locked away inside her for six long years, began to clamour loudly to be heard until she could no longer ignore it. ‘But I tried,’ she stumbled hoarsely, ‘to contact you.’

He froze at something hidden in her voice. ‘You did?’ he queried suspiciously.

She remembered why she had deliberately stowed the memory away. Because it hurt. It hurt like hell. Even now. ‘I travelled all the way to Manchester to talk to you,’ she gulped. ‘I was going to have you paged but one of the other doctors said that he thought you were in. I thought that it might be a good idea to see your instinctive reaction to the news that I was pregnant—without you being warned that I was there. He directed me to your room. So I went up...’

She looked up and into his face and Benedict felt some awful foreboding ice his skin as he read the truth in her eyes. Oh, my God... ‘Verity, don’t! Please, don’t—’

‘I went up,’ she continued with dogged determination, as though each word wasn’t cutting into her heart like a machete, ‘and knocked. But there was no answer. So I naturally assumed there was no one in,’ she added brightly. ‘Anyway, I knocked once more and I heard someone call something, and I walked right in...’

He was caught in the blaze of reproach that sparked from her aquamarine eyes and he discovered that what he felt was genuine dismay. And shame. He shook his head to halt her. ‘Verity, please—don’t—’

‘I walked in,’ she cut across his words ruthlessly, triumphant to see his discomfiture as he anticipated what she was going to say next, ‘only I quickly realised that you were in bed.’ She swallowed down the bile which had come up with the memory. ‘And not alone.’

‘Dear God,’ he whispered in horrified shock as he struggled to come to terms with how she must have felt. He hadn’t even seen her. ‘Verity, I’m so very—’

‘No!’ Her voice rang out. ‘Please don’t apologise to me, Benedict. There really isn’t any need. Our relationship had finished some months before, after all, so why shouldn’t you have had a new girlfriend?’

He gave a weary sigh. He remembered the other woman well—a junior doctor who had seemed to have everything that he thought he wanted in a woman. Except that she did not have Verity’s unique ability to make him laugh. In her arms he had not found the peace that Verity had given him, only he had been too damned young and stubborn to accept that at the time. He sighed. ‘And that was it? The only time you tried to get in touch?’

She fixed him with a withering look. ‘What the hell did you expect, Benedict? That I’d mount a patrol outside your door until the coast was clear? No. It was clear that I had no room in your life any more and you certainly didn’t look as though you were ready to cope with rattles and nappies and a child who was waking up every two hours during the night!’

‘Point taken,’ he accepted quietly, and was silent for a moment before he continued. ‘So what did you do?’

She gave a tight, forced smile. ‘I went to see my doctor, who strongly recommended a course of action which I found totally unacceptable.’

Their eyes met. He felt curiously and profoundly shocked. ‘You mean...?’

‘Yes,’ she replied, remembering the revulsion that she had felt when the doctor had suggested that she might want to terminate her pregnancy. ‘It never occurred to me. Not for a moment.’

‘Thank you,’ he said simply.

Which filled her heart with a sort of glow which she did her utmost to quell. ‘I found another doctor, close to St Thomas’s, and she referred me to a type of agency—’

‘What kind of agency?’

Verity smiled. ‘Oh, society has turned full circle, it seems. Girls who get pregnant outside marriage are no longer scorned and ostracised; they’re positively encouraged to have their babies and given any help they might need in order to do so. That’s the theory, anyway!

‘I was given a place to stay. In Cornwall.’ She closed her eyes on a dreamy memory. Pregnancy protected and cocooned you from reality and despite her obvious predicament of having no husband or money it had been a wonderful time in her life. ‘It was very beautiful, actually. And quiet. Apart from the sound of the sea. I just used to sit there, on the rocks, for hours and hours, listening to the waves as they lapped over the sand. Feeling my baby kick inside me.’

The memory became as real as the present day. She found that her hands had automatically crept to cover her belly in that instinctively protective way that pregnant women have.

With a start she opened her eyes and was taken aback by the deep remorse she saw glittering in the depths of his eyes. Whatever else she had meant to do by talking to Benedict it had certainly not been to rake up a catalogue of his supposed crimes and then beat him up with them. ‘It was a long time ago, Benedict,’ she whispered softly.

Benedict swallowed, still reeling from how bitter he felt at his exclusion from Sammi’s life. The way that Verity had said ‘my baby’ in that slumberous, possessive way had really brought it home to him. With an effort he kept his voice steady. ‘So you’ve done it all—on your own?’

‘Yes.’

‘And what about your parents? Didn’t they help you?’

Verity forced a smile. It sounded so ridiculously melodramatic to say it, like something from the last century. ‘My parents disowned me when I told them that I was having a baby and that marriage wasn’t an option. Hence the agency.’

Shock waves shuddered through him. ‘And then what?’ he shot out, biting down the urge to swear long and loud at the smallmindedness of her parents. He had only met them once, with their small, pinched faces and their disapproving looks, so unlike their vibrant, beautiful daughter.

Verity pushed a wayward strand of blonde hair back behind her ear. ‘I stayed in Cornwall until Sammi was nearly a year old,’ she told him. ‘So we had that uninterrupted bonding time together. I helped run the creche at the centre but it was only a temporary measure—they weren’t really in a position to offer me the post permanantly. And, besides, I decided that I couldn’t afford to let my nursing skills lapse or I would have no security for our future. I loved the country but London was where the work was.

‘And so I came back. That’s why I chose Theatre—it was one of the few stimulating options that gave me the opportunity to work regular hours.

‘And here,’ she finished flippantly because flippancy seemed to be something that she could safely hide behind, ‘I am.’

‘But you didn’t come back to St Thomas’s?’

‘No,’ she answered quietly.

‘You chose a hospital where nobody knew you,’ he guessed accurately.

‘That’s right.’ Verity picked up her juice and sipped at it before replacing it on the table. ‘I didn’t want people judging me or feeling sorry for me or basically involving themselves in my life.’

‘Apart from Jamie Brennan, of course?’

She met the unjust accusation in his eyes with equanimity. ‘That’s right,’ she agreed softly, not caring when she saw the look of fury which crossed his face. Let him think what he liked. And let him feel angry, too! How many women had he had over the years? And yet she was supposed to have joined a nunnery, was she?

The jealousy coiled in the pit of his stomach like a small, black snake and Benedict mentally willed it away. Instead he thought how beautiful she looked as he watched her fold her arms over her small, high breasts in an unconscious gesture of self-protection. She was wearing a deceptively simple white shirt and an amazing short, pleated, black skirt which came midway down her thigh. She didn’t look in the least bit mumsy.

With her face almost completely free of make-up and her hair swinging shiny and clean around her chin, she looked so young, so...pure, he decided almost reluctantly, that it was hard to believe that she had given birth to a child—his child—alone and in the most difficult of circumstances.

‘And does anyone at St Jude’s know?’

She raised her eyebrows questioningly, unwilling to help him out. ‘Know what exactly, Benedict?’

He saw the challenge that sparked in her aquamarine eyes and he found it an unbearable turn-on but he repressed it immediately. There were far more important things than sex on his mind right now. ‘About Sammi,’ he said baldly.

‘Well, I haven’t kept my child hidden away all these years,’ said Verity.

There it was again, he thought, my child. Didn’t she know, or care, how much that hurt?

‘If you mean do they know about her father...’ Verity blushed as she said the word and looked down, unable to meet his eyes. There was something terribly intimate about calling him Sammi’s father. ‘Then, no,’ she concluded baldly. ‘They don’t.’

He closed his eyes and rubbed at his temples, the way he always did when he was deep in thought, and when he opened them again he leaned forward as if physically attempting to bridge the huge chasm of misunderstanding that lay between them. ‘Why did you tell me, Verity? Why now—after all these years?’

She chose her words carefully—she had had enough time during her sleepless night while Benedict slept on her sofa to consider what her answer to this particular question should be. ‘Because I saw you,’ she said simply, and bit her lip.

He waited; he could sense that she was on the brink of tears. His instinct was to pull her into his arms but he knew that he needed to tread very carefully—they were both on an emotional seesaw as it was. Eventually he prompted, ‘And when you saw me? What?’

‘You looked so like her. Well, not really like her. It’s just—this way you have of raising your eyebrows. Both of you. That’s what brought it home to me. Eyebrows! It sounds so silly now but I knew that morally I simply had to tell you. It sounds so silly,’ she repeated helplessly and burst into tears.

He moved to the sofa in seconds, pulling her into his arms, and her head went straight away to his shoulder as though only his shoulder could relieve her of the most unbearable burden as she cried her heart out.

And Benedict felt as though he had been broken in two as his arms tightened to cradle her even closer against him. He had always been the kind of man to be unaffected, even irritated, by a woman’s tears which over the years he had had turned on him in pique or in temper but mainly in frustration because he had not loved the women in his life as they had professed to love him.

But these tears... Dear Lord in heaven, he thought desperately, impossibly touched by her grief. These were so different.

‘Not silly,’ he murmured against the scented sweetness of her hair. ‘Oh, no. Not silly at all, my—’ He had been about to say ‘darling’ but he stopped himself in time. It would have been inappropriate, given the circumstances, and Verity would have been perfectly justified in slapping him very hard around the face if he’d started murmuring sweet nothings into her ears.

In her sorrow she heard nothing; instead she just cried until there were no tears left—tears which she hadn’t allowed herself the indulgence of crying since she was newly pregnant. And by the time that they had become shuddering sobs Benedict seemed to have settled her back down on the sofa, a clutch of tissues pressed into her hand, and suddenly he was not there any more.

She heard him clanking around in the kitchen and when he returned it was with a tray of tea and he was smiling. And goodness only knew what he had to smile about!

‘What’s so funny?’ she demanded.

He put the tray down and held one of Sammi’s drawings aloft. It was a child’s painting of yellow tulips in a blue glass jar, crude but highly imaginative. It had been stuck to the front of the fridge with three teddy-bear magnets. ‘It’s wonderful!’ he exclaimed enthusiastically. ‘Absolutely wonderful!’

Verity smiled softly at the undisguised pleasure in his voice. ‘I think she’s good, too,’ she agreed. ‘Of course, I know I could be biased.’

‘You and me both,’ said Benedict indulgently. ‘My father was a brilliant amateur artist—he’s a little too arthritic to paint in any degree of comfort now. But I wonder whether she takes after him?’

They stared at each other in silence.

‘Sammi’s never met any of her grandparents,’ said Verity, on what sounded suspiciously like the beginnings of another sob.

Benedict handed her a cup of steaming, strong tea—more to distract her than anything else. His shirt was still wet from the last bout of crying! ‘That can all be resolved,’ he told her gently. ‘At least on her paternal side. If that’s what you want—but I’m rather assuming that it is.’

Verity drank her tea silently, not sure about what it was that she wanted, and when she looked up he read the confusion in her eyes as she tried to imagine his parents’ response to learning that they were grandparents.

‘You explained why you told me that I was Sammi’s father but you didn’t explain where you expected that admission to lead,’ said Benedict slowly. ‘You weren’t just expecting to tell me and then for me to quietly go away, were you, Verity?’ he quizzed softly, as he came to sit beside her.

‘I don’t know,’ she admitted honestly. ‘I didn’t really think it through at all.’ Her voice trembled as she found the courage to voice her thoughts. ‘What do you want, Benedict?’

He paused, momentarily taken aback by the generous way she had asked him. He considered his reply. ‘I want,’ he said carefully, ‘to get to know Sammi and for her to get to know me. And I would like to introduce her to my parents—’

‘But not yet?’ pleaded Verity.

He shook his head. ‘When depends entirely on when you think she’s ready. Or able. And when you’re ready. That might not be for months but I’m prepared to wait for as long as it takes.’ He ran his hand back through the rich, dark hair—a gesture which Verity recognised of old.

His expression was very intense as he looked at her. ‘You see, the thing is, Verity, that having introduced me to Sammi, giving me the first taster of being her father, has got me absolutely hooked.’

Verity gave him a quizzical look. ‘Just like that?’

He nodded. ‘Just like that. And if you’re expecting me to just go away again, to quietly fade into the background, then I’m afraid you’re going to be disappointed.’

She had to ask him. She must. ‘And, apart from your parents, is there...anyone else who will be getting involved with my daughter?’

His black brows almost met in the middle of his forehead as he stared at her with bemusement. ‘I’m not sure I follow you.’

She managed to convince herself that she was asking for Sammi’s sake, and hers alone but still the question stuck in her throat like a fishbone. ‘Is—? Are you involved with anyone?’ she croaked. ‘Married, perhaps?’ She saw him frown again. ‘A wife?’ she queried, aware that she was overstressing her case but she didn’t care. She wanted him to spell it out. If there was some woman—a fiancee or even a wife tucked away in the background—then she wanted to hear it. Now.

‘“A wife”?’ he repeated. Her words seemed to anger him because the green eyes became flinty and his mouth tight. ‘No, there isn’t!’ he snapped, and Verity was taken aback by the huge surge of relief that his words provoked. He eyed her with something approaching dislike.

‘Is that how little you think of me?’ he demanded. ‘I asked you out for dinner before I knew anything about Sammi. Do you think that’s how I would treat my wife? By making passes at attractive nurses on my first day at a new hospital?’ He saw something written in her eyes then and gave a hollow, knowing laugh.

‘Oh, I see,’ and he nodded his head understandingly. ‘You’re basing your assumption on my past behaviour, are you, Verity?’

She realised that perhaps she was not being fair to him. He might have changed.

And as she had tried to convince herself over and over again, the two of them had broken up ages before she found him in the arms of another woman. She found her eyes drawn to the hard, flat lines of his cheek-bones, to the strong curve of his jaw which was so like Sammi’s, and she did something that she had not done for years.

She flirted with him.

‘Is that what you were doing?’ she asked him softly. ‘Making a pass at me?’

His mouth lost something of its hardness; this was a game he was a past master at. But anger still sharpened the edges of his attraction towards her. He leant forward. ‘I should be careful, if I were you, Verity,’ he warned softly. ‘If you issue sensual, unspoken invitations like that then I’ll take you up on them.’

‘Benedict...’ she whispered, on a half-hearted protest.

It would have been the easiest thing in the world to take her in his arms right then and kiss her. He knew very well how much she wanted him to. And he would. But not yet. This was much too precarious to be rushed by passion. For the first time ever he started re-inventing the rules by which he had lived his life. His reply was a teasing murmur. ‘What?’

Verity swallowed—cursing him, hating him, wanting him. She felt raw, exposed, as if she had lain her heart bare for him to see. And she ached, too. She had repressed her sexuality and her desires for almost six arid years. And here was the man who had awakened both, the only man she had ever lain with. And they had a child together. Would it be so wrong? So very wrong? ‘You know,’ she told him angrily and made to stand up but he stopped her with a decisive shake of the dark head.

‘Oh, yes, I know,’ he whispered. ‘You want me to kiss you.’

Her frustration was so strong that she said the unthinkable. ‘Then why don’t you? I’m not stopping you,’ she said, unaware that her voice held a husky note of invitation which he found irresistible, and Benedict moved forward, took her face between his hands and stared down at her for a long, long moment, lost in the aquamarine glory of her eyes.

And Verity discovered that feelings for him, which she had thought she had eliminated, had simply lain dormant for all these years. Was she in danger of getting badly hurt for a second time?

She made to move away but this time Benedict pulled her insistently into his arms, reluctant to pass up on an opportunity to do what he had wanted to do since he’d first set eyes on her yesterday.

He lowered his head and kissed her, unhurriedly and experimentally, his mouth brushing lingeringly over the fullness of her lips.

It was so slow and yet so complete. Verity felt the world tip on its axis as he continued with his sensual exploration. With a little cry she opened her mouth beneath his, allowing his tongue to sweetly penetrate, to dart in and out and to lick at her until she felt quite dizzy with sensation. Her hands went up to grip at his broad shoulders and she felt her breasts grow heavy as she allowed herself to sink back against the cushions.

And Benedict came with her, his weight heavy and hard as his body engulfed hers, still kissing her all the while.

He felt the jut of her burgeoning breasts and stifled a moan of temptation. Oh, but be wanted her. So badly. He wanted all things. To tear the restrictive clothes from her body and take her in an instant. And yet to spend all the time in the world—to undress her degree by teasing degree, to love her so slowly...

He felt the jerky little push of her hips against him as her body instinctively responded to the growing need in him and the reality of what he was about to do appalled him. To take her now, after everything that had happened. When she was at her most tender, her most vulnerable. What kind of man was he?

And if they made love now; started a relationship which might well fizzle into nothing—what would come out of that for Sammi other than complications and confusion?

For all their sakes he should desist.

With the greatest effort of will he could remember making in his life he stopped kissing her and stood up abruptly, going over to the mantelpiece on the pretext of examining a photograph of Sammi but in reality staring sightlessly at the butter-coloured curls and the hyacinth-blue eyes. Instead he concentrated on slowing down his loud, ragged breathing. He thought of cold showers and baths of ice-cubes—a device that he hadn’t had to employ since his schooldays.

And only when he was certain that he could trust himself to turn around and face her without being enticed into carrying her off to the nearest bed did he do so.

Verity watched him turn, her eyes searching his face for some clue of what might have motivated that passionate kiss but all her hopes—if hopes they were—faded and died the moment she saw his features set into unforgiving lines, the eyes as impassive as a statue’s. And she shivered.

Benedict did not refer to it. He needed to get out of there. And fast. Before he changed his mind. ‘It’s time I was going,’ he said evenly and then he added, ‘Do you have a photograph I could have? Of Sammi?’

‘Of course I have!’ Feeling ridiculously pleased, she went over to the drawer and fished around in it until she had found Sammi’s recent school photo.

‘Thanks.’ He took it and smiled, then put it in his wallet. ‘Now. About Sammi?’ He raised his dark brows questioningly—that selfsame expression which had first so reminded her of their daughter.

“‘About Sammi”,’ she repeated woodenly, like a child learning her times-tables.

‘How about this coming weekend? I’m not on call. Are you free?’

Verity swallowed. Yes, she was free. She nodded, still not trusting herself to speak any sense.

‘Then how about Saturday? I could come round early—we could make a day of it. That’s if Sammi doesn’t object,’ he added.

Verity couldn’t fault him. As a ‘new’ father he was making all the right noises. If only she felt as impartially about him as he seemed to about her then everything would be just fine and dandy. She nodded her affirmation once more.

Benedict frowned, marginally irritated by the aquamarine eyes looking almost wounded and disproportionately huge in a face suddenly drained of colour. Why the hell was she staring at him as though he were some big, bad ogre? He gave a heavy sigh and then adopted what he hoped was a conciliatory approach. ‘Listen, Verity,’ he said. ‘It was a mistake just now. Heat of the moment, lust, hormones—whatever you want to call it—’

‘Sex,’ she put in baldly, pleased to see him wince very slightly. ‘That’s all it is.’ That’s all it ever was, she wanted to add but she would never do that. To say that would somehow be to devalue Sammi’s existence. And it had never been just sex for her, oh, no. Verity had loved Benedict very much and she suspected that that love was only a flicker away from re-ignition.

So she had better dampen it. For her sake and, more importantly, for Sammi’s.

Benedict started for the door, his mouth tasting as stale as if he had been eating cold cinders and all Verity’s sweetness suddenly gone away. He turned around, his eyes veiled. ‘Until Saturday, then,’ he said.

But Verity shook her head. ‘Until tomorrow, you mean. We still have to work together, remember?’

He gave a brief nod at the reminder. Yet another reason to stay away from her emotionally.