Best Man To Wed? Read online

  The reality, she knew now, would be rather dif ferent. Even if Chris had still been going, the four days of the conference would be filled with meetings, whilst she would be called upon to use her language skills, both in verbal translations and paperwork, which from previous experience she knew would keep her tied to her hotel bedroom when she wasn’t actually attending the conference with the company’s small sales team.

  ‘The flight time’s been changed,’ James informed her. ‘I’ll pick you up here at six-thirty. I’ve got to drive past on my way to the airport, so—’

  ‘You’ll pick me up?’ Poppy interrupted him, shocked. ‘But you aren’t going. Chris...’

  ‘Chris is on honeymoon, as you very well know, and won’t be back for another week,’ James reminded her grimly, giving her a tauntingly sardonic look as he added unkindly, ‘Surely even you aren’t self-deluding enough to believe that he’d cut short his honeymoon to go to Italy with you? Or was that what you were secretly hoping, Poppy... secretly wishing he would do? My God, just when the hell are you going to grow up and realise that—’

  ‘That what?’ Poppy interrupted him furiously, fighting to control the way her mouth had started to tremble as she goaded James wildly. ‘Go on, then, say it. Say what we both know you’re just dying to say, James. Or shall I say it for you...?’

  Her chin tilted proudly as she forced herself to look straight into his eyes without flinching. ‘When am I going to realise that Chris doesn’t love me, that he will never love me... that he loves Sally...?’ she said bravely.

  She knew that her eyes were over-bright with betraying tears, but she couldn’t help it; her emotions were too strong for her, too overpowering.

  ‘Of course I know that Chris won’t be going to Italy,’ she told James tiredly, turning away from him as the box at the heart of her small bonfire suddenly crackled fiercely and was engulfed by flames.

  The pain inside her heart as she watched it burn was so sharp and driving that she had to force herself not to reach into the fire and retrieve the box, shaking it from the flames. Inside it were all her precious, cherished memories and souvenirs of her years of loving Chris: the present he had given her for that momentous twelfth birthday when she had first fallen in love with him... the card he had sent her...the other gifts he had given her over the years.

  Quite mundane, perhaps, in many ways, and certainly not the gifts of a lover; no doubt in James, for instance, the small, precious hoard that she had guarded so tenderly would only provoke derision and contempt, but to her...

  Yes, she had known that Chris wouldn’t be going to Italy, but it had never occurred to her that James would be attending the conference in his place. She had assumed that someone else from the sales team would go instead. She frowned suddenly, something striking her.

  ‘If you’re going to Italy, you won’t need me there,’ she announced as she turned back to look at him. ‘You speak Italian fluently.’

  As well he might, Poppy reflected ungenerously. After all, his grandmother on his mother’s side was Italian and both he and Chris had frequently spent summer holidays with their Italian relations. But whereas James had always been very fluent in the language, Chris had not absorbed it quite so well.

  ‘Italian, yes,’ James agreed coolly, ‘but this is an international conference, remember, and your knowledge of Japanese is required. So, if you were entertaining any ideas about spending your time mooning around daydreaming about Chris, I warn you that we’re going to Italy to work...’

  ‘You don’t have any right to warn me about anything,’ Poppy challenged him dangerously, inwardly seething with resentment at the fact that he had called her professionalism into question.

  She was well aware how strenuously he had opposed her appointment to the post of interpreter and translator within the company, sneering that it was nepotism and that it would be cheaper to send such work out to tender.

  She shouldn’t have been listening outside the office door when he and her mother had argued about her appointment, Poppy knew, and she really hadn’t intended to do so but had simply been on her way to see her mother.

  However, what she had heard him say about her had made her all the more determined to prove just how wrong he was and just how valuable she could be to the company, and she had immediately put aside her own initial doubts about the wisdom of going to work for the family electronics business.

  When her mother had first suggested that she did so, Poppy had been reluctant to agree, wanting instead to establish her independence, but the knowledge of how difficult it was proving for her to find a job by herself, coupled with the fact that she’d known she would be working closely with Chris, had overcome her scruples and she now firmly believed that in the short time she had been with the company she had proved her worth.

  ‘I know I’m going to Italy to work,’ Poppy added pointedly now. ‘After all, I’m not the one who...’

  She paused, alarmed by the look in James’s eyes which told her that she had gone too far.

  ‘Go on,’ he invited silkily, his voice suddenly softly dangerous.

  ‘Well, I’m not the one with the family in Italy,’ Poppy blustered, shrugging.

  ‘Are you trying to say that I’m using the company to finance my own personal plans?’ James suggested ominously.

  ‘Well, you aren’t exactly involved in the sales side of things, are you?’ Poppy demanded aggressively. ‘The sales team—’

  ‘As managing director and chairman of the company, I am involved in everything,’ James told her softly. ‘Everything... Not so much as a paperclip disappears without my knowing about it, Poppy, you may be sure of that,’ he told her with a wintry look that made her colour up hotly as she remembered the occasions on which she had ‘borrowed’ company stationery.

  ‘And as for the sales team... On this occasion,’ he told her smoothly, ‘they won’t be coming with us.’

  ‘With us?’ Poppy stared at him in disbelief. ‘You mean it will be just you and me...?’ She couldn’t keep the horror out of her voice.

  ‘Just you and me,’ James confirmed.

  ‘I’m not... I won’t...’ Poppy began, and then stopped as James suddenly smiled at her gently...too gently, her instincts warned her as she wondered edgily if refusing to accompany him would be grounds for dismissal from her job. James was clever like that... sneaky enough too, and she knew how much he had always resented the fact that she was working for the company.

  ‘You’re the boss,’ she told him, attempting a careless shrug but suspecting from the narrow-eyed, glinting look of mockery that he was giving her that she hadn’t really deceived him.

  Four days in Italy with James... She tried not to shudder. She couldn’t think of anything that came closer to her idea of purgatory.

  She winced as a cloud of acrid smoke from her bonfire was suddenly blown into her face, making her cough and choke. As she stumbled clear of it, she saw that James was studying the photograph that he had snatched from the wind, and she could feel the hot tide of embarrassed colour starting to burn her face.

  It was not the fact that the photograph was of Chris that bothered her; it was an old one taken when she had been fourteen and he seventeen. She had taken it herself, snatching it with her new camera at a family party, and had later, with great daring, had the original print blown up.

  No, what was causing her whole body to burn with humiliated embarrassment was the fact that virtually the whole of Chris’s face, but most especially his mouth, was covered in tell-tale lipstick kisses where she had deliberately—oh, shaming to remember now—pressed her open lips with passionate intensity against Chris’s.

  A wave of toe-curling, excruciatingly horrible embarrassment, more intense than any self-consciousness she had ever suffered before, poured through her with scalding heat. Her body tensed in readiness for James’s taunting laughter as she resisted the desire to compound her humiliation by reaching out to try to snatch the betraying photograph from him.
r />   But, instead of laughing, James was simply looking from the photograph to her... to her mouth, she recognised with searing misery...and then back again...

  Unable to bear the nerve-stretching silence of James’s clinical study of her any longer, Poppy gave in to temptation and did what she had promised herself she was now mature enough not to do—she darted quickly towards him, reaching out her hand to snatch the photograph from him. But as she reached him he realised what she was trying to do and grabbed hold of her with one hand, whilst retaining possession of her photograph with the other.

  ‘Let me go,’ Poppy demanded, all sense of restraint and dignity overwhelmed by the humiliation-fuelled anger that gripped her, her hands pummelling furiously against James’s chest as she writhed impotently against him, struggling to break free.

  She had no chance of doing so, of course; her brain knew that even if her emotions and her body refused to accept it.

  James was a good six feet two to her five-four and at least five stone heavier; add to that the fact that she knew perfectly well that he swam and ran regularly as well as practising the art of aikido and it was no wonder that her furious attempts to break free were doing more to exhaust her strength than his.

  Even so, she still persisted, demanding through gritted teeth, ‘Let go of me... James... and give me back my photograph...’

  ‘Your photograph.’ Now he did laugh—a harsh, contemptuous sound that made her long to clap her hands over her ears to protect herself. ‘I suppose this is the nearest you’ve ever come to kissing a man with passion, isn’t it, Poppy? After all—’

  ‘No, of course it isn’t,’ Poppy denied untruthfully. She was damned if she was going to let James make her feel even worse than she already did.

  ‘No?’ James queried silkily, his eyes narrowing cynically as Poppy inadvertently looked up at him. ‘So who was he, then? It certainly wasn’t Chris, and yet, according to you, he’s the only man you’ve ever loved... the only man you could ever love...’

  Poppy’s face flushed scarlet with fury as she realised that James was quoting back at her the impassioned words that her sixteen-year-old self had declared to him when he had asked her tauntingly if she had grown out of her crush on his younger brother yet.

  ‘No one you know,’ Poppy shot back at him furiously. ‘In fact...’

  ‘No one anyone knows, including you, is more like it,’ James contradicted her drily.

  ‘That’s not true,’ Poppy lied hotly.

  ‘No?’ James taunted her. ‘Well, let’s just put it to the test, shall we...?’

  Before she knew what he intended to do, somehow he had shifted his weight and hers, so that she was momentarily off balance and forced instinctively to reach out and cling to him for support, whilst he took advantage of her vulnerability to tighten his hold on her, using not just one but both arms this time to imprison her against him, holding her so close that she could actually feel the hard, firmly muscled length of his thigh against her and the equally firm thud of his heart. ‘James,’ she began, automatically tilting her head back so that she could look at him and show him how angry she was, but her complaint died away in her throat as she saw the way he was looking at her... at her mouth... and her own heart began to trip frantically in a series of far too fast, shallow little beats that made her breathing quicken and her muscles tense, her lips parting as she tried to draw extra air into her suddenly oxygen-deprived lungs.

  A small sound—a protest, a soft moan; even she wasn’t quite sure which—gasped its way past the locked muscles of her throat and was lost, stifled by the slow, deliberate pressure of James’s mouth against hers.

  This couldn’t be happening, Poppy thought, her mind reeling with shock and disbelief. James’s mouth against hers, covering it, caressing it, possessing it...

  Frantically, she tried to turn her head out of the way, panic flooding her body with a trembling agitation and a desperate need to break free, but James forestalled her, one hand still binding her firmly against his body whilst the other grasped a handful of her hair, twisting it through his fingers, and then cupped her jaw, imprisoning her beneath the growing pressure of a kiss that was making her feel increasingly vulnerable.

  She could feel the strength in his fingers where they rested against her skin, their touch cool in marked contrast to the burning heat of her own flushed face, just as the steady thud of his heartbeat underlined the wretchedly fast race of her own.

  She knew, shamingly, that she was trembling from head to foot, and she knew, even more humiliatingly, that James must know it too. She could feel his fingers sliding along her throat, stroking her skin gently... gently ... James.

  Tears blurred her vision, burning behind the eyelids she refused to close as she glared her enmity into the cool, clear aqua of James’s unreadable eyes.

  All these years of dreaming of Chris kissing her, Chris holding her, Chris’s mouth caressing and possessing hers, and now it had to be James who was turning what should have been one of the most treasured moments of her life into a mocking parody of everything that her first kiss of real passion should have been.

  Was it really for this that she had refused dates and explorative teenage snogging sessions? Was it for this that she had held aloof from the sexual freedom that university could have afforded her? Was it for this that she had spent her nights and some of her days dreaming and yearning...? So that James could mock her and destroy her cherished fantasies with a cruel kiss that could only be designed to taunt her—a kiss that...?

  Poppy stiffened as her brain belatedly recognised something that her traitorous senses had shamingly already seemed to acknowledge—namely that if it hadn’t actually been James, her loathed elder cousin, whose mouth was caressing hers she might almost...could almost....

  Poppy gave an outraged gasp as she realised just why her lips, her mouth, seemed to be softening, yielding, almost enjoying the sensual contact with James’s, her eyes snapping fire when she registered the sudden, heart-stopping gleam darkening James’s as he finally lifted his mouth from hers.

  Her legs felt oddly weak as she stepped back from him, Poppy recognised dizzily—and not just her legs either.

  ‘Well, whoever he was, if indeed he did actually exist,’ she heard James saying derisively to her, ‘he wasn’t a very good teacher. Either that or...’

  ‘Or what?’ Poppy recovered just enough to challenge him. ‘I wasn’t a very good pupil...?’

  ‘Oh, I wouldn’t say that.’

  Poppy stared at him, caught between disbelief and suspicion, waiting for the taunting barb that she was sure was to come, but instead he simply stood there whilst her gaze dropped helplessly from his eyes to his mouth—in fact it might have been jerked there on strings which he controlled, so little ability did she have to stop its betraying movement.

  ‘Yes?’ she heard James murmur invitingly.

  ‘Give me back my photograph,’ Poppy demanded huskily, determinedly forcing her gaze back to his eyes, hoping that he would put the hot colour burning her face down to the heat of her bonfire.

  But, instead of acceding to her demand, to her disbelief James tore the photograph—her precious photograph—into small pieces and then casually walked over to the now dying bonfire and dropped them into its burning embers.

  ‘You had no right to do that,’ Poppy protested chokily. ‘That...’

  ‘What else did you intend to do with it?’ James asked her. ‘It’s over, Poppy. Chris is married now. Accept it; he never loved you and he never will,’ he told her cruelly.

  ‘How dare you—’ she began.

  But he stopped her, continuing bluntly, ‘And it’s time you grew up and accepted the truth instead of living in an adolescent fantasy world.’

  He had started to walk away from her, to Poppy’s relief. Seeing him tear up her precious photograph and consign it to the bonfire had brought back all her earlier misery and despair and she knew that. tears weren’t very far away. She had humiliated herself enough w
ithout James seeing her cry.

  He paused and she tensed as he turned round to look at her.

  ‘Don’t forget,’ he warned her, ‘I’ll pick you up at six-thirty on Wednesday morning. Don’t be late...’

  CHAPTER TWO

  POPPY woke up abruptly and stared anxiously at the illuminated face of her alarm clock, her heart thumping in dread at the thought that she might have overslept.

  Five o‘clock. She let her breath out in a sigh of relief and switched off the alarm, which she had set for five-thirty, as she swung her legs out of her bed. She hadn’t slept well at all—and not just last night, but every night since the wedding, and, if she was honest with herself, for a long time before that too.

  Yesterday she had come home to find her mother and her aunt poring over the proofs of the wedding photographs.

  It had hurt her to see the way both of them had looked slightly uncomfortable at her arrival. It had been exactly the same at the wedding, she acknowledged: people treating her with the kind of well-intentioned caution and sympathy which was meant to be compassionate but which had the effect of somehow making her feel just the opposite. An out-sider... a spectre at the feast.

  The only person who had treated her anything like normally had been the other bridesmaid—and Sally’s oldest and closest friend—who Poppy had quickly learned held a very cynical and wryly funny view of relationships and commitment.

  ‘Love may not last, but, believe me, enmity does,’ Star had told Poppy grimly during one of their bridesmaid-dress fittings, ‘and I’ve got the parents to prove it. I swear that mine pour more energy and emotion into loathing one another and fighting with one another than they ever did into their marriage, their supposed love.’

  She had seen the way her aunt had surreptitiously slid out of sight the photographs of the bride and groom in happy, loving close-ups as they kissed for the camera, and as she’d walked out of the kitchen she had heard her aunt telling her mother how much she liked Sally, and how very, very much in love with her Chris was.