Best Man To Wed? Read online

  Pride and her awareness of how unsympathetic and antagonistic towards her he was had prevented her from trying to defend herself by telling him that loving Chris had become a burden she desperately wanted to remove from her life.

  Had they had a different relationship, had they been closer, had she felt able to trust him, to turn to him for help, she might have been able to admit to him how much she longed to have someone to confide in, someone to whom she could talk about her feelings and her guilt at her own inability to leave behind a love she knew could only cause her pain. If things had been different ... if he had been different... if he had still been the same James he had been when she had been a child... But he wasn’t, and somewhere, somehow, the cousinly love that he had once felt for her had gone.

  Her determination not to give him any opportunity to criticise or condemn her whilst they were alone by keeping silent and aloof from him had disintegrated, though, as the road had started to wind through the ancient chain of mountains, taking them through small villages and dusty towns in whose Renaissance squares Poppy could very easily visualise the richly liveried rnen-at-arms who, along with the princes who had once commanded them, had fought over the prizes of the fertile plains below them.

  Today, the towns were tranquil, only their architecture a reminder of the past turbulence and turmoil, the scenery around them so spectacular that it bewitched Poppy into forgetting her vow of silence to exclaim over its beauty.

  James, of course, was bound to be less impressed, Poppy recognised; he had relatives in Tuscany and Rome and was no stranger to the beauty of Italy’s countryside, nor her architecture. And Poppy told herself that she ought not to feel rather like a child told off for a crime it hadn’t committed when James turned his head to look at her in response to her impulsive comment and said tautly, ‘But no doubt a view which you would enjoy far more if it was my brother you were seeing it with. Too bad that Chris doesn’t share your enthusiasm. He’s a modern city man, Poppy—something else he and Sally share, something else you and he don’t,’ he told her unkindly.

  Poppy said nothing, turning her head away so that James couldn’t see the quick, betraying sheen of tears filming her eyes.

  She knew, of course, that Chris did not share her love of history... of the past... of the awesomeness of nature, as James had just said, and as Chris himself was the first to cheerfully admit.

  Nor did she intend to defend herself by contradicting James’s comment or by telling him that he was wrong and that, oddly enough, she had not actually been wishing that Chris were in the car beside her.

  She hadn’t...but now she did, and with such heart-aching in tensity that she was almost swamped by her misery.

  Thank heavens it couldn’t be much further to the hotel, she thought. She closed her eyes and leaned back in her seat, keeping her face turned towards the window and averted from James.

  Four days, four times twenty-four hours... She gave an involuntary shudder. Please God, let them pass quickly, she prayed.

  ‘Poppy.’

  Sleepily Poppy opened her eyes and eased her aching body into a more comfortable position when she realised that the car had come to a halt and that they had reached their destination.

  The hotel, as she had read in the brochure, had originally been a medieval fortress built by an Italian prince, set high up in the mountains to guard his territories, but leading about it had not prepared her for the raw magnificence of a structure which seemed to be carved out of the rock itself, rising up steeply from the walled courtyard in which they were now parked.

  Even though she knew that the original fortress was now just a shell which had been used to house a far more modern and luxurious centre, Poppy felt awestruck and faintly intimidated by the sheer, stark rise of the stone edifice in front of her, which was softened only slightly by its mantle of ivy and roses.

  The palazzo had been used as a private home for several centuries, abandoned only when it had been commandeered by the German army during the Second World War, and Poppy knew that in addition to the luxurious state rooms which had now been adapted to form the hotel’s reception rooms the original Italian water garden had been restored to working order and restocked with the varieties of roses and other plants with which it would originally have been adorned.

  And yet, despite knowing just how luxurious the spa promised to be and being hit by the heat of the sunshine when she stepped out of the car, unable to remove her gaze from the sheer sweep of rock from which the outer wall of the fortress had been cut, Poppy couldn’t quite repress a small shiver.

  ‘Not the kind of place you’d want to be incarcerated in as a prisoner,’ she heard James saying behind her, his comment so exactly mirroring her own thoughts that she turned towards him in surprise as he added drily, ‘I wouldn’t give much for anyone’s chance of escaping from here.’

  ‘No.’ Poppy agreed bleakly. A prisoner would probably have about as much chance of escaping from such a place as she had of escaping James over the next few days.

  The car park was starting to fill up rapidly with other arrivals. Picking up their cases, James touched Poppy briefly on the shoulder.

  ‘Reception seems to be that way. Let’s go and get booked in before it develops into too much of a scrum.’

  Once inside the hotel, the austere, almost forbidding impression of the fortress as a prison was totally banished by the breathtaking luxury of the reception area, a huge, vaulted room illuminated by crystal chandeliers, the walls decorated with glowingly rich frescos. Only a room this vast could take such an abundance of gold, crimson and blue, Poppy acknowledged dizzily as she followed James towards the central reception desk.

  Immaculately groomed girls, in suits as understated as their surroundings were ornate, busied themselves dealing with the rapid influx of guests, and Poppy was cynically amused to see that James, who was in fact behind three other men trying to claim one girl’s attention, received the full wattage of her very alluring smile whilst they were totally ignored.

  Poppy had always known that other women found her elder cousin attractive. She could even remember how, in the days before she had fallen in love with Chris, she had actually felt angry and jealous herself if he paid her schoolfriends more attention than he did her, but those days were gone now, and even though she registered the assessing look the receptionist gave her as James leant over the desk to speak to the girl and handed her their passports she was not affected by it. The receptionist was welcome to him. She gave a small shudder. She could think of nothing more loathsome... noone more...

  She tensed as she suddenly realised what the receptionist was saying to James, and hurried towards him, demanding angrily, ‘What does she mean, our room?’

  The girl was already reaching behind her to hand James a pass-key. A key, Poppy noticed in disbelief.

  ‘James...’ she urged, but James had already anticipated her and was turning back to the receptionist, telling her in swift, fluent Italian that there appeared to have been a mistake, and that they required two separate rooms.

  ‘No,’ the girl denied, shaking her head, picking up their passports and a list she had in front of her. She read out carefully, ‘Mr and Mrs Carlton,’ and then said, first to Poppy, ‘You are Mrs Carlton,’ and then to James, ‘and you Mr Carlton.’

  ‘I am Poppy Carlton,’ Poppy confirmed, ‘but I am not his wife. We are not married... I am not... his wife,’ she emphasised.

  When the receptionist continued to gaze blankly at her, she turned angrily to James, appealing, ‘You tell her, James. Explain... make her understand.’

  How could such a mistake have been made? Poppy fumed as she stood back whilst James quickly explained to the receptionist the misunderstanding which seemed to have occurred and asked her to change their booking from one double room to two singles.

  Chris’s secretary had made the original bookings. She was comfortably middle-aged and extremely efficient and Poppy couldn’t believe that she could have made such a mis
take. The receptionist had summoned the duty manager at James’s request and James was now explaining the situation to him and reiterating the fact that they required two separate rooms.

  The duty manager shrugged and shook his head. ‘That, I am afraid, is not possible,’ he told James. ‘The hotel is fully booked for the conference, every room already taken...’

  ‘But they must have somewhere... some room,’ Poppy gasped as she heard what he was saying.

  ‘None; there is nowhere,’ the duty manager repeated firmly.

  ‘Then we’ll just have to find somewhere else to stay,’ Poppy burst out.

  Her face flushed beneath the withering look that James gave her as he asked her sardonically, ‘Where exactly did you have in mind? The nearest town is forty miles away.’

  ‘Then...then I’ll just have to...to sleep in the car,’ Poppy asserted wildly. ’I—’

  ‘For four days?’ James gave her a derisive look. ‘Don’t be so ridiculous...’

  ‘James, you can’t let them do this,’ Poppy protested as the duty manager turned away from them to deal with the harassed-looking courier in charge of a party of Japanese businessmen who, from what Poppy could hear of their agitated conversation, had lost not just some luggage en route but one member of their party as well. ‘Do something.’

  ‘Such as?’ James asked, gesturing to the now packed reception area and the press of people demanding attention from the receptionists.

  ‘You’ve attended conferences before; you know what they’re like,’ he pointed out. ‘The rule is if it can go wrong it will...’

  ‘Maybe, but it’s never gone wrong before,’ Poppy seethed. ‘How can they make a mistake like that...? There must be something you can do... Offer to pay them extra... to...’

  ‘Poppy,’ James told her, speaking slowly and patiently as though she were a child too young to grasp what he was saying. ‘There are no empty rooms. Believe me. I just heard one of the receptionists telling another that she’s already been forced to give up her staff room and share with someone else on another shift because of overbooking. Believe me, it’s either this room or nothing.’

  It was on the tip of Poppy’s tongue to tell him that if that was the case then there was no way she was staying. But then she-remembered how much James would relish her giving him an opportunity to prove how unprofessional she really was and she forced the impulsive words back.

  James, taking her acceptance for granted, was already signing the register and taking possession of their pass-cards.

  ‘We might as well find our own way,’ he told Poppy. ‘God knows how long we’d have to wait for a porter.’

  Like her, James was only carrying a briefcase and an overnight bag. She just hoped that the hotel’s laundry facilities were better organised and more reliable than its booking system, she reflected angrily as she followed James towards the nearest bank of lifts.

  The modern part of the complex had been built around an atrium and as the lift took them upwards they could look down past the open balconies to the greenery and splashing fountains below them.

  Although the complex had been given the title of spa it did not actually possess any natural hot springs or spa waters of its own, the term, Poppy suspected, being used in a slightly looser sense to embrace the fact that it offered a wide range of self-indulgent treatments and dietary regimes and holistic alternative therapies.

  Their room was on one of the upper floors, the silence as they stepped out of the lift onto the polished marble floor broken only by the hum of the air-conditioning.

  ‘This way,’ James instructed her. Their room was halfway down the corridor and Poppy waited whilst James opened the door, and then froze with shock as she followed him inside and stared in white-faced disbelief at the room’s one, single, solitary double bed.

  A double bed ...

  She looked at James, then back at the bed, announced flatly, ‘I don’t believe this...’

  ‘Correct me if I’m wrong, Poppy,’ James told her smoothly, ‘but, as the company’s official translator, wouldn’t it normally fall within your field of operations to provide correct foreign translations for those departments which might need them?’

  ‘You know it would,’ Poppy agreed irritably. ‘But—’

  ‘In that case you would then be the person responsible for providing a correctly worded translation for this booking.’

  ‘If I had been asked for one, yes,’ Poppy agreed. ‘But—’

  ‘And I think I am also right in saying,’ James continued grimly, ‘that when this particular booking was made you believed that you would be attending this conference with Chris...’

  Poppy stared at him in shocked disbelief as she realised what he was implying.

  ‘Yes, I did think I would be coming here with Chris,’ she agreed furiously, ‘but that does not mean that I deliberately altered the booking so that Chris and I would be forced to share a room. I had nothing to do with this booking. It was made by fax whilst I was away on holiday, and if you think for one moment that, no matter what...my feelings for...for anyone, I would ever stoop to doing something like this...that I would ever try to force...or manipulate a man... any man, but most especially one I... I cared about to—’

  She couldn’t go on, her words abruptly suspended by the force of her emotions.

  ‘I can’t stay here in this room with you,’ she protested huskily when she could trust herself to speak again. ‘I can’t... and I—’

  ‘Stop being so hysterical,’ James told her coldly. ‘You don’t have any choice. Neither of us does. This conference is very important. I’ve spent months making contact with various international companies who’ll be attending it... potential customers, and I don’t have time to waste dealing with a hysterical, manipulative idiot who—’

  ‘I did not arrange this. It has nothing to do with me,’ Poppy protested furiously. ‘The last thing I want...I would ever want...is to share a be—a room with you...’

  ‘I believe you,’ James told her, adding cuttingly, ‘But then you didn’t think you would be here with me, did you? And, I promise you, Poppy, you’re not exactly my ideal choice of bed-mate either. What the hell was that conniving little mind of yours planning? Some kind of emotional blackmail...? A threat to tell Sally that Chris had been sleeping with you if he didn’t come across and—’

  ‘No!’

  Her denial had been as explosive as a blow, Poppy acknowledged as she stared at James in sick disbelief. Did he really think she could... would stoop to something so underhanded as that?

  Her mouth twisted bitterly as she made herself look straight into the wintry contempt of his eyes and told him quietly, ‘I love Chris, James, and in my book that means putting him first... not wanting to hurt him... Despite what you seem to think, I don’t need you to tell me that Chris doesn’t feel the same way about me. Do you really think I’d want him on those kinds of terms...? That I’d want any man who...?’ She swallowed, unable to go on.

  ‘What I think is that you’ve become so obsessed with your so-called love for Chris that you don’t know what’s reasonable or rational any more...’

  ‘You’re wrong,’ Poppy told him, but she could see from the look on his face that he didn’t believe her.

  CHAPTER THREE

  POPPY exhaled her pent-up breath in an angry hiss of despair, turning away from the panoramic view through the bedroom window in front of her and quickly averting her eyes from the bed.

  James was downstairs in the conference hall where he had gone to check that their display stand, which had been shipped out via their Italian agents, had been assembled correctly, and she knew that sooner or later she was going to have to join him. After all, that was why she was here.

  Officially, the conference didn’t open until the morning but she knew from previous experience, that the conference hall would be teeming with people getting ready for the opening.

  How had it happened? she wondered miserably. How could such a mistake have
occurred and, even worse, how could... how dared James imply that she had had anything to do with it, that she had deliberately manipulated things so that she and Chris would be sharing a room?

  She had already contemplated refusing to share the bed with him, but the room’s furnishings, although elegant, were not particularly comfortable and the marble floor would certainly not make a comfortable bed.

  The saving grace was that at least the bed was a good size and there should be no danger of the two of them actually having to sleep close together. If she lay on her side and faced away from him, she might even be able to pretend that James wasn’t there at all.

  And at least there was one thing she most definitely did not have to worry about. There was no way that James would try to take advantage of the situation or of her. She almost laughed aloud at the very thought.

  Years ago, when they had all been children, there had been occasions when they had all holidayed together, and whilst they had never actually shared a bedroom there had been the kind of family intimacy between the cousins which had been natural under such circumstances.

  That had been when they were children, though, Poppy acknowledged, and there was-a vast difference between a five-year-old and a thirteen-year-old running, dressing gown-clad, between their separate bedrooms and two adults of twenty-two and thirty sharing the intimacy of a bed as well as a bathroom.

  The flimsy cotton robe that she had brought with her was hardly as protective or concealing as the thick, fleecy dressing gown that she had worn as a child and... Poppy froze and closed her eyes, cursing herself under her breath as she remembered that the one thing she had decided there was no need for her to bring with her was any kind of nightdress.

  Remembering the golden rule of easy travelling—only take what you can carry on and off the plane in your hand luggage—she had kept her packing to the bare minimum... ‘Bare’ being the operative word, she reflected grimly now.