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  James, disturbed by the sensual movement of her body against his, woke up, cursing silently as he reached out to push her away and put some distance between them.

  In her sleep Poppy protested about the removal of the warmth which had been giving her so much pleasure, the body which had felt so good against her own, the man who had made her feel so protected and loved, and she protested both verbally and physically, muttering a husky plea for him to come back and, at the same time, resisting his attempts to put some distance between them, wriggling her body back against his and curling her fingers possessively around his wrist.

  ‘Poppy...’ James warned her savagely under his breath.

  He had always prided himself on his self-control. The need to conceal his own feelings had been something he had learned young—he had had no other option when his father had died or when... But there came a point when no amount of self-control was enough, when no man...

  He took hold of Poppy’s shoulder, shaking her, but her eyes remained tightly closed, her body locked in sleep. In the moonlit room he could see the rich tumble of her hair, silk against silk where it lay against her skin; he reached out and touched it, smoothing the tangled tendrils.

  Poppy smiled sensuously as she breathed in the familiar scent of his skin. She moved her head and touched her lips to his shoulder, sighing blissfully as she absorbed the taste of him, opening her mouth so that she could touch him with her tongue.

  James went completely still and then slowly lifted his hand from her hair, but it was too late—had been too late, he suspected, since he had walked into the bedroom and seen her discarded robe lying on the floor and known that she was sleeping naked.

  ‘Poppy.’

  As he said her name he gathered up his strength to push her away and instead discovered that he was actually gathering her closer—so close that they were lying body to body—and that the hands which should have been holding her away from him were actually moving urgently over her skin, following the narrow contours of her back, the feminine curve of her waist and hips, the smooth roundness of her buttocks.

  Her lips were still touching his skin, and against his body he could feel the excited thud of her heartbeat.

  If she woke up now she would feel the equally aroused pounding of his, and the even more betraying arousal of another part of him. If he had any sense, any thought of self-preservation he would...

  James bent his head and slid one hand into Poppy’s hair, tilting her face up to meet his, covering her mouth with his.

  When Poppy woke up she discovered that she was being kissed in the most sensual, demanding and exciting way that she had ever known, her whole body responding to the hungry male pressure of the mouth caressing hers, the male hand that held her locked against him so that their bodies fitted together as exactly and perfectly as two separate pieces of one complete whole.

  As she breathed in dizzily, she felt her breasts swell and press against his chest, his body moving to accommodate the movement of hers, the sensation of his skin dragging slightly against hers so shockingly erotic that she trembled and moved more urgently against him, wanting to repeat it, wanting to feel him against her—

  She wanted to feel all of him against her, she recognised longingly as she moved her body pleadingly against his, trying to seek even closer contact with him, needing to feel the sensual roughness of his body hair against her, wanting more, much, much more than the tormenting male heat and hardness of his aroused body, which, for some reason, he was allowing merely to rest lightly against hers when she wanted...

  Poppy tried to show him exactly what it was she wanted by opening her mouth under his and kissing him passionately at the same time as she moved her hips against him, pressed her breasts against him, arched her spine and made soft keening sounds of need as she opened her legs and rubbed her body hungrily against his.

  It was unfair of him to withhold himself from her like this when he knew how much she wanted him, how much she needed him, how much she loved him.

  Poppy’s soft moans of protest turned to sharper sounds of delight when he suddenly responded to the urgent little movements of her body, thrusting his thigh between hers and making her shiver from head to foot with pleasure at the sensation of his hair-roughened flesh moving against the silky softness of hers.

  It must feel good to him as well, she realized, because now he kissed her much more passionately, thrilling her with the husky growl of her name as he held her face in his hands and circled her lips with his tongue-tip, using the weight of his body and the pressure of his hands to make her lie completely still while he teased her with the movement of his tongue and an even more erotic movement of his hips to the point where she couldn’t be still any more and her body physically and very visibly shuddered in uncontrollable response to what he was doing to her.

  For how many years had she longed for him like this, dreamed of him holding her like this, wanting her like this, loving her like this ...? All the feelings and needs she had suppressed surged up inside her in a flood-tide that swept her with it, drowning out everything but her need and her desire.

  ‘No,’ she protested in a husky whisper when his mouth left hers and he lifted her wrist to kiss the delicate, blue-veined skin. ‘Not there, not there,’ she urged; her body burned, ached, hurt almost with her need for him.

  The memory of the couple that she had discovered in the Jacuzzi made her shudder, the blood burning up under her skin as he lifted his mouth from her wrist and asked her thickly, ‘Not there... Where, then, Poppy? Where...?’

  His voice sounded different, deeper, rougher, much more raw and masculine somehow, and she shivered again as she recognised why. It was the voice of a man who was aroused... who wanted her...

  ‘Here,’ she told him, placing his hand against her breast, holding her breath almost as she looked first into his eyes and then at his mouth. His mouth...

  ‘Here,’ she heard him repeat softly, and the feel of his mouth against her, slowly caressing her nipple, was almost more than she could bear. Her body, her senses weren’t equipped to handle so much pleasure, and yet not to have it would have been a loss she could not bear to contemplate.

  ‘And this one?’ she heard him asking her hoarsely as he slowly released one breast to turn to the other, lingering over a delicate exploration of it whilst he waited for her response.

  Did he really need to ask? Poppy wondered feverishly, but she still said the words, whispering them jerkily as she told him, ‘Yes... oh, yes... yes...’

  This time the sensation of his suckling on her nipple actually made her cry out in exquisite, sharp pleasure—a high, bitter-sweet sound that made him take hold of her so tightly that she could feel the bite of his fingers against the flesh of her waist, his mouth moving on her so demandingly that she wasn’t sure if she could endure such intense pleasure.

  She could feel the sexual tension that he was creating within her coiling and stretching like a tautly drawn cord from her breasts right the way down her body so that her womb ached as hotly as her breasts and her need for him drenched her skin in a moist heat.

  And somehow, as though he knew how and where that cord ran and why, he started to trace its pathway along her body until the sensation of his mouth moving over her made her tremble wildly and cry out to him that she couldn’t bear any more, that the intensity of what she was feeling was too much for her to endure, that she felt as though the terrible pressure of her desire for him was somehow going to tear her apart, destroy her self-control, make her...

  Her eyes wet with tears, she tried to tell him how not even all the years of wanting this, of aching for him had prepared her for the intensity of what she was experiencing...how she had never known that just looking at his body, so strongly and powerfully male, would fill her with a need that she couldn’t control and that touching him and being touched by him would quicken her pulse and her heartbeat until her whole body shook with the violence of their excitement.

  ‘I never knew i
t would be like this,’ she told him helplessly. ‘All these years and I never knew it could be... it would be...’

  She felt his own hand tremble as he cupped her face and kissed her gently, his mouth absorbing the dampness of her emotional tears.

  ‘No,’ he told her thickly, ‘but I did.’ And then he was kissing her as Poppy had never known that it was possible to be kissed, so that the pressure of his mouth and the thrust of his tongue was an act of possession as intimate and shockingly intense as the final act of possession itself.

  His hands swept down over her body, his thigh nudging hers apart, his body so fully aroused that her hot flood of eager response was shot through with small, bright sparks of apprehensive female awe and female pride at knowing that she was the one who had aroused him so intensely, that she was the one he wanted, the one...

  The touch of his hand against her sex as he stroked her swamped her with hot forked-lightning darts of pleasure, making her move her body closer to him, making her...

  She reached down for his hand, her voice unsteady with emotion as she told him, ‘No... not that... it’s you I want... you.’ And then, as her control broke when he moved over her then into her, she cried out, ‘Oh, yes... yes. Oh, Chris, I want you so much—’

  ‘Chris!’

  The name was snarled at her, hurled back at her, the exquisite, unbearable, unimaginable pleasure of the slow penetration of her body by his ceasing in mid-thrust as she felt him grasp her shoulders and then lift one hand to her face as he demanded savagely, ‘Open your eyes, Poppy. I am not Chris.’

  No, of course he wasn’t Chris. How could she ever have imagined that he was, deceived herself that he was, believed that he was? Poppy agonised in shocked self-awareness as she looked up into the icy, furious glare of James’s eyes.

  Her teeth started to chatter, her brain seized by a nausea so intense that it paralysed any logical thought.

  Like someone in a trance she stared up at James. James, who had touched her more intimately than any other man had ever done. James, who had made her body feel... want. James, who...

  He had started to withdraw from her but her body had no intention of giving up on the pleasure that his had promised it; her body had no conscience, no awareness, no knowledge, after all, of Chris as its lover; her body only knew the pleasure that James had given it and as it tightened and clung to his and she heard herself uttering a surprisingly fierce and strong, ‘No,’ Poppy’s eyes registered her own confusion and disbelief.

  It was Chris she loved, Chris she wanted, she protested inwardly to her wayward flesh, but it didn’t want to listen to her; it knew no Chris, it only knew that it wanted...must have what it had been promised, and as James started again to withdraw from her Poppy found that somehow, without knowing how, she was actually moving against him, reaching out to hold onto him, imploring him with words which she would once have denied that she could ever bring herself to say to any man, no matter how much she loved him—much less this man.

  ‘No, please don’t... I want you... I want you... Oh, please... I want you so much...’

  The words became a husky, rhythmic accompaniment to the increasingly urgent movements of her body as it tried frantically to draw him deeper within itself, tried and, unbelievably, it seemed, succeeded, Poppy realised in dizzy, trembling relief. She was too caught up in the intensity of her body’s drive towards its sensual goal to be able to concentrate on anything other than the pleasure of that deepening sense of fullness within her; she was so caught up in it that nothing, nothing could be allowed to bring an end to that sensation of heady, addictive pleasure.

  She wanted him, needed him, ached for him too much to care about what he was actually saying as his body began to move within hers again.

  ‘No, you don’t, Poppy; you want my brother. But I’m the one you’ve got. I’m the one who’s touched you, caressed you, aroused you, shown you... taught you what it is to feel real physical desire, instead of dreaming some idealised dream; and I’m the one—’

  When he heard her cry out he stopped speaking abruptly, his hand tangling in her hair so that he could look into her eyes before she could defend herself from him and close them.

  The pain, so sharp that it had been responsible for her high-pitched, shocked cry, had gone as quickly as it had come, but the ache which had preceded it had not, nor the need and the slight trembling of her body. And the quickened pace of her breathing had nothing to do with any fear or desire for him to stop.

  He was doing it deliberately, Poppy guessed. Having deliberately aroused her, he now wanted to humiliate and punish her by stopping and...

  Angry tears filled her eyes as she glared back at him. ‘You can’t do this to me,’ she protested frantically. ‘You can’t leave me now, without... You can’t...’

  She didn’t see his expression before, without warning, his lids dropped, his lashes veiling it from her.

  He wasn’t looking at her face any more, Poppy recognised, but he was looking at her body, at her breasts in point of fact, and as he looked he lifted one hand and cupped one of them, stroking the taut nipple whilst he asked her softly, ‘I can’t what, Poppy?’

  She couldn’t answer him; the way he was touching her had galvanised her whole body into a shuddering shock of hot, fluid reaction.

  ‘James... James...’ she heard herself pleading achingly.

  ‘Say it... Say it... Say my name,’ she heard him telling her softly. ‘Tell me again how much you want me, Poppy; tell me again what it is you want, Poppy...who it is you want. My God, if you knew...’

  Poppy knew that she should stop him, tell him that she hated him, loathed him, detested him, but she also knew that she wouldn’t, couldn’t; she was blind, deaf and dumb to everything but the urgency he had generated within her. If he stopped making love to her now, without... before... she thought that she would die.

  ‘I want you... I want you...’ she whispered obediently, her breath catching in her throat as she responded to the deep rhythm that he was slowly imposing on her—felt it, clung to it, ached for it and finally, as she heard herself cry out his name, abandoned herself totally to it, letting him drive her beyond the safe, known edge of her universe and out into the void that lay beyond it, carried along by wave after wave of pleasure and the hot pulsing of his own lelease within her.

  Her body was still trembling with the aftershock of it many minutes later when she fell into an exhausted sleep.

  James watched her for several seconds, his mouth bitter, before turning his back on her and putting as much distance between them as he could.

  CHAPTER FOUR

  POPPY woke up reluctantly, an ingrained sense of self-preservation warning her that it was safer to cling to the protective blanket of sleep, that she wouldn’t like what she was going to have to face when she opened her eyes and remembered what had happened.

  She didn’t. The shock of the appalling flashbacks that poured over her in an icy deluge of self-knowledge made her sit bolt upright in bed and exclaim out aloud, ‘No! I couldn’t have... I didn’t...’

  But she knew, all too well, that she had. The space in the bed next to her where James must have slept was now, thankfully, empty.

  Where was he? He must have gone down to the conference hall, she decided.

  ‘And you’d just better get yourself up and dressed and ready to face him when he comes back,’ she warned herself grimly.

  Face him! The mere thought of doing so was enough to make her stomach churn wildly and her body burn with shamed heat.

  Quickly she scrambled out of bed; her body ached slightly in a way that was new and unfamiliar, the self-conscious heat scorching her skin becoming searingly intense as all too vivid and detailed unwanted memories of the way she had behaved, the things she had said the previous night returned.

  As she stood in the shower she could see where James’s passion was already beginning to bruise her skin—the passion she had urged him, begged him to show her.

  ‘No. I
didn’t... I couldn’t have...’ Poppy moaned, but she knew that she had, and, worse, she knew that he must know it too.

  ‘I thought he was Chris,’ she whispered helplessly in defence of her body’s physical treachery, its undeniable and inescapable, illogical and unbearable sexual response to him.

  By the time she was showered and dressed it was almost eight o’clock. She ought to go downstairs and have some breakfast, Poppy acknowledged, but the last thing she felt like doing was eating. No, not the last thing, she admitted mercilessly; that was having to see James, having to look at him and know what had happened between them, having to...

  She tensed as she heard the bedroom door open and saw James walk in.

  Despite her determination not to do so, she could feel herself starting to flush, her eyes looking everywhere but at him.

  ‘I... I was just on my way down to breakfast,’ she told him untruthfully, hurrying towards the door.

  ‘Not yet. There’s something I want to say to you—’

  ‘No!’ The speed and vehemence with which she blurted out her panicky denial betrayed her all too clearly, Poppy knew, as James reached out and took hold of her wrist, swinging her round so that he was standing between her and the door.

  ‘Let me go,’ she demanded fiercely. ‘I want you—’

  ‘So you told me—last night,’ James interrupted her, watching her mercilessly as the colour came and went in her face and her body stiffened as though he had struck her.

  ‘No,’ she whispered in denial. ‘That ... that wasn’t you. I...’

  Her whole body trembled as she fought for something to say, some reasonable and logical explanation of what she had done, what she had said, what she had felt. But, finally acknowledging that there was none, she reached desperately and dangerously for the only thing she had left, picking it up and hurling it at him with all the force of her pent-up, tangled emotions.