Best Man To Wed?

‘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.

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 without 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.

‘I never thought he would fall so deeply in love,’ Poppy heard her adding as she paused on the stairs, not wanting to listen and yet somehow unable to stop herself. She was a masochist addicted to the source of her pain, she told herself bitterly as the older woman continued.

‘Of the two of them James has always been the more passionate and intense one. Chris has always had a much sunnier, more resilient nature. I just wish... How is Poppy? She...’

Quickly Poppy moved out of earshot, her body trembling inwardly with a mixture of pain and indignation.

She knew how James would have reacted if he had been privy to that conversation, how he would have taunted her for allowing herself to become the object of other people’s pity—something he would never allow to happen to him. Poppy’s mouth twisted into a small, bitter smile as she tried to imagine James being involved in any situation, any relationship which might cast him in such a role. Impossible.

It was all very well for her aunt to describe James as the more. intense of her two sons—maybe he was, Poppy allowed, though she thought it more a case of his being intent on having his own way and steamrollering anyone who stood in opposition to him. But more passionate? And because of that passion, as her aunt had somehow implied, more vulnerable than his more easygoing younger brother? No way.

The only intense passion she had ever seen James exhibit was that of anger—the kind of anger that she had felt when he had given her that unwanted, hateful kiss of contempt.

Poppy shivered now as she hurried into the bathroom, the chill invading her body—that tiny, betraying sensation—nothing at all to do with the coolness of the early morning air.

In fact, as she glanced through the window she could see that the pre-dawn sky was clear and that it promised to be a fine, warm day.

No, the reason for the almost electric shock of sensitivity raising goose bumps on her skin lay not outside her body but within it. Its cause was her own fiercely denied and totally shocked awareness of the fact that something within her, some alien, unknown, unwanted part of her, had been physically responsive to the practised skill of James’s kiss.

It wasn’t a subject that she had any desire to explore and in order to dismiss it she spent her brief time under the shower running through the list of Japanese technical terms that she had committed to memory the previous evening.

The conference they were attending was a new one and it promised to be a highly prestigious event. Until James had announced that he would be going, taking the place not just of Chris but also of the sales team, Poppy had been looking forward to it.

The venue was not Milan, where she had been on previous occasions, but a newly opened, exclusive spa resort in the mountains, and the brochure that Chris had shown her had made the event read more like an exclusive holiday than a work event.

Not that she would have any time to enjoy the facilities of the spa, Poppy reflected as she stepped out of the shower and reached for a towel. James, she suspected, would see to that.

As she reached for her underclothes she caught sight of her naked body in the bathroom mirror. She had always been slim but during the weeks leading up to the wedding she had lost weight and now, she acknowledged, she was getting close to looking almost thin. Mentally comparing her fragile, slender body with Sally’s almost voluptuously feminine shape, she admitted that it was no wonder that Chris should prefer the open sensuality of Sally’s body to the fine-boned thinness of hers.

James had commented derisively on her lack of feminine curves only the previous Christmas, when they’d had their obligatory dance together at the firm’s Christmas party. His hands had spanned her waist completely and he’d taunted her with the fact that her body was more that of a girl than of a woman.

‘Just another indication of your reluctance to grow up and accept life as it really is,’ had been his sardonic comment.

‘I am adult; I’m twenty-two years old,’ Poppy had countered angrily.

‘On the outside,’ James had agreed, ‘but inside you’re still an adolescent clinging to a self-created fantasy. You don’t have an inkling of what real life is all about, Poppy...real emotions... real men.’

She had denied his comments, of course, but it hadn’t made any difference.

It hadn’t always been like this between them; they hadn’t always shared an enmity which seemed to deepen and harden with the years instead of relaxing and easing.

As a child she had adored James. He had then been the one who had rescued her from Chris’s teasing, the one who had patiently taught her to ride her first bike, fly her first kite, the one who had mopped up her tears when she’d fallen off the former and over the strings of the latter.

But all that had changed when she was twelve and had fallen in love with Chris. James’s good-humoured, elder-cousin indulgence of her had turned to contemptuous hostility once he had recognised her feelings for Chris, and she had reciprocated with a fury and dislike which had grown over the years instead of abating.

The last thing she wanted to do, she admitted to herself as she dressed quickly in her working ‘uniform’ of cream silk shirt and straight skirt of her taupe suit, was to spend the next four days exposed to James’s contempt and hostility, but it was not in her nature to take the cowardly way out of refusing to go; she took her job too seriously for that.

The actual translation work she did might not be enough to keep her busy eight hours a day, five days a week, Poppy acknowledged, but a look around at the kind of job her peers had been forced to take—some of them with much better degrees than her own-had made her determined to prove her worth to the business; an evening course in computer technology had turned out to be a wise investment of her time, as had her determination to involve herself in the administrative side of the business.

To some, such work might have seemed mundane, but Poppy felt it had given her a working knowledge and an insight into the running of the company which would be just as valuable on any future CV she needed to prepare as her language skills and her degree.

The overnight bag which she had packed the night before was downstairs in the hall. Picking up her suit jacket she studied her reflection in her bedroom mirror critically.

Her hair, soft and straight, made her look younger than she actually was, she knew, but she was loath to have it cut. Chris had once told her that he thought long hair on a woman was incredibly feminine. Sally, though, oddly enough, had a short, almost boyish crop of blonde curls.

Her features didn’t lend themselves well to exaggerated make-up and her skin was too pale, she decided critically. Her eyes, her best feature, were large and almond-shaped and fringed with thick dark lashes which looked ridiculous when loaded down with mascara. Her nose was short and straight, and her mouth, in her view, was an odd mismatch, her top lip well shaped and moderately curved whilst her bottom lip was wider and fuller, somehow giving her mouth a sensuality which she personally found distressing and which she always tried to play down with a softly coloured matt lipstick.

So far the early spring weather had been unseasonably fine and warm and her skin had begun to lose its winter pallor, but she had still slipped on stockings beneath her skirt. Bare legs, no matter how blissfully cool, did not, in her opinion, look properly businesslike.

Downstairs she made herself a cup of coffee and a slice of toast which she knew she wouldn’t eat. Her stomach was already churning nervously. She had never particularly liked flying.

James and Chris’s father, her uncle, had been a keen amateur pilot who had been killed with a friend when they had flown into a freak electric storm. She remembered how devastated Chris had been at his father’s death. They had cried over it together, sharing their grief. James, on the other hand, had retreated into grim, white-faced silence—a remote stranger, or so it had seemed to Poppy, who’d looked contemptuously upon her and Chris’s shared emotional grief.

She heard James’s car just as she was swallowing her last mouthful of coffee. Quickly putting down her cup she hurried out into the hall, pulling on her jacket and picking up her handbag and case as she went to open the door. Like her, James was dressed formally in a business suit, not navy for once but a lightweight pale grey which somehow emphasised his height and the breadth of his shoulders.

As he took her case from her, Poppy saw the brief, assessing glance he gave her and her chin started to tilt challengingly as she waited for him to make some critical or derogatory comment, but instead, disconcertingly, she suddenly became aware that his original scrutiny had turned into something a little more thorough and startlingly more male as his eyes lingered on the soft curves of her breasts.

It was the kind of inspection that Poppy was used to from other men; that telling but, generally speaking, acceptably discreet male awareness of her as a woman. But to be subjected to it by James ... James who’d sternly reprimanded his younger brother when Chris had teasingly commented on her new shape the first day she had self-consciously worn the pretty, flower-sprigged cotton bra that her mother had gravely agreed that her eleven-year-old’s barely thirty-inch c hest demanded.

Seeing James focus on that same chest in such a very male and sensual way when for years Poppy could have sworn that he was totally oblivious to the fact that she had grown from a child to a woman was a very disconcerting experience.

Somehow just managing to resist the temptation to tug the edges of her jacket protectively together, Poppy gave him an angry glare. How would he like it if she focused on... a certain part of his body in that way.

‘Have you got everything?’ she heard him ask her before her brain could come up with an answer to her own question. ‘Tickets, passport, money...?’

‘Of course,’ Poppy responded, grittily withholding the angry comment she wanted to make. This was a business trip to Italy, she reminded herself grimly, and she intended to preserve a businesslike distance between them, if only to prove to James that she was not the adolescent child he constantly taunted her as being.

Outside, his Jaguar gleamed richly in the early morning sunshine. As he opened the passenger door for her, Poppy could smell the rich, expensive scent of the car’s leather seats. Chris and her mother, who, like James, were directors and shareholders in the company, drove cars with far less status and the urge to remind James of this fact was irresistible as he slid into the driver’s seat next to her and started the car.

‘Very nice,’ she commented, smoothing the cream leather with her fingertips. ‘A perk of the job, I presume...?’

‘No, as a matter of fact, it isn’t,’ James shocked her by denying as he swung the car into the traffic. ‘It’s time you brought yourself up to date with current tax laws, Poppy,’ he told her acidly. ‘Even if I wanted to make use of my...connection with the company to my own financial advantage, the current tax penalties involved in owning an expensive company car would prohibit me from doing so.’

Poppy could feel her face start to burn as she interpreted the message in the first part of his statement. Unlike her, he did not have to benefit from his connection with the company, he was implying.

Resentment burned angrily in Poppy’s chest. Was she never going to be judged on her own merits, instead of being condemned because of her mother’s position as a shareholder? How would James like it if she pointed out to him that the only reason he was the company’s chairman was because of his father?