Best Man To Wed?

“What happened last night...

“It didn’t... I didn’t... I thought you were Chris... I was dreaming about him and when... You must have known that I would never... That...”

Poppy stopped abruptly as she saw the dangerous warning expression on James’s face, her stomach dropping sickeningly as she realized how angry he was.

“Go on,” he invited her softly. “You were saying that you thought I was Chris, that you were dreaming about Chris, but you weren’t asleep when we made love, were you, Poppy? You knew very well who it was, who was holding you...touching you, pleasuring you,” he told her tauntingly, “even if you do claim now that you wanted it to be my brother....”

Dear Reader,

What is more natural than a bride wanting her closest friends also to find happiness in love? For Sally, this means tricking three of her wedding guests into catching her bouquet! Three women, each very different, but all with their own reasons for never wanting to marry. That is why they agree to a pact to stay single, but just how long will it take for the bouquet to begin its magic?

Penny Jordan has worked her magic on these three linked stories. One of Mills & Boon’s most successful and popular authors, she has written three compelling romances—all complete stories in themselves—that follow the lives—and loves—of Claire, Poppy and Star. Best Man to Wed? is Poppy’s story. She is the close cousin of Sally’s new husband, and she is devastated at having lost the man she wanted to marry—and Poppy hardly needs the best man telling her to grow up and find herself a real man!

THE BRIDE’S BOUQUET—three women make a

pact to stay single, but one by one they fall, seduced

by the power of love

Look out for Star’s story in

Too Wise to Wed? July 1997

Mills & Boon Presents #1895

Best Man to Wed?

Penny Jordan

www.millsandboon.co.uk

MILLS & BOON

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Table of Contents

Cover

“What happened last night…

Dear Reader

Title Page

PROLOGUE

CHAPTER ONE

CHAPTER TWO

CHAPTER THREE

CHAPTER FOUR

CHAPTER FIVE

CHAPTER SIX

CHAPTER SEVEN

CHAPTER EIGHT

CHAPTER NINE

EPILOGUE

Copyright

PROLOGUE

POPPY CARLTON stared mournfully across the now empty garden, furiously trying to blink away her tears.

It seemed only yesterday that she and Chris used to play here. She had been happy then, never thinking that there might come a day when she and her cousin would not be so close, a day when someone else, another woman, would become the main focus of his life, his time, his future, his love.

Fresh tears brimmed and welled over. Poppy dashed them away with the back of her hand.

She had known for months, of course, that Chris and Sally were going to marry, but somehow, until the actual day of the wedding, she had gone on... What? Hoping that he would change his mind, that he would look at her, love her as a woman and not just as a cousin?

‘Your turn next,’ Chris had laughed affectionately at her as she had leapt forward with Claire, Sally’s stepmother, and Star, her closest friend, to catch the bouquet which Sally had dropped as she’d slipped on the stairs.

Her turn next. Impossible. She would never marry now. How could she when the man she loved, the only man she had ever loved or ever would love, was lost to her?

And of course her other cousin, James, Chris’s elder brother and best man, would have to have witnessed the whole thing—the falling bouquet, her instinctive attempt to save it along with Claire and Star, and, worst of all, the compassion and, humiliatingly, the relief as well in Chris’s eyes as he had made some cumbersome joke about her at least waiting until he and Sally had returned from their honeymoon before fulfilling the traditional prophecy that went with the catching of the bride’s bouquet.

Oh, yes, James had seen all of that and predictably had made no attempt to spare her the full force of his cynical denunciation of her feelings as he had told her, ‘Grow up, Poppy; grow up and wise up. It would never have worked; the pair of you would have been in the divorce courts within a year if Chris had ever been fool enough to take you up on what you’re so pathetically desperate to give him.’

‘You don’t know that,’ Poppy had spat back angrily. ‘You don’t anything.’

‘Oh, no,’ James had mocked her softly. ‘You don’t know what I know.’ He had added, ‘And if you did...’ He had paused, smiling nastily at her before challenging her with, ‘Of course, if you ever feel like finding out...’

‘I hate you, James,’ Poppy had retaliated passionately.

No, she would never marry now, and all Sally’s determined attempt to engineer it so that she was one of the trio to catch the bridal bouquet had done was reinforce that fact.

CHAPTER ONE

SLOWLY, gravely, Poppy knelt in front of the bonfire that she had just constructed, oblivious to the damp seeping into the knees of her jeans, the dying rays of the evening sunlight turning her silky brown hair a dark, rich red and illuminating her in a beam of light as, head bowed, she carefully struck a match with such seriousness that she might have been igniting a funeral pyre.

Which in effect she was, Poppy acknowledged tiredly as she watched the kindling that she had carefully arranged start to burn, flames crackling as they ran from twig to twig, racing towards the wooden trinket box at their heart.

As she stood up Poppy had to dig her hands deep into the pockets of her jeans to prevent herself pulling the kindling aside and snatching the box to safety.

It was over, she told herself mercilessly, closing her eyes, unable to look, unable to watch almost a whole decade of ceaseless devotion and love being eaten up by flames. A sharp breeze sprang up out of nowhere, ruffling the silky curtain of her hair, scattering sparks from the fire, whirling-dervish-like, amongst its flames, teasing them, snatching from them a handful of photographs, most of them charred beyond recognition, only one of them still recognisable, the pale pink lipstick shape of her own mouth imprinted brightly across its surface.

Tears stung Poppy’s eyes, her heart twisting and aching with anguish as her emotions overcame her will-power and she stretched out helplessly to clasp the photograph which fate, it seemed, had decreed that she should not destroy.

As Chris’s beloved features swam before her, tears filled her eyes and she missed the photograph, the wind whirling it out of reach. With a small cry, Poppy tried to pursue it, but someone else reached it before her, taking it from the breeze’s playful grasp with mocking ease, a taunting expression crossing his saturnine face as he looked at it and then back at her.

‘James!’ Poppy said his name with loathing as he came down the garden towards her, still holding her photograph.

James might be her beloved, darling Chris’s elder brother and her cousin but no two men could have been more unalike, Poppy reflected bitterly as James stopped walking and studied her bonfire.

Whereas Chris was all sunny smiles, warmth and laughter, good natured, easygoing, an open, uncomplicated individual whom it had all been too heart-breakingly easy for her to fall in love with, James was just the opposite.

James rarely smiled, or at least not at her, and James was most certainly not good-natured, nor easygoing and certainly not uncomplicated; even those who liked and approved of. him, such as her mother, were forced to admit that he was not always the easiest person in the world to deal with.

‘It’s because he had to step into his father’s shoes whilst he was still so young,’ her mother always said in his defence.

‘He was only twenty when Howard died, after all, and he had to take full responsibility for looking after his mother and Chris, as well as the business.’

Her mother had to defend James because he was her nephew. Poppy knew that but she hated him, loathed him, and she knew that he reciprocated those feelings even if he cloaked his in a more urbane and taunting mockery towards her than she could ever achieve towards him. It shocked her that people who didn’t really know them always claimed that of the two brothers James was by far the better looking...

‘He’s very, very dangerously sexy,’ one of the girls who worked for the small family company which James had taken over on his father’s death had told her.

According to her mother, by hard work and dedication he had built the company into something far more impressive than it had ever been during his father’s day.

‘I’ll just bet he’s a real once-in-a-lifetime experience in bed,’ the girl had added forthrightly.

Poppy had shuddered to listen to her, thinking that if she really knew what James was like, how cruel and hard he could be, she wouldn’t think that. Personally Poppy couldn’t think of any man she’d want less as a lover, but then there was only one man that Poppy wanted to fulfil that role in her life...in her heart...in her bed, and there always had been.

She had been twelve years old, a girl just on the brink of womanhood, when she had looked across the table at her first semi-grown-up birthday party and fallen head over heels in love with Chris. And she had gone on loving him and hoping, praying, longing for him to love her in return, not just as his cousin but as a woman ... the woman. Only he hadn’t done so.

Instead he had fallen in love with someone else. Instead he had fallen in love with pretty, funny Sally. Sally, who was now his wife... Sally, whom Poppy couldn’t hate even though she had tried very hard to do so.

Chris and James didn’t even look very much like brothers, if you discounted the fact that they shared the same impressive height and breadth of shoulder, Poppy decided now, watching James in angry resentment. Whereas Chris had the warm good looks of a young sun-god, his floppy brown hair golden at the ends, his eyes the same blue as a warm summer sky, his skin a mouth-watering gold, James looked more demoniac than godlike...

Like Chris, he too had inherited his Italian grandmother’s warm skin colouring, but in James it was somehow harder, more aggressively masculine, bronzer than Chris’s softer gold, just as his eyes were a far harder and colder nerve-freezing light aqua—the kind of eyes that could chill your blood to ice from three metres away if they chose. His hair, too, was much darker than Chris’s—not black but certainly very dark brown, with dark flecks of burnt gold that gleamed like amber in the sunlight.

Poppy was not a complete fool; she could see that physically some women might be drawn to a man of James’s type, and that of his type, perhaps, as the girl at work had said, he was an outstanding example, but she could never find him attractive. There was his temper, an ice-cold, rapier-sharp, humiliatingly effective weapon of destruction onto which she had run in furious, blind hotheadedness more times than she could bear to remember, and his sarcasm, which could rip your pride to shreds like the mountain cougar’s velvet-sheathed claws.

‘What the hell is going on?’ he demanded now as he walked towards her.

Mutinously Poppy glowered at him. He hadn’t looked at the photograph as yet and she itched to demand its return, her stomach muscles cramping with tension.

‘Mum and Dad are out,’ she told him ungraciously. ‘There’s only me here...’

‘It’s you I wanted to see,’ James told her urbanely, walking past her to squat down on his heels and study her bonfire.

Why was it, Poppy thought, watching warily, that such an action by any other man dressed as James was now—in an expensive, immaculately tailored business suit, highly polished shoes and a pristine white shirt—would have immediately rendered him ridiculous, but made James look completely the opposite? And why, she demanded irritably of life, should the bonfire—her bonfire—deposit its unwanted windborne detritus of smoke and sooty smudges in her direction and not his?

Life just wasn’t fair...

Fresh tears smarted in her eyes. Hastily she blinked them away just as she heard James commenting sardonically, ‘What exactly is the purpose of all this self-sacrifice Poppy? Not, one trusts, some immature and ignoble hope that out of the ashes of this maudlin act a new and stronger love for Chris will rise, like a phoenix, only this time one that he shares, because if so—’

‘Of course not,’ Poppy denied swiftly, too shocked by his contemptuous accusation to pretend not to understand what he meant—or to deny the purpose of the bonfire.

It was typical, of course; only James could make that kind of assumption about her motivation for doing something; only James would accuse her so unfairly.

‘If you must know,’ she told him bitterly, ‘I was trying to do what you’ve been telling me I should do for years, and that is to accept that Chris doesn’t... that he never—’ She broke off, swallowing hard as her emotions threatened to overwhelm her.

‘Damn you to hell, James,’ she swore shakily. ‘This has nothing to do with you... and you have no right—’

‘I am Chris’s brother,’ he reminded her crisply, ‘and as such it’s my brotherly duty to protect him and his marriage from—’

‘From what?’ Poppy demanded shakily. ‘From me...?’ Bitterly she started to laugh. ‘From me,’ she repeated. ‘From my love—’

‘Your love!’ James interrupted her, his mouth twisting. ‘You don’t even begin to know the meaning of the word. In the eyes of the world you might be a mature woman of twenty-two, but inside you’re still an adolescent,’ he told her crushingly, ‘with all the danger to yourself and to others that that implies.’

‘I am not an adolescent,’ Poppy denied furiously, angry flags of temper burning in her cheeks.

‘The way you can’t control your emotions says that you are,’ James corrected her coldly. ‘And, like an adolescent,’ he continued bitingly, ‘you positively enjoy wallowing in your self-induced misery, the self-aggrandised “love” you claim you feel for Chris. But you, of course, being you, have to drag everyone else into the plot as well.’

‘That’s not true,’ Poppy gasped furiously. ‘You—’

‘It is true,’ James told her grimly. ‘Look at the way you behaved at the wedding... Do you think that a single person there didn’t know .what you were doing, or how you felt?’

‘I wasn’t doing anything,’ Poppy protested, her face as white now as it had been red before.

‘Yes, you were,’ James told her. ‘You were trying to make Chris feel guilty and to make everyone else feel sorry for you. Well, it isn’t people’s pity you deserve, Poppy...it’s their contempt. If you really loved Chris—really loved him—you’d put his happiness before your own selfish, self-induced misery.

‘You claim that you’re not an adolescent any longer, that you’re an adult. Well, try behaving like one,’ James told her witheringly.

‘You have no right to speak to me like that,’ Poppy told him chokingly. ‘You have no idea how I feel or what—’

She froze as James burst out laughing—a harsh, contemptuous sound that splintered the early evening air.

‘No idea...? My dear Poppy, the whole town knows how you feel.’

Poppy stared at him.

‘Nothing to say?’ he jeered.

Poppy swallowed painfully. People did know how she felt about Chris. She couldn’t deny that, but not because she had deliberately flaunted her feelings to make Chris feel guilty, as James had so unfairly claimed.

It was simply that she had been so young when she had first fallen in love with Chris that it had been impossible for her to keep her feelings hidden, and she had loved him so long that people were bound to have noticed. But she had never, ever, as James was claiming, used her feelings to try to manipulate Chris, or, indeed, anyone else, into feeling sorry for her.

Of course, she deplored the fact that people were aware of her love for Chris—why else on the evening when he and Sally had broken the news of their engagement to the family had she made a silent vow that somehow she had to find a way to stop loving him?

All right, so far she might not have been successful, but at least she had tried—and was still trying.

It should have helped, she knew, knowing that Sally was so right for Chris and that they were so very, very much in love; with any other girl but Sally she might have suspected that that gesture of hers in ensuring that Poppy was one of the trio who was tricked into catching Sally’s wedding bouquet had been, at best, a clear warning to her that it was time for her to find a man of her own and, at worst, a tauntingly vindictive underlining of the fact that she had lost Chris. But Sally was far too genuinely nice and warm-hearted to do anything like that and her motives, Poppy knew, had been completely altruistic.

That hadn’t stopped it hurting, though. And now here was James deliberately making that hurting worse.

‘How I feel... what I do is none of your business,’ was the only response she could manage to James’s taunt.

‘No?’ James gave her an ironic look. ‘Well, what is my business is the fact that you are employed by the company as a linguist and interpreter and, as such, I see that you’re down to fly out to Italy for the international conference next Wednesday.’

‘Yes,’ Poppy agreed listlessly. The previous year, when the conference had been arranged, she had believed that Chris would be representing the company at the conference, and when he had asked her if she would like to go too she had walked on air for days afterwards, her imagination fuelling wildly romantic and, she realised, looking back, totally impossible fantasies featuring the two of them.

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.