Best Man To Wed?

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.

‘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.

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.