Best Man To Wed?

‘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 (#ulink_87f3beca-b633-5943-a168-76fbbdf4a8a9)

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.