Best Man To Wed?

by Penny Jordan

  ‘We really ought to go,’ she told Gunther reluctantly.

  ‘What if I refuse?’ Gunther teased her. ‘What if I say that I want to keep you here for ever and never take you back?’

  Even whilst she laughed, Poppy was unable to stop the sadness shadowing her eyes.

  Their afternoon had given her a brief respite, but she knew that there was no real escape from her unhappiness, especially not with someone like Gunther, who, nice though he was, was no match for a man like James...

  James... Poppy froze. Why should she be connecting her inability to respond to the more intimate overtures that she knew Gunther wanted to make to James? Surely it was her love for Chris that stood between her and any other man who might show an interest in her?

  ‘Poppy, what is it?’ Gunther asked her hesitantly. ‘You look so... so sad... If you have a worry... a problem... if there is something I can do to help...’

  ‘No. It’s... There is nothing...’ Poppy denied quickly.

  What would Gunther say, what would he think if he knew the truth? What would he think of her then? What would her friends, her family... Chris... think of her, if they knew what had happened with James...? But they would never know, she comforted herself. No one must ever know.

  As she stood up and helped Gunther to clear away the remnants of their picnic, anxiety like so many sharp knives caused her darting, stabbing flickers of pain that seemed to pierce her heart and she was filled with a sense of shame, bewilderment and confusion.

  How could she have been like that with James... wanted him, urged him? Her hands were trembling as she picked up her jacket.

  If only there were some way she could wipe the events of that night from her memory and her conscience... from hers and from James’s.

  It was late, Poppy realised once they were back in the car and heading back to the hotel. Later than she had thought, and already growing dark.

  It was just as well that she had already eaten, she decided as she glanced at the clock on the car’s dashboard, because they were certainly going to be too late to have dinner.

  In the end it was gone ten o‘clock before Gunther finally pulled into the hotel car park; a wrong turning had added several extra miles and almost a full hour to their return journey and Poppy just hoped that James was too preoccupied with his Japanese lady-friend to be aware that she had been playing truant.

  . ‘Thank you, it’s been a lovely afternoon,’ she told Gunther quickly, pulling away from him as he made to put his arm around her.

  She could see the disappointment in his eyes but to her relief he didn’t try to force the issue, simply falling into step beside her as he escorted her inside the hotel.

  Once inside the foyer, Poppy searched it anxiously, but fortunately there was no sign of James.

  ‘I’m afraid my wrong turning has caused you to miss dinner,’ Gunther apologised, ‘but perhaps—’

  ‘It’s all right, Gunther,’ Poppy assured him, forestalling him. ‘I couldn’t really eat anything else anyway, not after that delicious picnic...’

  If she went straight up to the room now, showered and prepared for bed, she could, with luck, be fast asleep before James came in—if indeed he was planning to spend the night with her and not with...

  With her? Poppy could feel the angry, self-betraying heat burning her skin as she hurried, head defensively down, towards the lifts. Of course, she had not meant that James would be spending the night with her, merely that he would be spending it in their room. What had he done to her, she wondered resentfully, that she was now having to monitor even her own private thoughts?

  She walked out of the lift and along the corridor, inserted her pass-card into the lock and pushed open the door.

  ‘Where the hell have you been?’

  The shock of James’s unexpected presence in the bedroom caused Poppy to stare at him in speechless silence.

  ‘Where have you been, Poppy?’ he repeated.

  ‘I...I... Out,’ Poppy told him unsteadily, alarmed by his fury.

  ‘Out. Out where?’ James demanded.

  ‘I... Gunther... I went out with Gunther,’ she admitted huskily. ‘He... he had hired a car for the afternoon and he wanted—’

  ‘Spare me the details, I can well imagine exactly what it was he wanted,’ James told her savagely. ‘And, to judge from the look of you and the length of time you’ve been gone, he got it.

  ‘Did you enjoy it, Poppy?’ he demanded acidly. ‘Did you beg him... plead with him—?’

  Before she knew what she was doing Poppy had flown at James, raising her hand to bring it down hard against his face, goaded beyond endurance by the hateful things he was saying to her, desperate to make him stop.

  But instead of retreating from her, instead of reacting as she had imagined and recognising how offensive, how unbearable, how unwarranted and undeserved his accusations were, he took hold of her with such speed that she had no time to do anything other than give a small gasp of startled shock as his fingers manacled her wrists and he swung her round in front of him, using his weight and her vulnerability to tip her over onto the bed.

  As he leaned over her, imprisoning her, Poppy could see the dark flecks in the topaz brilliance of his eyes, which, when she focused on them, seemed to mesmerise her into a state of shocked numbness. Then she heard him say, ‘I warned you what would happen if you did that again, Poppy.’

  And then he was raising her hands above her head, holding them, shackling them there, his body poised powerfully over hers.

  ‘I know why you’re doing this,’ Poppy protested wildly. ‘You’re doing it to punish me because your pride can’t bear knowing that I don’t want you.’

  ‘Is that what you told your German friend?’ James snarled at her.

  ‘Gunther and I just spent the afternoon together. We didn’t... he’s not...’

  Poppy tensed as she realised that her efforts to break free of James’s constraining hold had caused the soft, full skirt she was wearing to ride up, exposing her thighs.

  ‘Let me go, James,’ she begged shakily when she saw the way he was looking at her body. ‘You don’t really want me,’ she added huskily, ‘You can’t, and—’

  ‘Who says I can’t?’ James taunted her softly. ‘I’m a man, Poppy, and, as any man will tell you, there’s nothing quite so erotically stimulating as having a woman tell you she wants you, as having her beg you to fulfil her and satisfy her, as having her cry out to you that she needs you, aches for you...’

  ‘No,’ Poppy denied in panic. ‘I didn’t mean it... I... You can’t do this, James. I don’t want you...’

  ‘Liar,’ he told her softly, and as though to prove her self-deceit he reached out his free hand and ran it slowly up over her trembling body.

  The hard, warm feel of his palm against the tense sensitivity of her bare thigh made her quiver from head to foot in what Poppy told herself despairingly was outrage and rejection, but long before James’s hand had smoothed its way over her waist to lie mockingly just below the full curve of her breast she knew that she was lying to herself.

  ‘But I can’t want you...’

  She hadn’t realised she had whispered the shocked words out loud until she heard James warning her through gritted teeth, ‘Take care I don’t make you eat those words, Poppy, or endure the sexual equivalent, because, I promise you, if I do... once I do...’

  Poppy’s whole body shuddered as she realised what he meant, realised and, to her appalled anguish, visibly reacted to that knowledge not with shock and rejection but instead with something—some need—she couldn’t bear to acknowledge.

  ‘I don’t want this, James,’ she told him defiantly, but she knew as he lifted his hand and slowly started to unfasten her top that she was lying, and, what was worse, she knew that he knew it too.

  Why, why was her body responding to him like this? she wondered helplessly as he peeled away her top to reveal the warm curves of her breasts.

  She tried to will her body not
to react to the warmth of James’s breath as he bent his head towards her.

  ‘No!’

  Even as she made the thick, guttural denial and twisted her body desperately from side to side, Poppy knew shamingly that, far from making her want to be released from the sensual bondage of James’s mouth’s possession of her breast, the deepening and intensifying sensation of that possession as he subdued her attempts to break free of him somehow only increased the erotic effect of his mouth against her body.

  Lost in the sensation caused by James’s mouth slowly savaging the sensitive flesh of her breasts, Poppy was unaware of the fact that he had unfastened and removed her skirt until she felt the sudden coolness of the air-conditioning against her bare skin, her only covering the small white triangle of her cotton briefs.

  James still had her hands pinned above her head, and as he released her breast and started to unfasten his shirt Poppy turned her head to avoid looking at him, knowing already what just the thought of the satin heat of his naked skin against her own was doing to her, and as she did so she inadvertently caught sight of her reflection in the mirror on the wall, her body tensing as she stared transfixed at her image, unable to withdraw her gaze.

  Was that really her, that creature with the dark, tangled mane of hair, the full, swollen mouth whose colour echoed that of her erotically pouting nipples, her skin so creamily pale, so silky and glistening as she lay against the coverlet of the bed, her spine arched, her body stretched out like some wanton, sensual offering?

  Even to her own eyes there was something about her almost voluptuous dishevelment, the disarrangement of her limbs that positively flaunted her sensuality, her sexuality, she recognised in wide eyed shock, the white triangle of her briefs somehow more of an enticement than a barrier, her thighs slightly parted as though... as though...

  ‘What are you looking at?’ she heard James ask as he pulled off his shirt and stepped out of his trousers and leaned towards her, his image joining hers in the mirror, his mouth curling in a smile that made her stomach muscles lock in protest against the wave of shocked excitement it caused her.

  ‘Ah,’ he said softly, ‘so you like looking at yourself, do you, Poppy? You like watching whilst—?’

  ‘No,’ Poppy protested, her face burning as she heard him laugh and saw the way he stretched out his hand and slowly ran his fingertips along her skin, making her shiver and tremble in helpless response.

  ‘Well, remember what I said about making you eat your words,’ he reminded her softly. ‘Would you like that, Poppy?’ he added, so gently that the words slipped up under her guard. ‘Would you like to know what it feels like to have a man’s mouth against your body whilst he...?’

  His hand was covering her sex now, not touching or caressing her, simply lying there, but the weight and heat of it, the knowledge of it, was enough to accelerate the pulse which had been slowly throbbing there ever since be had first taken hold of her—throbbing in a deep, fierce ache so intense that she felt sure that he must be able to feel the vibrations as they shook her helpless body.

  He was naked now, his body darkly powerful in contrast to hers, his skin like the taut, warm pelt of a jungle killer.

  The urge within her to reach out and touch it, to touch him was so compelling that Poppy couldn’t withstand it, her fingertips trembling as they finally came into contact with his body.

  The fierce shudder that ripped through him made her stare at him in confused surprise, her eyes staring straight up into the dark heat of his, her breath coming faster between her half-parted lips as her body responded instinctively in its recognition of the arousal of his.

  For some reason his arousal shocked her. Shocked her and excited her, she acknowledged, unaware that her eyes were betraying her emotions to him, unaware of anything other than the heat and power of him as he lowered his body against hers and took hold of her, smothering any protest she might have wanted to make.

  Whilst her body shivered its pleasure in his arms, her lips responded to the pressure of his, parting, opening, her mouth drinking in the taste and feel of him.

  In the distance Poppy could hear a sound—a soft, keening cry of desire and urgency that she didn’t recognise as hers until James lifted his mouth from hers and demanded roughly, ‘Now tell me that you don’t want me...that you want my brother.

  ‘Look, Poppy,’ he commanded, one hand cupping the side of her face, turning it so that she was forced to look at her reflection in the mirror—at their reflections in the mirror—at the way that, without knowing she had done so, she had arched herself against him, opened her thighs to accept the weight of one of his between them, to accept it and...

  Poppy shivered as she saw the way her flesh clung longingly to his, the way her whole body silently betrayed its yearning need.

  ‘No... No, this isn’t what I want,’ she protested in a panicky whisper. ‘This can’t be what I want. You aren’t what I want...’

  As she tried to push James away, to reassert her independence, her determination to reject everything that both he and her body were telling her, she saw anger and another emotion she couldn’t define flash like warning darts of fire through the brilliance of his eyes.

  ‘Why are you doing this?’ she protested huskily. ‘You don’t want me. You don’t even like me. You must want... What happened?’ she asked him bitteerly. ‘Did your Japanese lady-friend turn you down after all? Well, that’s not my fault, so don’t try to... to... take out your frustration on me.’

  ‘Why not?’ James challenged her brutally. ‘Why shouldn’t I use you the way you used me? Exactly the way you used me!’

  Poppy gasped in shock at the ugliness of his accusation. ‘That’s not fair... It’s not... it’s not true,’ she defended herself. ‘What happened the other night was a... a mistake,’ she told him shakily.

  ‘Was it? Well, there won’t be any mistakes this time,’ James responded mirthlessly. ‘Look into the mirror, Poppy,’ he instructed her again, adding forcefully when she tried to turn her head away, ‘Look... and tell me what you see.’

  Poppy’s whole body trembled beneath the weight of her emotions. How could she tell him what she saw? How could she shame herself by putting into words what her body was so obviously experiencing—the desire, the need...the sensuality she could see in every taut line of her flesh, every aching curve, every inch of the body she could barely recognise as her own as she was forced to look, witness its open hunger for the man holding it?

  The man holding it... And that man was James. Not Chris but James. James, whom she could not possibly cerebrally want or desire, whom she did not even like, never mind love.

  What had happened to her? she wondered helplessly as she caught back a panicky sob. And why had it happened to her? Why had her own flesh so blatantly turned traitor on her? Why was it... she...so out of control, so... so...

  ‘The other night you told me you wanted me...begged me to make love to you. This time, when you say those words again, there’ll be no taking them back, Poppy, no pretence that you think I am Chris. This time both of us know just who exactly it is you’re crying out for.’

  Was that why he was doing this to her? Poppy wondered achingly. Because his pride couldn’t stomach the thought that a woman—any woman, but most especially a woman whom, after all, he had made it clear he despised so absolutely and completely—should dare to prefer another man? Was this, then, male pride, male anger, male desire, male power generated and fed by some testosterone-fuelled need to be first, to be the best?

  ‘Say it again, Poppy,’ she heard James demanding softly as his mouth started to caress her throat in what she knew was a slow and deliberate assault on her defences. ‘Tell me you want me...’

  ‘No,’ Poppy refused stubbornly, panicked by the thought of losing control, by the knowledge that what he was doing could all too easily make her lose control.

  She felt her whole body shudder as his mouth burned paths of fire down over it. In the mirror she could see her tort
ured twisting and turning as she tried to evade his lips and hands, but already her denials and her movements possessed a slow, drugged quality that made them sound and look more like some subtle form of enticement than genuine rejection.

  There was something about the sight of James leaning over her, half straddling her, something about the sheer, naked power of his body that sent waves of heat blistering through her, that made the hands she knew she had reached out to fend him off somehow seek to draw him closer instead.

  When she felt the warmth of his mouth caressing her stomach, she cried out to him to stop, but his hands were already sliding her briefs free of her body, and although she fought desperately not to look the sight of his dark head against the pale silkiness of her thighs caused such a fierce spasm of sensation within her that her whole body jerked visibly.

  ‘No, don’t—please don’t,’ she whispered protestingly, but his hands were already holding her, lifting her, his lips stroking the soft, vulnerable flesh on the inside of her thighs, his palm resting against her sex, touching it, making it... her... tremble in a paroxysm of combined anxiety and pleasure.

  Even though she had known what was going to happen, how he was going to punish her and exact full payment for her defiance, her denial, and, even though she had thought she had prepared her body so that she could defend herself from it, the shock of his mouth actually moving against the most intimate part of her—and her reaction to it—caused her to cry out helplessly to him that she couldn’t bear such pleasure, that she was afraid of what he was going to do to her, of what she was feeling.

  ‘James... James...’

  She heard herself call his name as her body exploded in violent spasms of intense pleasure and knew she was babbling incoherently to him as he moved over her and took her in his arms, kissing her breasts and then her mouth with the taste of her body still on his lips.

  ‘James... James...’

  Her body was still quivering, still empty...still aching for him, she recognised in breathless wonder.