Best Man To Wed?

by Penny Jordan

  ‘And now she’s finally caught up with him,’ Chris teased, interrupting his mother who was dabbing the emotional tears from her eyes as she hugged Poppy.

  ‘How long have you known?’

  ‘When did all this happen?’

  ‘Have you made any plans yet?’

  Poppy stood like someone in a trance as her family’s happy congratulations fell on her like blows, whilst at her side James was as still and cold as stone.

  ‘I told you you’d never be able to keep this to yourselves,’ Chris reminded them gleefully when Poppy’s father had gone to open some champagne.

  ‘Now I know why you looked so disappointed when I arrived without James.’ James’s mother smiled as she hugged Poppy a second time. ‘Oh, Poppy, I can’t tell you how pleased I am... I thought that James—’ She broke off and shook her head, smiling at Poppy through her tears.

  What was wrong with them all? Poppy wondered dizzily as her father started to hand round glasses of champagne. They all knew that she loved Chris and yet they were behaving as though... as though her relationship with James was somehow expected...a foregone conclusion.

  She heard her father proposing a toast whilst someone else congratulated James and asked him when they were to be married.

  ‘Well, you won’t want to wait long, will you?’ interrupted Sally. ‘And, after all, it isn’t as though you need to look for a house or anything; you can move straight into James’s...’

  Could she see just the tiniest hint of relief in Sally’s eyes? Poppy wondered achiligly as Chris turned to hug her. He didn’t kiss her, she noticed. Did he suspect the truth...? Did he know that he was still the one she loved?

  ‘So when did all this happen?’ Poppy’s mother asked her when the excitement had finally started to die down a little.

  In Italy, Poppy was about to say, but James got in before her, saying firmly, ‘Last Christmas.’

  Poppy turned her head to stare at him. Last Christmas they had had one-of the worst quarrels they had ever had, when he’d accused her of trying to make Sally uncomfortable at the family’s Christmas party by ‘mooning about’, as he’d put it, over Chris.

  She waited for her mother to laugh and accuse James of lying but instead she simply smiled and said that they had done very well to keep it to themselves for so long.

  ‘We didn’t want to steal Chris and Sally’s glory,’ James fibbed smoothly.

  ‘So now we’ve got another wedding to plan; when do you...?’

  A wedding... Poppy gave James an appalled look and told her mother quickly, ‘Oh, no, we can’t—’

  ‘We can’t quite make up our minds when,’ James overrode her smoothly.

  ‘Well, at least you won’t have to look for a house,’ her mother continued, repeating what Sally had said earlier, giving James a rueful look as she added, ‘I thought at the time that it was rather odd for a single man to be buying what was obviously a family home. I suppose I should have guessed then; Poppy has always had a weakness for those Victorian houses down by the river.’

  Whilst Poppy bit back her shocked response—that she had had nothing to do with the choice of James’s present home—James himself responded with a calm, ‘Yes, I know; I remember how as a little girl she used to insist on taking the long way home from school so that she could walk past them.’

  It was true, she did love the magnificent terrace of large Victorian houses whose long gardens backed onto the river, and had even fantasised about living in one, but with Chris, not James.

  She had been angry when James had bought one of them, resentful almost, refusing to go to the small house-warming party he had given.

  All through lunch Poppy was conscious of the interest they were causing. She herself didn’t have any appetite, she had lost weight since her return from Italy but then she was so stressed, so on edge that it was no wonder she didn’t want to eat.

  ‘I want to talk to you.’ Poppy tensed as she heard James speaking quietly in her ear.

  ‘We can’t... not now. Not here.’

  ‘I’m leaving in half an hour,’ James told her, glancing at his watch, ‘and when I do you’re coming with me.’

  ‘No,’ Poppy protested. ‘I can’t... What will people think?’

  ‘They’ll think that we’re in love and that we want to be on our own to—’

  ‘Stop it,’ Poppy hissed, her face starting to burn. ‘Why did you have to say... to let them think...?’

  ‘Why the hell do you think?’ James demanded grimly.

  Poppy’s flush deepened as she remembered that all too betraying ‘James!’ and the way she had virtually flung herself into his arms.

  ‘Where are we going?’ Poppy asked James after she had fastened her seat belt. She had tried to get out of leaving with him, using the excuse that her mother would need her to help clear up, but James had refused to listen and now here she was, seated next to him in his car, wondering why on earth she had been so stupid as to allow the curious glances of a few people to drive her into seeing James as an ally... a refuge.

  ‘Where do you think?’ James asked her drily as he turned the car in the direction of his own home.

  ‘Not there,’ Poppy protested as she realised where they were going.

  ‘Why not? Where else is there where we can talk without being overheard?’

  ‘We don’t have to go to your house. You could just park the car and... say...’

  ‘Oh, yes, and have anyone who saw us—and certainly someone would—put it about that the pair of us are so hot for each other that you’ll let me have you in the back of the car?’

  ‘Stop it,’ Poppy demanded, hot-cheeked. ‘Don’t talk about me like that. I would never...’ She stopped, the words of denial choking in her throat. How could she tell James that what he was saying made her feel cheap? It was too late to argue with him any more. He was already turning into the road to his house, which was right at the end of the terrace and had a large expanse of garden to the side of it as well as to the rear.

  The houses, three storeys high, possessed cellars as well as attics, most of which had been converted into garages and storage spaces respectively. As James parked his car in his garage, she shivered a little, dreading the interview ahead.

  ‘This way,’ James instructed her, opening the car door for her.

  As she followed him up stone steps and through a door into the main hallway she tried not to betray any interest in the house which she had so far refused to visit, even though her eye was immediately taken by the elegance of the plasterwork ceiling and the generous proportions of the hall and stairs.

  The rich mahogany of the panelled doors gleamed softly in the early evening sunlight and Poppy had to suppress an urge to reach out and touch them to see if the wood felt as warmly alive as it looked. Disconcertingly, she remembered that the last time she had felt such an urge to touch something that something had been James—the sleek warmth of James’s body.

  A fierce shudder galvanised her body, causing James to frown as he watched her. The stairs and hallway had been carpeted in a natural cord matting which provided the perfect background for the richness of the rugs laid over it. If this had been her home she would have added some feminine touches such as a huge bowl of flowers on the circular table, Poppy decided, but otherwise she couldn’t fault James’s taste.

  ‘In here,’ he told her, opening one of the doors.

  Poppy blinked as she stepped through it and was momentarily blinded by sunlight. The room was huge, running the whole length and half the width of the ground floor, with windows overlooking both the front and the back, and James had furnished it with a mixture of antique and modern furniture which somehow melded magically together to make it look both elegant and welcoming.

  ‘Now,’ James began as he followed her into the room and closed the door behind him, ‘do you mind telling me exactly what you’re playing at?’

  ‘I... I don’t know what you mean,’ Poppy said.

  ‘Oh, come on,
Poppy, don’t give me that. What the hell were you doing coming up to me like that and making it obvious that—?’

  ‘That what?’ Poppy defended herself, tears stinging her eyes. ‘That we’d been to bed together? They already knew that—or they would soon have known,’ she amended more honestly.

  James was frowning. ‘What do you mean? Surely Chris—?’

  ‘Not Chris,’ Poppy interrupted. ‘No one had said anything, but Mum had invited Stewart Thomas and I could tell from the way he and Diana were looking at me...’ She bit her lip, unwilling to tell him how vulnerable she had felt, how afraid and alone it had made her realise she was when she had seen the way Stewart and his wife were looking at her and had known what they must be saying.

  ‘It’s all right for you,’ she told James fiercely. ‘No one would think any the less of you for... for what happened... but it’s different for me.

  ‘Why did’all this have to happen?’ she demanded passionately, tears clogging her voice.

  ‘Do you really have to ask?’ she heard James saying roughly. ‘It had to happen because of this, Poppy. Because of this...’ And then he was holding her, kissing her, his mouth almost brutal as it devoured hers, but even more shocking than the raw sensuality of his kiss was her own response to it—her body’s response to it: avid, eager, hungry, shamelessly accepting, urging, inciting him to...

  Poppy gave a small moan of panic as she felt his hand move towards her breast. Once he touched her there she would have no hope of stopping the frightening, out-of-control rush of sensation that she could feel building inside her, threatening her. As she panicked and started to pull away from James, she was engulfed by the return of the dizzy sensation she had felt earlier on, only this time it was accompanied by a surge of nausea and weakness.

  Helpless to escape it, she closed her eyes and gave a small moan.

  ‘Poppy—Poppy, what is it?’ she heard James demanding forcefully as she fell forward against him. When his arms locked round her to support her, she felt the dizziness start to recede and, mercifully, with it her nausea.

  ‘How long has this been going on?’ James asked her curtly. He was still holding her, still supporting her, and inexplicably it was somehow easier simply to stay where she was, leaning against him, than to make herself move away; her legs still felt oddly weak and she couldn’t get out of her mind how afraid and vulnerable she had felt when he hadn’t been there, how relieved she had been to see him standing there in her parents’ drawing room.

  ‘How long has what been going on?’ she asked him weakly.

  ‘You know what I mean, Poppy,’ James warned her harshly. ‘Are you pregnant? Are you carrying my child?’ he asked her grimly.

  Carrying his child. The colour came and went in Poppy’s face as the importance of what he was saying struck her.

  ‘No, no, of course I’m not,’ she denied. How...? ‘I can’t be pregnant, James,’ she told him piteously. ‘I can’t be...’

  ‘You may not want to be,’ James corrected her bitingly.

  Pregnant, with James’s child... Poppy swayed shakily. Of course she couldn’t be...could she? As she mentally counted the weeks and then slowly recounted them since their return from Italy and acknowledged what she had previously ignored—namely that her period was now months overdue—she went cold with shock.

  ‘Poppy?’ James demanded gratingly.

  ‘I... I don’t know,’ she whispered through numb lips, and then as the panic exploded inside her she told him frantically, ‘James, I can’t be pregnant... We can’t...’

  ‘It’s perhaps just as well that we’ve already warned everyone that we intend to get married,’ James told her curtly, ignoring her shocked denial and coolly interpreting the reason for her panic.

  ‘We can’t get married,’ Poppy protested, her eyes glazed with shock.

  ‘We can’t not,’ James corrected her. ‘Not now.’

  ‘But I may not be pregnant,’ Poppy told him. ‘And even if I am...’

  ‘If you are, what?’ James asked her harshly. ‘If you are, you’d rather destroy my child than—?’

  ‘No,’ Poppy told him vehemently. ‘No, I could never do that... never.’

  ‘Then we don’t really have any other option, do we?’ James told her. ‘If you are carrying my child, we have to get married...’

  ‘Yes,’ Poppy whispered, knowing that it was true. Had they been strangers and not cousins maybe then she could have contemplated bringing her child up alone, but under the circumstances...

  ‘I may not be pregnant,’ she repeated, but she could hear the lack of conviction in her voice and knew that James could hear it too.

  As she closed her eyes she had a vivid memory of feeling James deep within her body, of experiencing that fierce, female surge of triumph at knowing that he was there, without realising then just what that feeling meant. Now she suspected that she did. She’d have to get one of those test things from the chemist’s, she decided bleakly; either that or visit their family doctor.

  ‘I never wanted this to happen,’ she told James bleakly. ‘I never wanted—’

  ‘Either me or my child?’ he suggested. ‘No, I know that... I... No doubt you’d far rather fantasise that it’s Chris’s child you’re carrying, just as you wanted to fantasise that he was the one making love to you. Unfortunately—for both of us—it wasn’t him. It was me!’

  CHAPTER SEVEN

  ‘POPPY, I need to talk to you.’ Poppy shivered as she listened to the curt tones of James’s voice relaying the terse message to her over her answering machine.

  Mercifully, at least as far as she was concerned, he had been away on business for the past three days and today she wasn’t going into the office since she was taking three days’ holiday. Later in the day she was due to have lunch with Sally’s stepmother and her fellow bridesmaid—an arrangement which had been made at Star’s suggestion three months ago, on the day of Chris and Sally’s wedding.

  As she remembered the certainty and vehemence with which she had insisted then that there was no way she would ever marry, Poppy could feel her stomach starting to churn nauseously with a now familiar mixture of panic and misery.

  She supposed if she were a different sort of person, a braver sort of person, she could defy James, refuse to marry him and bring up her child—their child—on her own; there had certainly been times since her visit to the doctor had confirmed what she had already secretly known in her heart—that she was carrying James’s child—when she had toyed unrealistically with the idea of simply running away... disappearing...avoiding all the misery and anguish that she knew lay ahead of her.

  But how could she? How could she hurt her parents by doing something like that? And besides, no matter where she ran to she could never escape from herself or from the knowledge of what she had done.

  However, she could not face James yet, even though she was acutely conscious of the thoughtful looks her mother had been giving her and suspected that it wouldn’t be long before she questioned her increasingly hard-to-conceal bouts of sickness and put two and two together.

  There were alternatives, of course, she acknowledged tiredly as she prepared for her lunch date, but they were simply not options she could ever choose to take. Little though she had wanted or planned to have a baby—any baby, never mind James‘s—now that she knew that she actually had conceived... Poppy placed her hand protectively over her stomach. No, she couldn’t do that, couldn’t take away the life that she and James had created.

  She knew why James had left that message on her private line, of course; she knew perfectly well what it was he wanted to ask her... The unexpected business commitment which had taken him abroad had meant that he had had to leave before he could question her about the outcome of her visit to the doctor and she knew she would have little alternative but to tell him.

  The last thing she felt like doing today was going to lunch. What would the other two think if they knew that soon she would be breaking the vow that they
had all made to remain unmarried? Would they, like her parents and her family, assume that she was actually in love with James? That all the years she had spent loving Chris had simply been a youthful infatuation which had really meant nothing?

  It had shocked Poppy to discover that her parents, and especially her mother, seemed to think that James was so right for her—that they were so right for one another. Even Chris had told her how pleased he was for both of them. It seemed to Poppy that the only people who weren’t pleased or happy about the fact that she and James had supposedly fallen deeply in love with one another were she and James themselves.

  Oddly enough, instead of feeling hurt by Chris’s comment, by his inability to see the truth, what Poppy had experienced had been a totally unexpected and disconcerting sense of irritation and exasperation...

  The restaurant was quite quiet, the conservatory where they were lunching pleasantly cool, but Poppy still felt queasy and uncomfortably warm as she sat down.

  She could see the faintly concerned looks that Claire, Sally’s stepmother, was giving her as she toyed with her food and made monosyllabic responses to her conversation, but the smell of food was making her head swim and her stomach churn—or was it the fact that just being there was bringing home to her the enormity of what she had done and the way her life was bound to change?

  Panic filled her as she realised how unprepared for change she really was. Unable to face another mouthful of food, she pushed away her plate and stood up.

  Once she reached the sanctuary of the ladies’ cloakroom she discovered that her nausea had subsided, and by the time Claire came in search of her she felt sufficiently in control of herself to apologise for her sudden exit, even if her voice did shake a little as she said the words.

  What would they think once they discovered the truth, these two women with whom she had sworn a vow to remain unmarried and so disprove the myth of the potency of catching the bride’s bouquet?

  And, no matter how quickly she and James got married, once the baby arrived people were bound to guess the truth. Her face burned hotly. There was no onus on couples these days to marry before having children, and had she and James genuinely been in love she knew that her prime emotion on learning that she had conceived his child would have been one of intense joy and delight.