Best Man To Wed?. PENNY JORDAN

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СКАЧАТЬ href="#ulink_5bdfce9b-c960-583e-a430-4e52723ee8bb">CHAPTER TWO

      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.

      The conference they were attending was a new one and it promised to be a highly prestigious event. Until James had announced that he would be going, taking the place not just of Chris but also of the sales team, Poppy had been looking forward to it.

      The venue was not Milan, where she had been on previous occasions, but a newly opened, exclusive spa resort in the mountains, and the brochure that Chris had shown her had made the event read more like an exclusive holiday than a work event.

      Not that she would have any time to enjoy the facilities of the spa, Poppy reflected as she stepped out of the shower and reached for a towel. James, she suspected, would see to that.

      As she reached for her underclothes she caught sight of her naked body in the bathroom mirror. She had always been slim but during the weeks leading up to the wedding she had lost weight and now, she acknowledged, she was getting close to looking almost thin. Mentally comparing her fragile, slender body with Sally’s almost voluptuously feminine shape, she admitted that it was no wonder that Chris should prefer the open sensuality of Sally’s body to the fine-boned thinness of hers.

      James had commented derisively on her lack of feminine curves only the previous Christmas, when they’d had their obligatory dance together at the firm’s Christmas party. His hands had spanned her waist completely and he’d taunted her with the fact that her body was more that of a girl than of a woman.

      ‘Just another indication of your reluctance to grow up and accept life as it really is,’ had been his sardonic comment.

      ‘I am adult; I’m twenty-two years old,’ Poppy had countered angrily.

      ‘On the outside,’ James had agreed, ‘but inside you’re still an adolescent clinging to a self-created fantasy. You don’t have an inkling of what real life is all about, Poppy...real emotions... real men.’

      She had denied his comments, of course, but it hadn’t made any difference.

      It hadn’t always been like this between them; they hadn’t always shared an enmity which seemed to deepen and harden with the years instead of relaxing and easing.

      As a child she had adored James. He had then been the one who had rescued her from Chris’s teasing, the one who had patiently taught her to ride her first bike, fly her first kite, the one who had mopped up her tears when she’d fallen off the former and over the strings of the latter.

      But all that had changed when she was twelve and had fallen in love with Chris. James’s good-humoured, elder-cousin indulgence of her had turned to contemptuous hostility once he had recognised her feelings for Chris, and she had reciprocated with a fury and dislike which had grown over the years instead of abating.

      The last thing she wanted to do, she admitted to herself as she dressed quickly in her working ‘uniform’ of cream silk shirt and straight skirt of her taupe suit, was to spend the next four days exposed to James’s contempt and hostility, but it was not in her nature to take the cowardly way out of refusing to go; she took her job too seriously for that.

      The actual translation work she did might not be enough to keep her busy eight hours a day, five days a week, Poppy acknowledged, but a look around at the kind of job her peers had been СКАЧАТЬ