“What happened last night...

“It didn’t... I didn’t... I thought you were Chris... I was dreaming about him and when... You must have known that I would never... That...”

Poppy stopped abruptly as she saw the dangerous warning expression on James’s face, her stomach dropping sickeningly as she realized how angry he was.

“Go on,” he invited her softly. “You were saying that you thought I was Chris, that you were dreaming about Chris, but you weren’t asleep when we made love, were you, Poppy? You knew very well who it was, who was holding you...touching you, pleasuring you,” he told her tauntingly, “even if you do claim now that you wanted it to be my brother....”

Dear Reader,

What is more natural than a bride wanting her closest friends also to find happiness in love? For Sally, this means tricking three of her wedding guests into catching her bouquet! Three women, each very different, but all with their own reasons for never wanting to marry. That is why they agree to a pact to stay single, but just how long will it take for the bouquet to begin its magic?

Penny Jordan has worked her magic on these three linked stories. One of Mills & Boon’s most successful and popular authors, she has written three compelling romances—all complete stories in themselves—that follow the lives—and loves—of Claire, Poppy and Star. Best Man to Wed? is Poppy’s story. She is the close cousin of Sally’s new husband, and she is devastated at having lost the man she wanted to marry—and Poppy hardly needs the best man telling her to grow up and find herself a real man!

THE BRIDE’S BOUQUET—three women make a

pact to stay single, but one by one they fall, seduced

by the power of love

Look out for Star’s story in

Too Wise to Wed? July 1997

Mills & Boon Presents #1895

Best Man to Wed?

Penny Jordan

www.millsandboon.co.uk

Table of Contents

Cover

“What happened last night…

Dear Reader

Title Page

PROLOGUE

CHAPTER ONE

CHAPTER TWO

CHAPTER THREE

CHAPTER FOUR

CHAPTER FIVE

CHAPTER SIX

CHAPTER SEVEN

CHAPTER EIGHT

CHAPTER NINE

EPILOGUE

Copyright

PROLOGUE

POPPY CARLTON stared mournfully across the now empty garden, furiously trying to blink away her tears.

It seemed only yesterday that she and Chris used to play here. She had been happy then, never thinking that there might come a day when she and her cousin would not be so close, a day when someone else, another woman, would become the main focus of his life, his time, his future, his love.

Fresh tears brimmed and welled over. Poppy dashed them away with the back of her hand.

She had known for months, of course, that Chris and Sally were going to marry, but somehow, until the actual day of the wedding, she had gone on... What? Hoping that he would change his mind, that he would look at her, love her as a woman and not just as a cousin?

‘Your turn next,’ Chris had laughed affectionately at her as she had leapt forward with Claire, Sally’s stepmother, and Star, her closest friend, to catch the bouquet which Sally had dropped as she’d slipped on the stairs.

Her turn next. Impossible. She would never marry now. How could she when the man she loved, the only man she had ever loved or ever would love, was lost to her?

And of course her other cousin, James, Chris’s elder brother and best man, would have to have witnessed the whole thing—the falling bouquet, her instinctive attempt to save it along with Claire and Star, and, worst of all, the compassion and, humiliatingly, the relief as well in Chris’s eyes as he had made some cumbersome joke about her at least waiting until he and Sally had returned from their honeymoon before fulfilling the traditional prophecy that went with the catching of the bride’s bouquet.

Oh, yes, James had seen all of that and predictably had made no attempt to spare her the full force of his cynical denunciation of her feelings as he had told her, ‘Grow up, Poppy; grow up and wise up. It would never have worked; the pair of you would have been in the divorce courts within a year if Chris had ever been fool enough to take you up on what you’re so pathetically desperate to give him.’

‘You don’t know that,’ Poppy had spat back angrily. ‘You don’t anything.’

‘Oh, no,’ James had mocked her softly. ‘You don’t know what I know.’ He had added, ‘And if you did...’ He had paused, smiling nastily at her before challenging her with, ‘Of course, if you ever feel like finding out...’

‘I hate you, James,’ Poppy had retaliated passionately.

No, she would never marry now, and all Sally’s determined attempt to engineer it so that she was one of the trio to catch the bridal bouquet had done was reinforce that fact.

CHAPTER ONE

SLOWLY, gravely, Poppy knelt in front of the bonfire that she had just constructed, oblivious to the damp seeping into the knees of her jeans, the dying rays of the evening sunlight turning her silky brown hair a dark, rich red and illuminating her in a beam of light as, head bowed, she carefully struck a match with such seriousness that she might have been igniting a funeral pyre.

Which in effect she was, Poppy acknowledged tiredly as she watched the kindling that she had carefully arranged start to burn, flames crackling as they ran from twig to twig, racing towards the wooden trinket box at their heart.

As she stood up Poppy had to dig her hands deep into the pockets of her jeans to prevent herself pulling the kindling aside and snatching the box to safety.

It was over, she told herself mercilessly, closing her eyes, unable to look, unable to watch almost a whole decade of ceaseless devotion and love being eaten up by flames. A sharp breeze sprang up out of nowhere, ruffling the silky curtain of her hair, scattering sparks from the fire, whirling-dervish-like, amongst its flames, teasing them, snatching from them a handful of photographs, most of them charred beyond recognition, only one of them still recognisable, the pale pink lipstick shape of her own mouth imprinted brightly across its surface.

Tears stung Poppy’s eyes, her heart twisting and aching with anguish as her emotions overcame her will-power and she stretched out helplessly to clasp the photograph which fate, it seemed, had decreed that she should not destroy.

As Chris’s beloved features swam before her, tears filled her eyes and she missed the photograph, the wind whirling it out of reach. With a small cry, Poppy tried to pursue it, but someone else reached it before her, taking it from the breeze’s playful grasp with mocking ease, a taunting expression crossing his saturnine face as he looked at it and then back at her.

‘James!’ Poppy said his name with loathing as he came down the garden towards her, still holding her photograph.

James might be her beloved, darling Chris’s elder brother and her cousin but no two men could have been more unalike, Poppy reflected bitterly as James stopped walking and studied her bonfire.

Whereas Chris was all sunny smiles, warmth and laughter, good natured, easygoing, an open, uncomplicated individual whom it had all been too heart-breakingly easy for her to fall in love with, James was just the opposite.

James rarely smiled, or at least not at her, and James was most certainly not good-natured, nor easygoing and certainly not uncomplicated; even those who liked and approved of. him, such as her mother, were forced to admit that he was not always the easiest person in the world to deal with.

‘It’s because he had to step into his father’s shoes whilst he was still so young,’ her mother always said in his defence.

‘He was only twenty when Howard died, after all, and he had to take full responsibility for looking after his mother and Chris, as well as the business.’

Her mother had to defend James because he was her nephew. Poppy knew that but she hated him, loathed him, and she knew that he reciprocated those feelings even if he cloaked his in a more urbane and taunting mockery towards her than she could ever achieve towards him. It shocked her that people who didn’t really know them always claimed that of the two brothers James was by far the better looking...

‘He’s very, very dangerously sexy,’ one of the girls who worked for the small family company which James had taken over on his father’s death had told her.

According to her mother, by hard work and dedication he had built the company into something far more impressive than it had ever been during his father’s day.

‘I’ll just bet he’s a real once-in-a-lifetime experience in bed,’ the girl had added forthrightly.

Poppy had shuddered to listen to her, thinking that if she really knew what James was like, how cruel and hard he could be, she wouldn’t think that. Personally Poppy couldn’t think of any man she’d want less as a lover, but then there was only one man that Poppy wanted to fulfil that role in her life...in her heart...in her bed, and there always had been.

She had been twelve years old, a girl just on the brink of womanhood, when she had looked across the table at her first semi-grown-up birthday party and fallen head over heels in love with Chris. And she had gone on loving him and hoping, praying, longing for him to love her in return, not just as his cousin but as a woman ... the woman. Only he hadn’t done so.

Instead he had fallen in love with someone else. Instead he had fallen in love with pretty, funny Sally. Sally, who was now his wife... Sally, whom Poppy couldn’t hate even though she had tried very hard to do so.

Chris and James didn’t even look very much like brothers, if you discounted the fact that they shared the same impressive height and breadth of shoulder, Poppy decided now, watching James in angry resentment. Whereas Chris had the warm good looks of a young sun-god, his floppy brown hair golden at the ends, his eyes the same blue as a warm summer sky, his skin a mouth-watering gold, James looked more demoniac than godlike...

Like Chris, he too had inherited his Italian grandmother’s warm skin colouring, but in James it was somehow harder, more aggressively masculine, bronzer than Chris’s softer gold, just as his eyes were a far harder and colder nerve-freezing light aqua—the kind of eyes that could chill your blood to ice from three metres away if they chose. His hair, too, was much darker than Chris’s—not black but certainly very dark brown, with dark flecks of burnt gold that gleamed like amber in the sunlight.

Poppy was not a complete fool; she could see that physically some women might be drawn to a man of James’s type, and that of his type, perhaps, as the girl at work had said, he was an outstanding example, but she could never find him attractive. There was his temper, an ice-cold, rapier-sharp, humiliatingly effective weapon of destruction onto which she had run in furious, blind hotheadedness more times than she could bear to remember, and his sarcasm, which could rip your pride to shreds like the mountain cougar’s velvet-sheathed claws.

‘What the hell is going on?’ he demanded now as he walked towards her.

Mutinously Poppy glowered at him. He hadn’t looked at the photograph as yet and she itched to demand its return, her stomach muscles cramping with tension.

‘Mum and Dad are out,’ she told him ungraciously. ‘There’s only me here...’

‘It’s you I wanted to see,’ James told her urbanely, walking past her to squat down on his heels and study her bonfire.

Why was it, Poppy thought, watching warily, that such an action by any other man dressed as James was now—in an expensive, immaculately tailored business suit, highly polished shoes and a pristine white shirt—would have immediately rendered him ridiculous, but made James look completely the opposite? And why, she demanded irritably of life, should the bonfire—her bonfire—deposit its unwanted windborne detritus of smoke and sooty smudges in her direction and not his?

Life just wasn’t fair...

Fresh tears smarted in her eyes. Hastily she blinked them away just as she heard James commenting sardonically, ‘What exactly is the purpose of all this self-sacrifice Poppy? Not, one trusts, some immature and ignoble hope that out of the ashes of this maudlin act a new and stronger love for Chris will rise, like a phoenix, only this time one that he shares, because if so—’

‘Of course not,’ Poppy denied swiftly, too shocked by his contemptuous accusation to pretend not to understand what he meant—or to deny the purpose of the bonfire.

It was typical, of course; only James could make that kind of assumption about her motivation for doing something; only James would accuse her so unfairly.

‘If you must know,’ she told him bitterly, ‘I was trying to do what you’ve been telling me I should do for years, and that is to accept that Chris doesn’t... that he never—’ She broke off, swallowing hard as her emotions threatened to overwhelm her.

‘Damn you to hell, James,’ she swore shakily. ‘This has nothing to do with you... and you have no right—’

‘I am Chris’s brother,’ he reminded her crisply, ‘and as such it’s my brotherly duty to protect him and his marriage from—’

‘From what?’ Poppy demanded shakily. ‘From me...?’ Bitterly she started to laugh. ‘From me,’ she repeated. ‘From my love—’

‘Your love!’ James interrupted her, his mouth twisting. ‘You don’t even begin to know the meaning of the word. In the eyes of the world you might be a mature woman of twenty-two, but inside you’re still an adolescent,’ he told her crushingly, ‘with all the danger to yourself and to others that that implies.’

‘I am not an adolescent,’ Poppy denied furiously, angry flags of temper burning in her cheeks.

‘The way you can’t control your emotions says that you are,’ James corrected her coldly. ‘And, like an adolescent,’ he continued bitingly, ‘you positively enjoy wallowing in your self-induced misery, the self-aggrandised “love” you claim you feel for Chris. But you, of course, being you, have to drag everyone else into the plot as well.’

‘That’s not true,’ Poppy gasped furiously. ‘You—’

‘It is true,’ James told her grimly. ‘Look at the way you behaved at the wedding... Do you think that a single person there didn’t know .what you were doing, or how you felt?’

‘I wasn’t doing anything,’ Poppy protested, her face as white now as it had been red before.

‘Yes, you were,’ James told her. ‘You were trying to make Chris feel guilty and to make everyone else feel sorry for you. Well, it isn’t people’s pity you deserve, Poppy...it’s their contempt. If you really loved Chris—really loved him—you’d put his happiness before your own selfish, self-induced misery.

‘You claim that you’re not an adolescent any longer, that you’re an adult. Well, try behaving like one,’ James told her witheringly.

‘You have no right to speak to me like that,’ Poppy told him chokingly. ‘You have no idea how I feel or what—’

She froze as James burst out laughing—a harsh, contemptuous sound that splintered the early evening air.

‘No idea...? My dear Poppy, the whole town knows how you feel.’

Poppy stared at him.

‘Nothing to say?’ he jeered.

Poppy swallowed painfully. People did know how she felt about Chris. She couldn’t deny that, but not because she had deliberately flaunted her feelings to make Chris feel guilty, as James had so unfairly claimed.

It was simply that she had been so young when she had first fallen in love with Chris that it had been impossible for her to keep her feelings hidden, and she had loved him so long that people were bound to have noticed. But she had never, ever, as James was claiming, used her feelings to try to manipulate Chris, or, indeed, anyone else, into feeling sorry for her.

Of course, she deplored the fact that people were aware of her love for Chris—why else on the evening when he and Sally had broken the news of their engagement to the family had she made a silent vow that somehow she had to find a way to stop loving him?

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.

‘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

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 forced to take—some of them with much better degrees than her own-had made her determined to prove her worth to the business; an evening course in computer technology had turned out to be a wise investment of her time, as had her determination to involve herself in the administrative side of the business.

To some, such work might have seemed mundane, but Poppy felt it had given her a working knowledge and an insight into the running of the company which would be just as valuable on any future CV she needed to prepare as her language skills and her degree.

The overnight bag which she had packed the night before was downstairs in the hall. Picking up her suit jacket she studied her reflection in her bedroom mirror critically.

Her hair, soft and straight, made her look younger than she actually was, she knew, but she was loath to have it cut. Chris had once told her that he thought long hair on a woman was incredibly feminine. Sally, though, oddly enough, had a short, almost boyish crop of blonde curls.

Her features didn’t lend themselves well to exaggerated make-up and her skin was too pale, she decided critically. Her eyes, her best feature, were large and almond-shaped and fringed with thick dark lashes which looked ridiculous when loaded down with mascara. Her nose was short and straight, and her mouth, in her view, was an odd mismatch, her top lip well shaped and moderately curved whilst her bottom lip was wider and fuller, somehow giving her mouth a sensuality which she personally found distressing and which she always tried to play down with a softly coloured matt lipstick.

So far the early spring weather had been unseasonably fine and warm and her skin had begun to lose its winter pallor, but she had still slipped on stockings beneath her skirt. Bare legs, no matter how blissfully cool, did not, in her opinion, look properly businesslike.

Downstairs she made herself a cup of coffee and a slice of toast which she knew she wouldn’t eat. Her stomach was already churning nervously. She had never particularly liked flying.

James and Chris’s father, her uncle, had been a keen amateur pilot who had been killed with a friend when they had flown into a freak electric storm. She remembered how devastated Chris had been at his father’s death. They had cried over it together, sharing their grief. James, on the other hand, had retreated into grim, white-faced silence—a remote stranger, or so it had seemed to Poppy, who’d looked contemptuously upon her and Chris’s shared emotional grief.

She heard James’s car just as she was swallowing her last mouthful of coffee. Quickly putting down her cup she hurried out into the hall, pulling on her jacket and picking up her handbag and case as she went to open the door. Like her, James was dressed formally in a business suit, not navy for once but a lightweight pale grey which somehow emphasised his height and the breadth of his shoulders.

As he took her case from her, Poppy saw the brief, assessing glance he gave her and her chin started to tilt challengingly as she waited for him to make some critical or derogatory comment, but instead, disconcertingly, she suddenly became aware that his original scrutiny had turned into something a little more thorough and startlingly more male as his eyes lingered on the soft curves of her breasts.

It was the kind of inspection that Poppy was used to from other men; that telling but, generally speaking, acceptably discreet male awareness of her as a woman. But to be subjected to it by James ... James who’d sternly reprimanded his younger brother when Chris had teasingly commented on her new shape the first day she had self-consciously worn the pretty, flower-sprigged cotton bra that her mother had gravely agreed that her eleven-year-old’s barely thirty-inch c hest demanded.

Seeing James focus on that same chest in such a very male and sensual way when for years Poppy could have sworn that he was totally oblivious to the fact that she had grown from a child to a woman was a very disconcerting experience.

Somehow just managing to resist the temptation to tug the edges of her jacket protectively together, Poppy gave him an angry glare. How would he like it if she focused on... a certain part of his body in that way.

‘Have you got everything?’ she heard him ask her before her brain could come up with an answer to her own question. ‘Tickets, passport, money...?’

‘Of course,’ Poppy responded, grittily withholding the angry comment she wanted to make. This was a business trip to Italy, she reminded herself grimly, and she intended to preserve a businesslike distance between them, if only to prove to James that she was not the adolescent child he constantly taunted her as being.

Outside, his Jaguar gleamed richly in the early morning sunshine. As he opened the passenger door for her, Poppy could smell the rich, expensive scent of the car’s leather seats. Chris and her mother, who, like James, were directors and shareholders in the company, drove cars with far less status and the urge to remind James of this fact was irresistible as he slid into the driver’s seat next to her and started the car.

‘Very nice,’ she commented, smoothing the cream leather with her fingertips. ‘A perk of the job, I presume...?’

‘No, as a matter of fact, it isn’t,’ James shocked her by denying as he swung the car into the traffic. ‘It’s time you brought yourself up to date with current tax laws, Poppy,’ he told her acidly. ‘Even if I wanted to make use of my...connection with the company to my own financial advantage, the current tax penalties involved in owning an expensive company car would prohibit me from doing so.’

Poppy could feel her face start to burn as she interpreted the message in the first part of his statement. Unlike her, he did not have to benefit from his connection with the company, he was implying.

Resentment burned angrily in Poppy’s chest. Was she never going to be judged on her own merits, instead of being condemned because of her mother’s position as a shareholder? How would James like it if she pointed out to him that the only reason he was the company’s chairman was because of his father?

Poppy moved irritably against the restriction of her seat belt, all too aware of how easily James could refute such an accusation. Although he had the reputation within the company of being a demanding employer, noone disputed the fact that the company’s present success was due to his hard work. And no matter how much he might demand of those who worked for him it was never any more than he demanded of himself.

The traffic was starting to build up as they got closer to the airport and already Poppy’s stomach was beginning to clench nervously as she anticipated what lay ahead. It was the moment of take-off she dreaded most; once that was over it was easier for her to relax.

The spot in Italy where the conference was being held was three hours’ drive from the airport, which meant, Poppy suspected, that they would be spending the better part of the day travelling. She had brought some work with her to keep her occupied during the Sight—and to ensure that she didn’t have to talk to James—but she couldn’t help wistfully reflecting how different things would have been if her travelling companion had been Chris... a Chris who was not married to Sally or anyone else, a Chris who—

Stop it, she warned herself sternly. He is married to Sally and you’ve got to stop thinking about him... stop loving him...

As she quickly blinked away the weak tears she could feel threatening her, she heard James say sardonically, ‘Poor Poppy, still hopelessly--in love with a man who doesn’t want her. Why do I get the impression it’s a role you actively enjoy playing?’ he asked her savagely, the harshness in his voice shocking her almost as much as the cruelty of his accusation.

‘That’s not true,’ she denied chokily.

‘That’s not the impression I get;’ James said to her as he negotiated the maze of slip-roads that led to the car park. ‘In fact I’d say the role of self-pitying lover is one you’ve embraced with far more enthusiasm than you appear to have had for embracing real love.’

Poppy’s face burned hotly as he parked the car and opened his door. She wasn’t going to dignify his comments by responding to them... or defending herself, she told herself fiercely. Nor was she going to let James see how much they had hurt her.

‘It’s no wonder that Chris prefers to take a real woman to bed,’ James told her cruelly as he opened her door for her and waited like a gaoler for her to get out.

I am a real woman, Poppy wanted to protest. Just as real as Sally, just as capable of giving love, of inciting passion and desire. But was she? Was there something inherently feminine and desirable in Sally that was missing from her? Was she somehow lacking in that vital ingredient that made a woman lovable and desirable?

All the doubts about herself and her sexuality which had sprung into life with the news of Chris’s engagement to Sally and which she had rigorously and fiercely ignored and denied suddenly rose up inside her, a fully armed enemy force which James’s words had carelessly set free from the prison in which she had concealed them.

Did he know about the fears, the insecurities about her sexuality that these last months had brought? Poppy wondered numbly as she waited for him to remove their cases from the boot of his car.

How could he? It was impossible. He was simply trying to goad her, to hurt her, to provoke a reaction from her which would enable him to reinforce his condemnation of her as immature and foolish.

Quite what his purpose was in doing this Poppy didn’t really know, had never really questioned. The enmity which had developed between them had grown alongside her love for Chris until she’d accepted it in the same way that she had accepted that love. But, despite the fact that Chris’s marriage had now forced her to accept that she had to find a way of severing herself from the past and finding another focus for her life, of accepting that Chris could never be a part of that life in the way she had so much hoped, it seemed that since the wedding James’s antagonism to her had simply increased.

Why? Was he perhaps trying to force her into leaving the company? Was his desire to hurt her, to undermine her... to destroy her... to do with the business, or something more personal?

James had locked the car and was waiting impatiently for her to join him.

These next four days were going to be the longest of her life, Poppy reflected.

‘You can relax now; we’re airborne...’

The sound of James’s voice in her ear made Poppy open her tightly closed eyes, her pent-up breath leaking in a relieved sigh from her lungs as she recognised the truth of what he was saying.

Having shudderingly refused the window-seat that James had offered her, she had fastened her seat belt and willed herself not to give in to her childhood need to have a familiar hand to cling to as the plane had taxied down the runway and started to lift off.

At least she had managed not to do that, although... Surreptitiously she slowly released the tense fingers she had not been able to stop herself from curling into the immaculate smoothness of James’s suit jacket—and not just James’s suit jacket, she acknowledged uncomfortably, but James’s very solidly muscled arm as well.

His dry ‘Thank you, Poppy’ as she tried to remove her hand from his arm without him noticing what she had done made her flush guiltily and avoid looking at him.

Did he never feel afraid? she wondered bitterly. Did nothing ever dent that iron self-control of his? Had no one ever made him ache... hurt ...yearn for her so much that nothing else ... noone else mattered?

If anyone had, she had certainly never been aware of it, Poppy thought, but then she had been too involved in her own feelings to pay much attention to anyone else.

As always, now that they were actually airborne, her fear left her, her body starting to relax...

She refused the drink that the stewardess offered her and reached for her case and the work she had brought with her. James, she noticed, was already engrossed in some papers which he had removed from his briefcase. Well, at least whilst his attention was on them he wouldn’t be able to pick on her, she decided with relief.

‘Oh, James, just look at that view,’ Poppy breathed, unable to keep the awed delight from her voice as she stared through their hire-car window at the panorama spread before them.

Transport had been arranged from the airport to the conference centre, but James had opted to make his own arrangements and independently hire a car, and Poppy had felt no trepidation at the thought of travelling with him, since she knew that not only was he a very safe driver but that he was also familiar with Italian roads.

The thought of spending three hours shut up in a car with only him for company had been a different matter and until they had started to climb into the mountains she had resolutely occupied herself with her own thoughts rather than try to engage him in any conversation. Conversations with James, she had decided bitterly, always seemed to lead to the same place-to them arguing.

Pride and her awareness of how unsympathetic and antagonistic towards her he was had prevented her from trying to defend herself by telling him that loving Chris had become a burden she desperately wanted to remove from her life.

Had they had a different relationship, had they been closer, had she felt able to trust him, to turn to him for help, she might have been able to admit to him how much she longed to have someone to confide in, someone to whom she could talk about her feelings and her guilt at her own inability to leave behind a love she knew could only cause her pain. If things had been different ... if he had been different... if he had still been the same James he had been when she had been a child... But he wasn’t, and somewhere, somehow, the cousinly love that he had once felt for her had gone.

Her determination not to give him any opportunity to criticise or condemn her whilst they were alone by keeping silent and aloof from him had disintegrated, though, as the road had started to wind through the ancient chain of mountains, taking them through small villages and dusty towns in whose Renaissance squares Poppy could very easily visualise the richly liveried rnen-at-arms who, along with the princes who had once commanded them, had fought over the prizes of the fertile plains below them.

Today, the towns were tranquil, only their architecture a reminder of the past turbulence and turmoil, the scenery around them so spectacular that it bewitched Poppy into forgetting her vow of silence to exclaim over its beauty.

James, of course, was bound to be less impressed, Poppy recognised; he had relatives in Tuscany and Rome and was no stranger to the beauty of Italy’s countryside, nor her architecture. And Poppy told herself that she ought not to feel rather like a child told off for a crime it hadn’t committed when James turned his head to look at her in response to her impulsive comment and said tautly, ‘But no doubt a view which you would enjoy far more if it was my brother you were seeing it with. Too bad that Chris doesn’t share your enthusiasm. He’s a modern city man, Poppy—something else he and Sally share, something else you and he don’t,’ he told her unkindly.

Poppy said nothing, turning her head away so that James couldn’t see the quick, betraying sheen of tears filming her eyes.

She knew, of course, that Chris did not share her love of history... of the past... of the awesomeness of nature, as James had just said, and as Chris himself was the first to cheerfully admit.

Nor did she intend to defend herself by contradicting James’s comment or by telling him that he was wrong and that, oddly enough, she had not actually been wishing that Chris were in the car beside her.

She hadn’t...but now she did, and with such heart-aching in tensity that she was almost swamped by her misery.

Thank heavens it couldn’t be much further to the hotel, she thought. She closed her eyes and leaned back in her seat, keeping her face turned towards the window and averted from James.

Four days, four times twenty-four hours... She gave an involuntary shudder. Please God, let them pass quickly, she prayed.

‘Poppy.’

Sleepily Poppy opened her eyes and eased her aching body into a more comfortable position when she realised that the car had come to a halt and that they had reached their destination.

The hotel, as she had read in the brochure, had originally been a medieval fortress built by an Italian prince, set high up in the mountains to guard his territories, but leading about it had not prepared her for the raw magnificence of a structure which seemed to be carved out of the rock itself, rising up steeply from the walled courtyard in which they were now parked.

Even though she knew that the original fortress was now just a shell which had been used to house a far more modern and luxurious centre, Poppy felt awestruck and faintly intimidated by the sheer, stark rise of the stone edifice in front of her, which was softened only slightly by its mantle of ivy and roses.

The palazzo had been used as a private home for several centuries, abandoned only when it had been commandeered by the German army during the Second World War, and Poppy knew that in addition to the luxurious state rooms which had now been adapted to form the hotel’s reception rooms the original Italian water garden had been restored to working order and restocked with the varieties of roses and other plants with which it would originally have been adorned.

And yet, despite knowing just how luxurious the spa promised to be and being hit by the heat of the sunshine when she stepped out of the car, unable to remove her gaze from the sheer sweep of rock from which the outer wall of the fortress had been cut, Poppy couldn’t quite repress a small shiver.

‘Not the kind of place you’d want to be incarcerated in as a prisoner,’ she heard James saying behind her, his comment so exactly mirroring her own thoughts that she turned towards him in surprise as he added drily, ‘I wouldn’t give much for anyone’s chance of escaping from here.’

‘No.’ Poppy agreed bleakly. A prisoner would probably have about as much chance of escaping from such a place as she had of escaping James over the next few days.

The car park was starting to fill up rapidly with other arrivals. Picking up their cases, James touched Poppy briefly on the shoulder.

‘Reception seems to be that way. Let’s go and get booked in before it develops into too much of a scrum.’

Once inside the hotel, the austere, almost forbidding impression of the fortress as a prison was totally banished by the breathtaking luxury of the reception area, a huge, vaulted room illuminated by crystal chandeliers, the walls decorated with glowingly rich frescos. Only a room this vast could take such an abundance of gold, crimson and blue, Poppy acknowledged dizzily as she followed James towards the central reception desk.

Immaculately groomed girls, in suits as understated as their surroundings were ornate, busied themselves dealing with the rapid influx of guests, and Poppy was cynically amused to see that James, who was in fact behind three other men trying to claim one girl’s attention, received the full wattage of her very alluring smile whilst they were totally ignored.

Poppy had always known that other women found her elder cousin attractive. She could even remember how, in the days before she had fallen in love with Chris, she had actually felt angry and jealous herself if he paid her schoolfriends more attention than he did her, but those days were gone now, and even though she registered the assessing look the receptionist gave her as James leant over the desk to speak to the girl and handed her their passports she was not affected by it. The receptionist was welcome to him. She gave a small shudder. She could think of nothing more loathsome... noone more...

She tensed as she suddenly realised what the receptionist was saying to James, and hurried towards him, demanding angrily, ‘What does she mean, our room?’

The girl was already reaching behind her to hand James a pass-key. A key, Poppy noticed in disbelief.

‘James...’ she urged, but James had already anticipated her and was turning back to the receptionist, telling her in swift, fluent Italian that there appeared to have been a mistake, and that they required two separate rooms.

‘No,’ the girl denied, shaking her head, picking up their passports and a list she had in front of her. She read out carefully, ‘Mr and Mrs Carlton,’ and then said, first to Poppy, ‘You are Mrs Carlton,’ and then to James, ‘and you Mr Carlton.’

‘I am Poppy Carlton,’ Poppy confirmed, ‘but I am not his wife. We are not married... I am not... his wife,’ she emphasised.

When the receptionist continued to gaze blankly at her, she turned angrily to James, appealing, ‘You tell her, James. Explain... make her understand.’

How could such a mistake have been made? Poppy fumed as she stood back whilst James quickly explained to the receptionist the misunderstanding which seemed to have occurred and asked her to change their booking from one double room to two singles.

Chris’s secretary had made the original bookings. She was comfortably middle-aged and extremely efficient and Poppy couldn’t believe that she could have made such a mistake. The receptionist had summoned the duty manager at James’s request and James was now explaining the situation to him and reiterating the fact that they required two separate rooms.

The duty manager shrugged and shook his head. ‘That, I am afraid, is not possible,’ he told James. ‘The hotel is fully booked for the conference, every room already taken...’

‘But they must have somewhere... some room,’ Poppy gasped as she heard what he was saying.

‘None; there is nowhere,’ the duty manager repeated firmly.

‘Then we’ll just have to find somewhere else to stay,’ Poppy burst out.

Her face flushed beneath the withering look that James gave her as he asked her sardonically, ‘Where exactly did you have in mind? The nearest town is forty miles away.’

‘Then...then I’ll just have to...to sleep in the car,’ Poppy asserted wildly. ’I—’

‘For four days?’ James gave her a derisive look. ‘Don’t be so ridiculous...’

‘James, you can’t let them do this,’ Poppy protested as the duty manager turned away from them to deal with the harassed-looking courier in charge of a party of Japanese businessmen who, from what Poppy could hear of their agitated conversation, had lost not just some luggage en route but one member of their party as well. ‘Do something.’

‘Such as?’ James asked, gesturing to the now packed reception area and the press of people demanding attention from the receptionists.

‘You’ve attended conferences before; you know what they’re like,’ he pointed out. ‘The rule is if it can go wrong it will...’

‘Maybe, but it’s never gone wrong before,’ Poppy seethed. ‘How can they make a mistake like that...? There must be something you can do... Offer to pay them extra... to...’

‘Poppy,’ James told her, speaking slowly and patiently as though she were a child too young to grasp what he was saying. ‘There are no empty rooms. Believe me. I just heard one of the receptionists telling another that she’s already been forced to give up her staff room and share with someone else on another shift because of overbooking. Believe me, it’s either this room or nothing.’

It was on the tip of Poppy’s tongue to tell him that if that was the case then there was no way she was staying. But then she-remembered how much James would relish her giving him an opportunity to prove how unprofessional she really was and she forced the impulsive words back.

James, taking her acceptance for granted, was already signing the register and taking possession of their pass-cards.

‘We might as well find our own way,’ he told Poppy. ‘God knows how long we’d have to wait for a porter.’

Like her, James was only carrying a briefcase and an overnight bag. She just hoped that the hotel’s laundry facilities were better organised and more reliable than its booking system, she reflected angrily as she followed James towards the nearest bank of lifts.

The modern part of the complex had been built around an atrium and as the lift took them upwards they could look down past the open balconies to the greenery and splashing fountains below them.

Although the complex had been given the title of spa it did not actually possess any natural hot springs or spa waters of its own, the term, Poppy suspected, being used in a slightly looser sense to embrace the fact that it offered a wide range of self-indulgent treatments and dietary regimes and holistic alternative therapies.

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