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From now on, for the rest of her life, no matter what else might happen to her, each and every time she looked at James she was going to remember just what had happened between them and how she...
‘I don’t care what it takes or where I have to sleep tonight—I am not going to share that bed with you again,’ she told him shakily.
The smile he gave her was as cruel as a hunting wolf‘s—a baring of his teeth almost that made her feel that he would like nothing more than to savage and destroy her.
‘What’s wrong?’ he asked her silkily. ‘Afraid that you might discover that it isn’t really Chris you want after all and that your body—?’
‘No...’ Poppy denied quickly—too quickly? she wondered miserably as she saw the look in James’s eyes. That wasn’t the reason why she didn’t want to share that bed with him for a second night, she reassured herself as she made her way down to the conference hall. Of course it wasn’t. How could it be?
She knew that it was another man she had really wanted, another body she had really yearned and ached for even if...even though...
She swallowed painfully, unable to deny the unwanted and tormentingly vivid memory she had of looking into James’s eyes, of knowing who he was and still wanting, still saying...
‘Hey, are you all right?’
Poppy realised that she had actually closed her eyes and walked right into Gunther as she heard the concern in the young German’s voice and opened them to see him looking anxiously at her.
‘I’m sorry,’ she apologised huskily. ‘I was just thinking about... something...’
‘There is no need to apologise,’ he told her with a charming smile. ‘I was indeed hoping that I might have the chance to talk with you today—’
‘Don’t tell me you want my services as a linguist?’ Poppy teased, responding to the warmth in his smile and only too glad to have something, someone to take her mind off James and the appalling events of the previous night. ‘If you do, I certainly shan’t believe you,’ she added. ‘Your English is very good.’
‘No...not that,’ he assured her. ‘What I wanted to ask was if you would have dinner with me this evening...’
Have dinner with him. Poppy gave him a bewitchingly dazzling smile.
‘I’d love to,’ she told him fervently and honestly. Anything, she felt; right now she would be grateful for anything and anyone who kept her away from James.
‘Poppy, if you’ve quite finished socialising...’
James’s voice cracked between them like a whip, making Poppy spin round guiltily, her nervous, ‘James,’ causing Gunther to look slightly puzzled as he watched her.
‘We are here to work,’ James reminded her curtly. ‘I’ve got a meeting with a consortium of Japanese buyers in fifteen minutes and I’ll need you there to translate, and there are several points I need to run through with you first.’
‘I’ll be with you in a moment, James,’ Poppy told him, trying to stand her ground instead of tamely giving in to the command she had heard in his voice.
She might be his cousin and an employee of the company but she was still her own person, still had her rights. Tilting her chin, she looked away from him and back to Gunther and told him clearly, ‘I’d love to have dinner with you tonight, Gunther. Would eight o’clock be all right...?’
Instead of walking away and giving her the privacy to complete her conversation with the young German, James had waited for her like a jailer, determined not to let her get away, she decided angrily as she fell into step beside him and they made their way through the crush towards their own stand.
‘If it’s his bed you’re thinking of sharing tonight, Poppy,’ James warned her cynically as he took hold of her arm and guided her through the surging throng, ‘I should warn you that you won’t get much privacy, nor much bed space. The hotel management have already had to put an extra bed in the room he’s booked into as a result of their overbooking!’
‘How dare you say that?’ Poppy hissed furiously at him, her face burning. She couldn’t bear the way he was making her feel so... so cheap... so... ‘Just because... just because I... Just because of what happened last night,’ she told him in a breathless rush, ‘that doesn’t mean that I’m now going to go to... to have sex with... with anyone...’
‘Really? You do surprise me...’ James told her sardonically. ‘After all, if you haven’t got the scruples not to use one man in place of another, I shouldn’t have thought—’
Smack!
Through the tears clouding her eyes, Poppy could see the hazy dark red outline of her open-handed slap against the lean tautness of James’s face. She stared at it in shocked, silent horror, unable to believe what she had done, unable to believe the anger, the lack of self-control, the sheer weight of misery and self-disgust which had driven her to overreact in such a way.
As the crowd pressed and surged around them, she was conscious only of James and the frightening stillness of his body, the icy coldness of his eyes, the tension of the coiled strength within him that menaced and held her in paralysed thrall.
‘How very predictable and old-fashioned of you,’ he told her softly, at last. ‘But I’ve got news for you, Poppy. As an innocent and appallingly inexperienced virgin you might just...just have been able to get away with such outdated and sexually stereotyped behaviour, but since you can’t any longer lay claim to your mummified virginal state it’s time you learned that physical violence from a woman to a man can do a lot more than just get his adrenalin pumping...and that, in the language of sex, it can be a big come-on, as much an indication of desire as verbally saying to a man that you want him...’
‘No!’ Poppy asserted. Her face felt stiff, wooden, numb, so that it was almost impossible for her lips to frame the small, vehement denial.
‘Yes,’ James insisted softly. ‘Oh, yes, Poppy—and before you start making any more denials you might also think about this. Even in the days when it was acceptable for a woman to slap a man’s face, it was a weapon she used knowing that it was a two-edged sword—that the man in question might take it as the rebuke she intended but that he might retaliate by assuaging the blow to his pride by inflicting one to hers...’
When he saw the way she was looking at him, James’s mouth twisted contemptuously. ‘Oh, come on, Poppy,’ he derided her. ‘Don’t tell me you’ve never read a book or seen a film where the hero retaliates to the heroine’s slap by taking hold of her and kissing the breath out of her...’
‘That’s just fiction,’ Poppy protested shakily. ‘And besides, you... you aren’t a hero... and...’
‘And you certainly aren’t a heroine?’ James supplied for her. ‘Maybe you’re not, but just try remembering, the next time you feel like venting that nasty temper of yours on me, that I’m fully capable of retaliating and that I know just how to make you wish to hell that you’d had second thoughts...’
‘By kissing me!’ Poppy scorned, outwardly defiant but inwardly shaking with the tension and shock of the intense anger she could feel emanating from him. The
re had been anger between them before, but never anything like this, never anything as dangerous or out of control as the heaviness in the air she could feel vibrating between them now.
‘No,’ James told her quietly, shaking his head. But just as the breath was starting to leak in luxurious relief from her lungs he threw her into an ice-cold yet furnace-hot seizure of sick disbelief as he told her slowly and with obvious relish, ‘No, Poppy, not by kissing you but by taking you upstairs and spreading you out beneath me on the bed and—’
‘What?’ Poppy dared to demand hoarsely as she tried to mask her fear. ‘By raping me?’
The smile he gave her made a violent spasm of tension engulf her body, visibly shaking it whilst he watched her knowingly.
‘Oh, no,’ he told her silkily, ‘it wouldn’t be rape, Poppy, not with you crying out to me that you wanted me, begging me to touch you, to take you, to...’
She was going to faint, Poppy decided. She could already feel the coldness invading her body.
Closing her eyes, she willed the betraying symptoms to subside and not to shame her even more than she had already been shamed.
‘I hate you, James,’ she told her cousin through gritted teeth. ‘I hate you more than I have ever hated anyone else in my life...’
She was desperately tempted to turn and walk away from him, to lose herself in the crowd. It would be easy to do... easy to escape him... but for how long? Ultimately she would have to face him and, with him, the additional taunt not just of what had happened last night but of her lack of professionalism in her work as well.
No, the best way to treat him was to behave with indifference, simply to ignore him, to distance herself completely from him and from what had happened. To close off within her mind the entire episode, to seal it up and bury it somewhere where she would never, ever have to look at it again.
‘And so how are you enjoying the conference?’
Poppy made a wry face as Gunther smiled at her across the dinner table.
