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‘We really ought to go,’ she told Gunther reluctantly.
‘What if I refuse?’ Gunther teased her. ‘What if I say that I want to keep you here for ever and never take you back?’
Even whilst she laughed, Poppy was unable to stop the sadness shadowing her eyes.
Their afternoon had given her a brief respite, but she knew that there was no real escape from her unhappiness, especially not with someone like Gunther, who, nice though he was, was no match for a man like James...
James... Poppy froze. Why should she be connecting her inability to respond to the more intimate overtures that she knew Gunther wanted to make to James? Surely it was her love for Chris that stood between her and any other man who might show an interest in her?
‘Poppy, what is it?’ Gunther asked her hesitantly. ‘You look so... so sad... If you have a worry... a problem... if there is something I can do to help...’
‘No. It’s... There is nothing...’ Poppy denied quickly.
What would Gunther say, what would he think if he knew the truth? What would he think of her then? What would her friends, her family... Chris... think of her, if they knew what had happened with James...? But they would never know, she comforted herself. No one must ever know.
As she stood up and helped Gunther to clear away the remnants of their picnic, anxiety like so many sharp knives caused her darting, stabbing flickers of pain that seemed to pierce her heart and she was filled with a sense of shame, bewilderment and confusion.
How could she have been like that with James... wanted him, urged him? Her hands were trembling as she picked up her jacket.
If only there were some way she could wipe the events of that night from her memory and her conscience... from hers and from James’s.
It was late, Poppy realised once they were back in the car and heading back to the hotel. Later than she had thought, and already growing dark.
It was just as well that she had already eaten, she decided as she glanced at the clock on the car’s dashboard, because they were certainly going to be too late to have dinner.
In the end it was gone ten o‘clock before Gunther finally pulled into the hotel car park; a wrong turning had added several extra miles and almost a full hour to their return journey and Poppy just hoped that James was too preoccupied with his Japanese lady-friend to be aware that she had been playing truant.
. ‘Thank you, it’s been a lovely afternoon,’ she told Gunther quickly, pulling away from him as he made to put his arm around her.
She could see the disappointment in his eyes but to her relief he didn’t try to force the issue, simply falling into step beside her as he escorted her inside the hotel.
Once inside the foyer, Poppy searched it anxiously, but fortunately there was no sign of James.
‘I’m afraid my wrong turning has caused you to miss dinner,’ Gunther apologised, ‘but perhaps—’
‘It’s all right, Gunther,’ Poppy assured him, forestalling him. ‘I couldn’t really eat anything else anyway, not after that delicious picnic...’
If she went straight up to the room now, showered and prepared for bed, she could, with luck, be fast asleep before James came in—if indeed he was planning to spend the night with her and not with...
With her? Poppy could feel the angry, self-betraying heat burning her skin as she hurried, head defensively down, towards the lifts. Of course, she had not meant that James would be spending the night with her, merely that he would be spending it in their room. What had he done to her, she wondered resentfully, that she was now having to monitor even her own private thoughts?
She walked out of the lift and along the corridor, inserted her pass-card into the lock and pushed open the door.
‘Where the hell have you been?’
The shock of James’s unexpected presence in the bedroom caused Poppy to stare at him in speechless silence.
‘Where have you been, Poppy?’ he repeated.
‘I...I... Out,’ Poppy told him unsteadily, alarmed by his fury.
‘Out. Out where?’ James demanded.
‘I... Gunther... I went out with Gunther,’ she admitted huskily. ‘He... he had hired a car for the afternoon and he wanted—’
‘Spare me the details, I can well imagine exactly what it was he wanted,’ James told her savagely. ‘And, to judge from the look of you and the length of time you’ve been gone, he got it.
‘Did you enjoy it, Poppy?’ he demanded acidly. ‘Did you beg him... plead with him—?’
Before she knew what she was doing Poppy had flown at James, raising her hand to bring it down hard against his face, goaded beyond endurance by the hateful things he was saying to her, desperate to make him stop.
But instead of retreating from her, instead of reacting as she had imagined and recognising how offensive, how unbearable, how unwarranted and undeserved his accusations were, he took hold of her with such speed that she had no time to do anything other than give a small gasp of startled shock as his fingers manacled her wrists and he swung her round in front of him, using his weight and her vulnerability to tip her over onto the bed.
As he leaned over her, imprisoning her, Poppy could see the dark flecks in the topaz brilliance of his eyes, which, when she focused on them, seemed to mesmerise her into a state of shocked numbness. Then she heard him say, ‘I warned you what would happen if you did that again, Poppy.’
And then he was raising her hands above her head, holding them, shackling them there, his body poised powerfully over hers.
‘I know why you’re doing this,’ Poppy protested wildly. ‘You’re doing it to punish me because your pride can’t bear knowing that I don’t want you.’
‘Is that what you told your German friend?’ James snarled at her.
‘Gunther and I just spent the afternoon together. We didn’t... he’s not...’
Poppy tensed as she realised that her efforts to break free of James’s constraining hold had caused the soft, full skirt she was wearing to ride up, exposing her thighs.
‘Let me go, James,’ she begged shakily when she saw the way he was looking at her body. ‘You don’t really want me,’ she added huskily, ‘You can’t, and—’
‘Who says I can’t?’ James taunted her softly. ‘I’m a man, Poppy, and, as any man will tell you, there’s nothing quite so erotically stimulating as having a woman tell you she wants you, as having her beg you to fulfil her and satisfy her, as having her cry out to you that she needs you, aches for you...’
‘No,’ Poppy denied in panic. ‘I didn’t mean it... I... You can’t do this, James. I don’t want you...’
‘Liar,’ he told her softly, and as though to prove her self-deceit he reached out his free hand and ran it slowly up over her trembling body.
The hard, warm feel of his palm against the tense sensitivity of her bare thigh made her quiver from head to foot in what Poppy told herself despairingly was outrage and rejection, but long before James’s hand had smoothed its way over her waist to lie mockingly just below the full curve of her breast she knew that she was lying to herself.
‘But I can’t want you...’
She hadn’t realised she had whispered the shocked words out loud until she heard James warning her through gritted teeth, ‘Take care I don’t make you eat those words, Poppy, or endure the sexual equivalent, because, I promise you, if I do... once I do...’
Poppy’s whole body shuddered as she realised what he meant, realised and, to her appalled anguish, visibly reacted to that knowledge not with shock and rejection but instead with something—some need—she couldn’t bear to acknowledge.
‘I don’t want this, James,’ she told him defiantly, but she knew as he lifted his hand and slowly started to unfasten her top that she was lying, and, what was worse, she knew that he knew it too.
