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‘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.
