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But they were not in love and she had conceived his child whilst believing... whilst wanting another man, and that was the source of her shame and anguish, of her dread at the prospect of marriage to him.
She was relieved when the lunch was finally over. Having said goodbye to Star outside the restaurant, she and Claire were left alone together. As Claire turned to her, clearly about to say something, Poppy saw James’s familiar Jaguar driving towards them, James himself at the wheel, and she froze, torn between her need to turn and flee and her knowledge that physically she felt incapable of moving so much as a muscle. The Jaguar stopped abruptly in front of them and James got out and strode towards them.
Poppy winced, and she felt James’s fingers curl round her arm, locking on it in a grip that she couldn’t break. ‘James, what are you doing here? How did you know where to find me?’
‘I looked in your diary,’ he told her witheringly. ‘Get in the car.’
‘James... I...’
I don’t want to go with you, she had been about to say, but he shook his head, telling her grimly, ‘Not now, Poppy; I’m not in the mood for it. Where the hell have you been?’ he demanded as he propelled her towards the Jaguar. ‘Why the hell haven’t you been in touch with me?’
As she turned towards him he warned her, ‘No games, Poppy; you know what I mean, you know what it is I want to know...’
Just for a heartbeat Poppy contemplated lying to him, telling him that she wasn’t pregnant after all, but the impulse soon died, shrivelled by the hot, dry blast of his anger.
‘I was right, wasn’t I?’ James continued mercilessly, after he had bundled her into the car, slid into the driver’s seat and set the car in motion. ‘You have conceived my child.’
‘Yes,’ Poppy admitted tonelessly. Why, when she knew how little emotion there was between them, how lacking in tender, loving feelings their relationship was, did she have this urge to cry, to turn to James and beg him to stop the car and put his arms round her, hold her, make her feel safe... make her feel protected...make her feel loved?
She tensed her body, expecting his anger to accelerate at her confirmation of her pregnancy with the same velocity with which the car had increased speed, but instead he remained oddly quiet—so quiet in fact that Poppy felt impelled to turn her head and look at him—the first time she had looked at him since he had stopped the car and come striding so angrily towards her.
James wasn’t paying any attention to her; his gaze, his concentration appeared to be fixed on the empty road ahead of them.
‘I... I won’t... I can’t not have my baby,’ she told him doggedly, realising only as she gave voice to the shaky words just how strongly she already felt about her child, how protective of it, how determined always to keep it from hurt and from harm.
Now James did look at her, and the look in his eyes made her wince slightly as he told her starkly, ‘If I thought for one moment that you might... This baby is mine as well as yours, Poppy, and if I thought that you’d do anything—and I do mean anything to harm it...’
Poppy’s body shook as she listened to him. That he would insist on them both ‘doing the right thing’ she had never doubted—he was that sort of man—but the emotion she had heard in his voice as he’d told her that the baby—her baby—was his child as well had left her lost for words, grappling with the shock of suddenly discovering a side to him that she had never imagined existed.
She knew, of course, how protective he could be towards his close family, but it had never occurred to her that those feelings might extend to a child he had never even intended should be conceived.
‘We’ll need to talk to your parents,’ she heard him warning her, ‘and then my mother...’
‘Do we... are we...? They’ll have to know the truth,’ she told him, unaware of how haunted and unhappy she looked as she whispered rather than stated the words.
‘Yes,’ he agreed quietly. ‘Or at least part of it. I warn you, Poppy, that not just for your own sake but for the baby’s sake as well there is one truth that it is advisable that no one should ever know.’
Poppy’s heart started to thump heavily as he turned his head to look at her.
‘What... what do you mean?’ she asked him, her mouth dry with foreboding.
‘They must never—no one must ever have any reason to think that our child... our relationship... is the result of anything other than love.’
‘Love?’ Poppy swallowed hard as she stared at him aghast. ‘But no one will really believe that. They all know the way I feel about Chris...’
‘They all know that you had an adolescent crush on my brother,’ James corrected her coldly.
‘I can’t pretend that I’ve fallen in love with you,’ Poppy told him. ‘No one would ever believe me.’
‘No? Then you’ll just have to find a way of making them believe you,’ James informed her. ‘Unless, of course, you actually want people to guess the truth.’
‘No,’ Poppy denied sharply, her face burning with hot colour.
‘No,’ James said sardonically. ‘You’re caught between two equally unpalatable choices, I’m afraid, Poppy. You either pretend you love me or you take the risk of people questioning why, if you don’t, you and I conceived a child. It’s a question of the lesser of two evils.’
‘Chris will never believe that I’ve fallen in love with you,’ Poppy protested feverishly.
‘He is far too busy with his own life and his new wife to have any time to spare questioning what’s going on in yours. Face it, Poppy, what you choose to do or not to do with your life isn’t of much interest to Chris, other than as a cousin, and if anything—’
‘He’ll be only too relieved not to have the embarrassment of me loving him any more,’ Poppy broke in shakily. ‘Yes, so you’ve already told me.’
‘Are both your parents at home this evening?’
‘Yes—yes, I think so,’ Poppy confirmed as she tried to grapple with the confusion of her thoughts. Part of her ached and longed to turn the clock back and to have things as they were, but if that were possible that would mean ... Her hand moved automatically towards her stomach. The discovery of how emotionally attached she had become to the thought of her child in such a short space of time shocked her.
‘Good. We’ll need to talk to them as quickly as possible. I think so far as the general public is concerned the fact that the family has barely got over one big wedding should serve as a reasonable excuse for the haste of ours...’
‘But people are bound to guess, especially once the baby—’
‘So let them guess,’ James shrugged as he shot back his cuff to glance at his watch. ‘I’ll come round about eight,’ he told her as he brought the car to a halt outside her parents’ house.
Poppy reached numbly for the doorhandle. She felt tired and drained, alone, and even afraid. This wasn’t how she had imagined things would be... how her life, her marriage would be. And never, ever in her darkest nightmares had she envisaged a scenario so starkly devoid of love and emotion.
James had got out and was now standing on the pavement beside her. As the panic flared inside her she turned towards him.
‘We can’t marry one another, James,’ she protested. ‘We don’t love each other. We have nothing in common, nothing to keep us together, nothing to make our marriage real.’
All her fears and her pent-up sense of loss and anguish were contained in her voice and her expression as she turned pleadingly towards him, but James ignored them, taking hold of her right there in her parents’ drive, his hands firm and compelling as he gripped her upper arms and told her savagely, ‘No! We’ve got this much, Poppy.’
And then he was kissing her, his mouth hard and warm on hers, burning the numb immobility of her lips into fierce, painful life as they softened and then clung to his, his touch conjuring up inside her a sharp, whirlwind sensation and taut, aching need.
Their surroundings, their situation, everything else faded into insignificance as Pop
py clung helplessly to him whilst her body responded to his touch, his kiss.
