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‘Paolo doesn’t seem to have brought us any milk,’ Poppy told him, quickly turning away, not wanting him to see the flush burning her face.
‘Poppy,’ James warned.
‘No... no, I shall never try to pretend Chris is my... our baby’s father,’ she said. ‘Not to myself or to anyone else.
‘James, how are we going to endure this?’ she demanded starkly, turning back to face him, her eyes betraying her misery. ‘We don’t love each other.’ Her voice quickened with panic. ‘We don’t even like one another.’
‘We’ll endure it because we have to, because of him or her,’ James told her grimly, his glance resting tellingly on her stomach before he picked up the car keys which he had dropped on the table. ‘I’ll take the cases upstairs and then I’ll go down to the village for some water. I’ll put your luggage in the main bedroom—I’ll sleep in the other one...’
The villa only had two bedrooms, both of them very spacious, and one bathroom, which was off the larger of the two rooms so that whoever was using the smaller had to walk through the main bedroom to get to it. James’s mother had always said that one day she would add a second bathroom, but she had never got round to it.
Without waiting for her to answer, James walked towards the door.
The rear of the villa was shaded by a vine-covered patio. The summer that Poppy had stayed here with her parents they had eaten most of their meals on it. How on earth was she going to endure two weeks cooped up alone here with James? And if she couldn’t bear the thought of spending two weeks alone with him, then how was she going to get through all the years that lay ahead of them? Tiredly she went upstairs.
Paolo’s wife had made up both beds on James’s instructions. How had he explained the fact that a honeymooning couple required two double beds? Poppy wondered dully as she stripped off her clothes and showered off the dirt of their drive before pulling on clean underwear and crawling beneath the lavender-scented linen sheets.
Poppy smiled contentedly to herself as she slipped on her soft lawn cotton dress and glanced out of the bedroom window. The sky was a perfect, clear blue, promising another sunny day.
It was just as she let the loose folds of her dress fall round her hips and started to straighten up that she felt it—no more than the briefest flutter of sensation—a movement as delicate as the touch of a flower petal falling against her skin. She recognised it straight away, instinctively, calling out automatically, without thinking, ‘James... quick...’
‘What is it? What’s wrong?’ he demanded as he responded to her summons, pushing open her bedroom door and standing watching her.
She had dreaded this time—being isolated from everyone else, being alone with James, knowing that it was bound to reveal all the flaws in their relationship, all the reasons why they should not have married, and yet astonishingly the days had actually passed very quickly.
Her body, perhaps exhausted by the trauma of the weeks leading up to the wedding, had wanted only to relax and absorb the heat of the sun. Her instincts had caused her to focus not on the antipathy which existed between her and James but on her need to protect the life growing within her, and, yes, there had been times, moments when she had been heart-wrenchingly conscious of all that she had forfeited, all that she would never have—all that both of them had forfeited, she acknowledged, in committing themselves to a marriage without love—and then she had ached with pain and an intense but nebulous sense of loss and despair.
And yet, oddly, it had not been Chris whom she’d thought of at such times—his image, the memories of him cherished all through the years of her adolescence seemed to have lost their old power to give her succour.
‘What is it?’ James repeated, frowning.
As she looked back at him, noticing how very masculine he looked in a pair of soft, natural-coloured linen shorts and white T-shirt, his legs bare and very brown, his forearms surprisingly strongly muscled for a man who spent so much of his time seated at a desk, Poppy felt a sharp pang of unexpected emotion, an unexpected and devastating awareness of how intensely male James actually was.
It was, she felt, as though suddenly she was seeing him in a different way, as though she had walked into a room in which all the familiar objects had been moved around so that she saw them with fresh eyes—saw them and found that she had allowed habit to conceal the true depth of their appeal from her.
Her heart suddenly seemed to beat a little bit faster and she knew that she had flushed slightly.
‘Don’t you feel very well?’ James was asking her. For the first few days of their stay he had insisted that she remain in bed in the morning until he had brought her a cup of tea and some plain biscuits.
Initially she had been irritated by such coddling, telling him curtly that she knew it was for the baby’s sake and not hers, but these last couple of mornings she had actually found that she was quite enjoying being spoiled—a feeling which had sneaked up on her, catching her unawares.
‘No. No, I feel fine...’
Now that he was here, frowning at her, obviously irritated at being interrupted, she was beginning to regret the impulse which had led to her calling him, and besides...
‘It was nothing,’ she told him, starting to turn away from him. ‘I was just wondering if you still intended to go into town later on.’
‘Yes, we need petrol and food and—’
He broke off as Poppy suddenly gave a small, startled gasp, hurrying to her side, his frown deepening as he touched her on one slim brown arm and said, ‘Poppy, if you’re not feeling well...’
‘No, it isn’t that,’ she denied, her flush deepening to a happy glow of pleasure as she told him breathlessly, ‘It’s the baby; it’s moving... Feel,’ she added impetuously, taking hold of his hand and placing it on her body.
When she felt his resistance she immediately let go of him, snatching her fingers away from his as though the contact had burned her, quick, emotional tears she couldn’t conceal filling her eyes as she tried to move back from him. Only James wouldn’t let her, and, despite his initial withdrawal, his hand was now lying against her body, firm and warm and somehow oddly comforting and reassuring.
The baby must have thought so too, she decided hazily, because it suddenly shifted much more vigorously than it had before, causing Poppy to laugh out loud in maternal pride as she saw the look of mingled disbelief and awe in James’s eyes.
An unfamiliar tinge of colour was darkening his face, making him look somehow different and vulnerable. He had lowered his head slightly, his gaze fixed on where his hand lay against her, and Poppy had an odd and devastating urge to reach out and hold him.
As she tried to absorb the full implications of what she was experiencing it seemed to Poppy that somehow or other the foundations of her whole world had shifted dangerously beneath her, leaving her very afraid and alone.
‘Feels like she’s going to inherit your talent for making her presence felt,’ was James’s only comment as he removed his hand and stepped back from her, but although his voice was steady Poppy could see how moved he was by what he had experienced.
‘She?’ she queried, her own voice husky. ‘You want it to be a girl, then?’
‘Yes,’ James confirmed, his voice becoming familiarly harsh. He added, ‘At least that way...’ He shook his head, his mouth clamping shut on what he had been about to say.
It surprised Poppy that he should want a daughter; she had imagined that a man like James would only value sons. Despite the fact that they were cousins, she knew surprisingly little about him as a man,
she recognised, but she was learning.
Oh, yes, she was learning, she acknowledged later in the day, lying in a chair in the garden, waiting for James to return from his trip into town. And not just about James.
The odd feelings that she had experienced this morning—that shaft of pure, liquid desire that had shot through her when she’d seen him standing in the bedroom doorway, that flood of heart-rocking emotion that had swamped her as she’d watched him reaching out to make contact with their child...
Frantically she tried to control and dismiss them by comparing them with the love she had always felt for Chris, but somehow it was impossible for her to summon up anything more than a faint echo of the emotion which had dominated her entire life for so many years.
Even picturing Chris was an effort, and when she did the face that looked back at her through her imagination was simply that of her cousin and not her adored, longed-for lover. Her body and her heart were empty of the intensity of yearning that she had expected to feel.
Was it her pregnancy that was responsible for her lack of physical and emotional desire for Chris? She had desired James only a few hours earlier, she admitted, and she desired him now.
She moved her body uncomfortably on the sun-lounger but the torrent of heat engulfing her had nothing to do with the strength of the sun. She sat up, her face burning with the shock of her discovery. She couldn’t want James. It was impossible.
But she wasn’t an innocent girl any more; she was a woman—a woman who knew perfectly well how her body reacted when it was aroused, when it wanted and desired. There was no mistaking such signals, no confusing them with something else.
But James, of all men. Was it something to do with the fact that they had already been lovers?
