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‘I never thought he would fall so deeply in love,’ Poppy heard her adding as she paused on the stairs, not wanting to listen and yet somehow unable to stop herself. She was a masochist addicted to the source of her pain, she told herself bitterly as the older woman continued.
‘Of the two of them James has always been the more passionate and intense one. Chris has always had a much sunnier, more resilient nature. I just wish... How is Poppy? She...’
Quickly Poppy moved out of earshot, her body trembling inwardly with a mixture of pain and indignation.
She knew how James would have reacted if he had been privy to that conversation, how he would have taunted her for allowing herself to become the object of other people’s pity—something he would never allow to happen to him. Poppy’s mouth twisted into a small, bitter smile as she tried to imagine James being involved in any situation, any relationship which might cast him in such a role. Impossible.
It was all very well for her aunt to describe James as the more. intense of her two sons—maybe he was, Poppy allowed, though she thought it more a case of his being intent on having his own way and steamrollering anyone who stood in opposition to him. But more passionate? And because of that passion, as her aunt had somehow implied, more vulnerable than his more easygoing younger brother? No way.
The only intense passion she had ever seen James exhibit was that of anger—the kind of anger that she had felt when he had given her that unwanted, hateful kiss of contempt.
Poppy shivered now as she hurried into the bathroom, the chill invading her body—that tiny, betraying sensation—nothing at all to do with the coolness of the early morning air.
In fact, as she glanced through the window she could see that the pre-dawn sky was clear and that it promised to be a fine, warm day.
No, the reason for the almost electric shock of sensitivity raising goose bumps on her skin lay not outside her body but within it. Its cause was her own fiercely denied and totally shocked awareness of the fact that something within her, some alien, unknown, unwanted part of her, had been physically responsive to the practised skill of James’s kiss.
It wasn’t a subject that she had any desire to explore and in order to dismiss it she spent her brief time under the shower running through the list of Japanese technical terms that she had committed to memory the previous evening.
The conference they were attending was a new one and it promised to be a highly prestigious event. Until James had announced that he would be going, taking the place not just of Chris but also of the sales team, Poppy had been looking forward to it.
The venue was not Milan, where she had been on previous occasions, but a newly opened, exclusive spa resort in the mountains, and the brochure that Chris had shown her had made the event read more like an exclusive holiday than a work event.
Not that she would have any time to enjoy the facilities of the spa, Poppy reflected as she stepped out of the shower and reached for a towel. James, she suspected, would see to that.
As she reached for her underclothes she caught sight of her naked body in the bathroom mirror. She had always been slim but during the weeks leading up to the wedding she had lost weight and now, she acknowledged, she was getting close to looking almost thin. Mentally comparing her fragile, slender body with Sally’s almost voluptuously feminine shape, she admitted that it was no wonder that Chris should prefer the open sensuality of Sally’s body to the fine-boned thinness of hers.
James had commented derisively on her lack of feminine curves only the previous Christmas, when they’d had their obligatory dance together at the firm’s Christmas party. His hands had spanned her waist completely and he’d taunted her with the fact that her body was more that of a girl than of a woman.
‘Just another indication of your reluctance to grow up and accept life as it really is,’ had been his sardonic comment.
‘I am adult; I’m twenty-two years old,’ Poppy had countered angrily.
‘On the outside,’ James had agreed, ‘but inside you’re still an adolescent clinging to a self-created fantasy. You don’t have an inkling of what real life is all about, Poppy...real emotions... real men.’
She had denied his comments, of course, but it hadn’t made any difference.
It hadn’t always been like this between them; they hadn’t always shared an enmity which seemed to deepen and harden with the years instead of relaxing and easing.
As a child she had adored James. He had then been the one who had rescued her from Chris’s teasing, the one who had patiently taught her to ride her first bike, fly her first kite, the one who had mopped up her tears when she’d fallen off the former and over the strings of the latter.
But all that had changed when she was twelve and had fallen in love with Chris. James’s good-humoured, elder-cousin indulgence of her had turned to contemptuous hostility once he had recognised her feelings for Chris, and she had reciprocated with a fury and dislike which had grown over the years instead of abating.
The last thing she wanted to do, she admitted to herself as she dressed quickly in her working ‘uniform’ of cream silk shirt and straight skirt of her taupe suit, was to spend the next four days exposed to James’s contempt and hostility, but it was not in her nature to take the cowardly way out of refusing to go; she took her job too seriously for that.
The actual translation work she did might not be enough to keep her busy eight hours a day, five days a week, Poppy acknowledged, but a look around at the kind of job her peers had been forced to take—some of them with much better degrees than her own-had made her determined to prove her worth to the business; an evening course in computer technology had turned out to be a wise investment of her time, as had her determination to involve herself in the administrative side of the business.
To some, such work might have seemed mundane, but Poppy felt it had given her a working knowledge and an insight into the running of the company which would be just as valuable on any future CV she needed to prepare as her language skills and her degree.
The overnight bag which she had packed the night before was downstairs in the hall. Picking up her suit jacket she studied her reflection in her bedroom mirror critically.
Her hair, soft and straight, made her look younger than she actually was, she knew, but she was loath to have it cut. Chris had once told her that he thought long hair on a woman was incredibly feminine. Sally, though, oddly enough, had a short, almost boyish crop of blonde curls.
Her features didn’t lend themselves well to exaggerated make-up and her skin was too pale, she decided critically. Her eyes, her best feature, were large and almond-shaped and fringed with thick dark lashes which looked ridiculous when loaded down with mascara. Her nose was short and straight, and her mouth, in her view, was an odd mismatch, her top lip well shaped and moderately curved whilst her bottom lip was wider and fuller, somehow giving her mouth a sensuality which she personally found distressing and which she always tried to play down with a softly coloured matt lipstick.
So far the early spring weather had been unseasonably fine and warm and her skin had begun to lose its winter pallor, but she had still slipped on stockings beneath her skirt. Bare legs, no matter how blissfully cool, did not, in her opinion, look properly businesslike.
Downstairs she made herself a cup of coffee and a slice of toast which she knew she wouldn’t eat. Her stomach was already churning nervously. She had never particularly liked flying.
James and Chris’s father, her uncle, had been a keen amateur pilot who had been killed with a friend when they had flown into a freak electric storm. She remembered how devastated Chris had been at his father’s death. They had cried over it together, sharing their grief. James, on the other hand, had retreated into grim, white-faced silence—a remote stranger, or so it had seemed to Poppy, who’d looked contemptuously upon her and Chris’s shared emotional grief.
She heard James’s car just as she was swallowing her last mouthful of coffee. Quickly putting down h
er cup she hurried out into the hall, pulling on her jacket and picking up her handbag and case as she went to open the door. Like her, James was dressed formally in a business suit, not navy for once but a lightweight pale grey which somehow emphasised his height and the breadth of his shoulders.
As he took her case from her, Poppy saw the brief, assessing glance he gave her and her chin started to tilt challengingly as she waited for him to make some critical or derogatory comment, but instead, disconcertingly, she suddenly became aware that his original scrutiny had turned into something a little more thorough and startlingly more male as his eyes lingered on the soft curves of her breasts.
It was the kind of inspection that Poppy was used to from other men; that telling but, generally speaking, acceptably discreet male awareness of her as a woman. But to be subjected to it by James ... James who’d sternly reprimanded his younger brother when Chris had teasingly commented on her new shape the first day she had self-consciously worn the pretty, flower-sprigged cotton bra that her mother had gravely agreed that her eleven-year-old’s barely thirty-inch c hest demanded.
Seeing James focus on that same chest in such a very male and sensual way when for years Poppy could have sworn that he was totally oblivious to the fact that she had grown from a child to a woman was a very disconcerting experience.
Somehow just managing to resist the temptation to tug the edges of her jacket protectively together, Poppy gave him an angry glare. How would he like it if she focused on... a certain part of his body in that way.
‘Have you got everything?’ she heard him ask her before her brain could come up with an answer to her own question. ‘Tickets, passport, money...?’
