by Penny Jordan
‘Stop it,’ she heard James telling her warningly. Then he said, ‘It’s me you’re married to, Poppy, not Chris. My child you’re carrying—mine!’
‘Don’t you think I know that?’ she returned bitterly. Her dress suddenly felt uncomfortably tight round her waist, her head ached and she felt hot and tired.
‘I hate all this hypocrisy,’ she told James angrily. ‘All this pretence.’
‘Really? You didn’t seem to mind the pretence the night you convinced yourself you were in bed with Chris and not with me,’ James reminded her bluntly.
Shocked by the unexpectedness of his attack, coming so soon after his convincing act of love in church, Poppy could only stare at him in silence until she was rescued by the welcome sound of her mother’s voice exclaiming, ‘Darling, are you all right? You look rather pale. Come and sit down. Everyone’s here now and the caterers are ready to serve lunch.’
CHAPTER EIGHT
‘IT WON’T be long now.’
Poppy had balked at the idea of a honeymoon but James had insisted, pointing out that it would look odd if they didn’t go away, and in the end she had had to give in, although she had wished she hadn’t when he had told her where they were going.
‘Italy!’ she had protested. ‘No, I can’t, not Italy; it will remind me of your Japanese friend—the one you spent the night with at the hotel,’ she had begun, childishly driven into the panicky reaction by her own misery.
But James had stopped her, telling her firmly, ‘The only person I spent the night with at the hotel was you.’
‘One night you didn’t come back to the room,’ Poppy had accused him challengingly.
‘Yes, but not because I was with someone else. If you must know, I stayed up all night working.’
Poppy hadn’t quite been able to bring herself to look at him. ‘I still don’t want to go back to Italy.’
‘We don’t have much choice,’ James had told her coolly. ‘My mother is insisting on giving us the villa as a wedding gift and it would look churlish to refuse.’
Poppy had knowm he was right. James’s mother had not used the villa since James’s father’s death, preferring, she said, to keep her happy memories of the holidays they had spent there intact.
Now she had told James and Poppy it was time that other members of the family enjoyed it, and since James had always been far more in touch with his Italian heritage than Chris she had decided that James and Poppy should have it.
Poppy had been there once with her parents, as a child, and she remembered how awed she had been by the Tuscan countryside, by the richness of its colours and the warm vibrancy of its people and its life.
One unexpected side effect of her pregnancy had been that her body temperature seemed to have risen by several degrees, and the air-conditioning in the car that James had hired for them was a welcome antidote to the heat of the Italian summer, beneath which the Tuscan countryside drowsed.
Whenever Poppy thought of the area she always thought of it in terms of its colours—amber, saffron, warm browns and rich terracotta—the colours of the earth, colours which, for her, echoed its richness and warmth, its bounty, their depth leavened and lightened by the cerulean sky.
The villa—their villa now—was small and relatively isolated and had originally been a wedding gift from James’s father to his mother.
‘James was conceived there,’ she had told Poppy several days ago, ‘and I’ve often wondered if that is why he is so much more in tune with his Italian heritage than Chris.
‘You do love him, don’t you, Poppy?’ she had asked quietly. ‘Because I know how much he loves you, how much he has always loved you.’ And Poppy had bowed her head.
She had no idea why, when James could so obviously and easily lie to his mother, she seemed unable to do the same, but perhaps her aunt had taken the tears in her eyes as a sign of her love for James rather than the reverse, Poppy decided, because she had not pressed the matter, simply touching Poppy’s bent head gently.
The small town several miles away from the villa was just as Poppy remembered it. A couple of dark-eyed children watched them from an open doorway as they drove past and Poppy’s heart turned over, seized by the quick, melting surge of emotions she had become familiar with in these last weeks.
‘What is it? What’s wrong?’ James asked her, but she did not feel able to tell him, to explain. died all women feel like this when they knew they were carrying a child? she wondered. Did they all experience this—this emotional awareness of the vulnerability of all young things, this need to protect and cherish? The strength of her love for a child she had never intended to conceive, the bond she felt with it already, constantly amazed her. She might not love James or he her, but she would—she did even now—love their child.
And so did James, she acknowledged, moving her head to look at him as he turned off the main road and onto the narrow dirt track that led to the villa.
Time and the hot Tuscan sun had turned the original. deep terracotta of the building into a soft, faded colour somewhere between pink and brown. The shutters, closed now against the afternoon sun, were painted white. The local farmer whom James’s mother paid to maintain the property for her had obviously repainted them recently, Poppy decided as she noted their dazzling brilliance.
James stopped the car and got out. Uncertainly Poppy went to join him.
‘Paolo should have been down with some supplies for us,’ he told her, referring to the farmer. ‘If not, I’ll leave you to get settled in and drive back to the village to get some. Is there anything in particular that you would like?’
‘Only water,’ Poppy told him, grimacing a little. Her mouth, like her body, felt dry and dusty from the journey. The heat, coupled with her own inner tension, had also made her feel slightly light-headed. As she blinked dizzily in the sun, she saw that James was frowning.
‘You’d better get inside out of the heat,’ he told her.
‘I’m pregnant, James, that’s all,’ she responded irritably. ‘There’s no need to fuss. Not that you are fussing—fussing on my account,’ she added bitterly. ‘You don’t give a damn what happens to me.’
‘Would you want me to?’
Poppy stiffened as she heard the challenge in his voice.
‘We both know what’s really bugging you, Poppy,’ James added grimly, ‘and it isn’t my so-called “fussing”, is it? For God’s sake!’ he exclaimed, ‘I know I’m not Chris but just when the hell are you going to grow up and realise—?’ He stopped, rubbing the back of his neck with his hand and frowning as he narrowed his eyes against the sun.
‘Let’s get inside,’ he told her, turning towards the front door to the villa.
Silently Poppy followed him, deliberately keeping her distance as he unlocked the weathered wooden door. Inside the villa it felt blissfully cool. Whilst James opened the shutters Poppy made her way to the kitchen. Paolo had obviously been, because there was a box of groceries on the kitchen table. As she looked through it Poppy sniffed appreciatively at the locally cured ham and the freshly picked tomatoes, suddenly feeling unexpectedly hungry.
‘Aha, you like that, do you?’ she teased the baby, speaking her thoughts out loud as her mouth watered at the sight and smell of the fresh, locally baked bread.
‘You’re going to be like your papà, are you, and favour your Italian heritage?’ she laughed as her tiredness melted away, her body relaxing now that it was released from the tension of James’s constant presence. It was something new that she had only started very recently, this verbal communication with her child.
‘Well, don’t expect me to be a doting Italian mamma and spoil you,’ she warned with very obvious untruth. Then spinning round, her face flushing, she realised that James was standing in the doorway. How long had he been there? Long enough to overhear her silliness, she guessed, and quickly defended herself.
‘All the books say that it’s important to communicate with the baby even before it’s born, to let it know tha
t you’re there, that you care, that you love it.’
‘And do you love it...him or her?’
‘He or she is my child... How could I not do?’ Poppy demanded huskily.
‘Your child is also mine,’ James reminded her. ‘Mine, Poppy,’ he reiterated. ‘And, let me warn you now, if you ever, ever attempt to pretend that my child has my brother for its father, in the same way you pretended that he was your lover—’
‘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?