Best Man To Wed?

by Penny Jordan

  ‘But if you love me, why—?’ Poppy stopped, her face suddenly crimsoning.

  ‘Why what?’ James pressed.

  ‘Why did you act the way you did after... after...? Why did you behave so coldly to me after we’d made love?’ she asked him huskily. ‘You must have known how much I wanted you.’ Her colour deepened. ‘I thought you were... I thought you didn’t want me any more, that I’d disgusted you—’

  ‘Disgusted me?’ James interrupted her. ‘Oh, Poppy, if only you knew what it did to me when you told me that you wanted me. You’ll never know how close I came that night to telling you how I felt, but I couldn’t get out of my mind the way you’d told me that you wanted me to be Chris...that you’d believed that first time that I was Chris.

  ‘I stopped being intimate with you because I had no choice. I knew that it was only a matter of time before my control broke and I told you how I felt and I couldn’t lay that burden on you. Not after everything else I’d done.’

  ‘Everything else... What else?’ Poppy demanded.

  ‘Making love to you when I knew you couldn’t really want me... when I knew that you were still a virgin and unlikely to be using any form of birth control... and, having done so once, being unable to resist repeating the offence and knowing when I did how it increased the likelihood that you would conceive.’

  ‘I think I knew I had,’ Poppy told him in awe, before admitting half-shyly, ‘There was something—a feeling, a sort of knowing.’

  ‘I didn’t set out to force you into a position where you’d have to marry me,’ James told her, ‘but, once I knew the possibility was there, there was no way I was not going to use it. I told myself that it was me who’d made love to you, me your body wanted, even if your heart remained locked against me, and that somehow I’d find a way of making you see that you couldn’t possibly want me so much physically without there being some possibility that you might come to love me.’

  ‘I probably already loved you, even before...before we made love,’ Poppy told him hesitantly. ‘When I was young... Before... You were always... It was you I loved best then,’ she told him softly, ‘but somehow when I started to grow up...’

  ‘Everyone goes through teenage crushes,’ James told her gently.

  ‘I can’t understand how I ever thought that what I felt for Chris was really love,’ Poppy said. ‘When I look back now...’

  She stopped talking as James bent his head and kissed her.

  ‘James...? James?’ she demanded, shaking his arm as she broke the kiss.

  ‘What is it?’

  ‘I want to go home,’ she told him unsteadily. ‘Please make them let me go home... with you...’

  ‘Are you sure?’ James asked her quietly, searching her face and then cupping it in his hands to kiss her—holding her as though he simply couldn’t bear to let her go, Poppy recognised with a sense of wonder.

  Now that she knew the truth it amazed her that she had not seen it for herself. The love she had thought could never be hers was there, displayed in his every touch, his every look. It wasn’t just with words that love was communicated, Poppy knew with sudden wisdom.

  Looking back, she could see that it was perhaps no wonder that she had responded physically to James the way she had that first time they had made love; her body had recognised the truth that her mind had been too stubborn and perhaps a little too immature to want to see. There was no point in even trying to compare what she felt for James with the feelings she had had for Chris.

  Chris!

  She gave James a rueful look.

  ‘I was horrid to poor Chris,’ she told him solemnly.

  ‘Good,’ James replied unsympathetically, and then relented to smile lovingly at her.

  ‘Do you think things will be all right with him and Sally,’ Poppy asked him anxiously, ‘now that she’s decided she wants a baby?’

  ‘Chris and Sally love one another; there’s no doubt about that. They’ll find a way of working things out.’

  ‘I’m so glad you’re here,’ Poppy whispered as he bent his head to kiss her again. ‘And so,’ she added, ‘is your daughter. Oh, James—’ she clung to him, trembling slightly if anything had happened...’

  ‘Don’t,’ he begged her. ‘If anything happened to you, I don’t think I could bear to go on living.’

  The nurse clicked her tongue reprovingly when she came into the room and found her patient wrapped in her husband’s arms.

  ‘I want to go home,’ Poppy told her.

  ‘Well, I don’t know about that,’ she said disapprovingly. ‘You’re supposed to be resting...’

  The doctor, however, when summoned by James, took a more benign view. There was no reason why Poppy shouldn’t go home, just so long as she took things easy for a few days, he declared.

  ‘Don’t worry...she will,’ James assured him, adding in an undertone to Poppy, his face mock-severe, ‘Even if I have to stay in bed with her to make her do so...’

  ‘No more business trips away from home?’ Poppy questioned James some twenty minutes later as he gently helped her into his car.

  ‘None,’ he assured her firmly. ‘From now on Chris can handle those.’

  ‘Poor Sally,’ Poppy protested.

  ‘Well, perhaps not all of them,’ James allowed. ‘But the only way I shall be working away from home in future is if my wife comes with me.’

  ‘There’s just one condition,’ Poppy told him mockingly.

  ‘And that is?’ James demanded, his eyebrows lifting in a return of his old hauteur.

  ‘That the head of the company and his translator get to share a double room, and a double bed,’ Poppy purred. ‘All in the name of financial economy, of course.’

  ‘Of course,’ James agreed, and then added in a husky voice as he saw the way Poppy was looking at him, ‘You’re supposed to be resting—remember?’

  EPILOGUE

  Holly JOY was born four days before Christmas, just in time for her already doting father to take her and her mother home with him to spend their first Christmas together as a family.

  ‘She’s perfect,’ James told Poppy lovingly on Christmas Eve as he watched her feeding their small daughter. ‘But not as perfect as you.’

  Poppy laughed.

  ‘I can remember a time when “perfect” was the last adjective you would have used to describe me,’ she reminded him. She laughed again as Holly Joy squeaked her protest at having her enjoyment of her supper disrupted by her father’s determination to kiss her mother but that laughter was soon stilled as she responded to the love and passion she could feel in James’s kiss.

  ‘Do you realise that I wanted our baby to be a girl because I saw it as a way of loving a miniature version of you?’ he murmured, and Poppy, listening to his confession, felt tears forming as she understood just how much her husband wanted—had always wanted—her love.

  Around her neck she was wearing the creamy pearls which James had given her to celebrate their baby’s birth, and amongst the presents which had arrived for Holly Joy from her aunt Sally had been a handmade silver bracelet in an unusual design of flowers and ribbons, rather like a bridal wreath.

  Poppy had also received from her a bouquet of flowers which she’d instantly recognised. How long ago it seemed now since she had caught Sally’s wedding bouquet and yet, in reality, it was barely ten months.

  ‘It didn’t seem appropriate to send you this when you and James married; I don’t know why,’ Sally had written on the accompanying card. ‘But now it does. Two down, one to go...’

  Poppy laughed as she showed James the card.

  ‘Well, she may have got her way with me,’ she told him, ‘but she’s not going to find it so easy with Star. She really is anti-marriage and anti-commitment. Still, two out of three isn’t bad.’

  ‘Mmm,’ James murmured, gathering her in his arms after she had put Holly back in her cot. ‘Right now I’ve got far more interesting things I want to do than talk about Sally’s manipulation of s
uperstition.’

  ‘Such as?’ Poppy teased.

  ‘Come here and let me show you...’

  Laughingly she did.

  ISBN : 978-1-4592-6904-0

  BEST MAN TO WED?

  First North American Publication 1997.

  Copyright © 1996 by Penny Jordan.

  All rights reserved. Except for use in any review, the reproduction or utilization of this work in whole or in part in any form by any electronlc, mechanical or other means, now known or hereafter invented, including xerography, photocopying and recording, or in any information storage or retrieval system, is forbidden without the written permission of the publisher, Harlequin Enterprises Limited, 225 Duncan Mill Road, Don Mills, Ontarlo, Canada M3B 3K9.

  All characters in this book have no existence outside the imagination of the author and have no relation whatsoever to anyone bearing the same name or names. They are not even distantly inspired by any individual known or unknown to the author, and all incidents are pure invention.

  This edition published by arrangement with Harlequin Books S.A.

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