by Lynne Graham
Three weeks later, Poppy was shouting at Tilly’s pet geese for lurking behind a gate in an effort to spring a surprise attack on the postman. But the older man was even wilier than the web-footed watchdogs and he leapt into his van unscathed, honked the horn in cheerful one-upmanship and drove off.
Poppy went back into her great-aunt’s cottage, clutching the post and the newspaper. Tilly, a small, spry woman with short grey curly hair, well into her seventies but very fit and able, set her book down in favour of the paper.
‘Have you got some answers to that ad you placed?’ Tilly asked.
‘By the looks of it, several,’ Poppy answered with determined cheer. ‘With a little luck, you’ll be shot of your uninvited house guest within a few weeks!’
‘You know I love having you here,’ Tilly scolded.
But her great-aunt’s cottage was tiny, perfect for one, crowded for two. Furthermore, Tilly Edwards was one of those rare individuals who actually enjoyed her own company. She had her beloved books and her own set little routine and Poppy did not want to encroach for too long on her hospitality. Within days of her arrival at Tilly’s rather isolated home, she had placed an advertisement in a popular magazine seeking employment again as a nanny.
She would take anything—short-term, long-term, whatever came up. The sooner she was working again and too busy to sit feeling sorry for herself, the happier she would be. In the minuscule kitchen, she made a pot of tea for herself and coffee for Tilly. Of recent, she herself had gone off coffee. But then she had pretty much gone off food, too, she conceded wryly, thinking of the irritating bouts of queasiness she had suffered in recent days. Obviously a broken heart led not just to sleepless nights, but poor appetite and indigestion as well. So out of misery might come skinniness. She couldn’t even smile at the idea.
She was grateful that she had had enough pride and sense to leave Aragone Systems, but the pain of that sudden severance from all that was familiar and the knowledge that she would never see Santino again was unimaginable and far worse than she had expected. But then it was short, sharp shock treatment, exactly what she had deserved and most needed, she told herself.
‘Poppy…’ Tilly said from the sitting room.
Poppy moved a few feet back to the doorway. Her great-aunt held up her newspaper. ‘Isn’t that the man you used to work for?’
Poppy focused on the small black and white photo. Initially the only face she saw was Santino’s and then right beside him, beaming like a megawatt light bulb she recognised Jenna Delsen. ‘What about him?’ she prompted as evenly as she could manage, for one glance even from a distance at Santino in newsprint upset her.
‘Seems he’s got engaged…an attractive woman, isn’t she? Would you like to read it for yourself?’ Tilly immediately extended the paper.
‘No, thanks. I’ll take a look at it later.’ Poppy retreated back into the kitchen again and knew that the glimpse she had already had of that damning photo was more than sufficient. She felt incredibly dizzy and assumed that that was the effect of shock. Bracing unsteady hands on the sink unit, she snatched in a stricken breath and shut her anguished eyes tight. Engaged? To Jenna Delsen only weeks after he had referred to the beautiful blonde as ‘just an old friend’?
Later she went out for a long walk. The strain of trying to behave normally around Tilly had been immense. So, the man you love isn’t perfect, after all, she told herself heavily. Shouldn’t that make it much easier to get over him? His engagement put a very different complexion on their night together. Santino had lied to her. He had lied without hesitation. He was a two-timing louse, who had simply used her for a casual sexual encounter. Clearly he had already been involved in a relationship with Jenna Delsen that went way beyond the boundaries of platonic friendship.
Three days later, Santino arrived in Wales. Finding out where Poppy’s only relative lived had been a long and stony road, which had entailed ditching quite a lot of cool and calling Australia several times before eventually contriving to talk to Poppy’s sister-in-law, the doctor. And if Karrie Bishop ever got tired of medicine, secret police forces everywhere would vie for her services. Santino had not appreciated the interrogation he had received, and even less did he appreciate getting lost three times in succession in his efforts to find a remote cottage that he had even begun suspecting Dr Bishop might have only dreamt up out of a desire to punish him!
But there the cottage was, a minute building hiding behind an overgrown hedge, the sort of home loved by those who loathed unexpected visitors, Santino reflected with gritty black humour. His tension was at an all-time high now that he had arrived and he had to think about what he was going to say to Poppy. Oddly enough, Santino had not considered that contentious issue prior to his actual arrival. Finding Poppy had been his objective. What he might do with her when he found her was not a problem for his imagination in any way, but what he could reasonably say was something more of a challenge. He missed her at the office? He couldn’t get that night out of his mind?
Very unsettled by that absence of cutting-edge inspiration, but too impatient to waste time reflecting on it, Santino climbed out of his sleek car in the teeming rain. When a pair of manic honking geese surged out of nowhere in vicious attack, Santino could happily have wrung their long, scrawny necks, built a bonfire on the spot and cooked them for dinner. The confident conviction that the cottage might lie round every next corner had prevented him from stopping off for lunch and he was in a very aggressive mood.
Hearing the noisy clamour of the geese announcing a rare visitor, Poppy hurried to the front door to yank it open. The car was a startling vivid splash of scarlet against the winter-bare garden. But it was Santino, sleek and immaculate in a charcoal-grey business suit, who knocked most of the air in her lungs clean out of her body.
In the act of holding his feathered opponents at bay with his car door, Santino caught sight of Poppy lurking in the doorway and stilled. The pink sweater made her look cuddly and the floral skirt with the pattern that made him blink was cheering on a dull day, he decided, rain dripping down his bronzed features. He just wanted to drag her into the car and drive off with her.
Shock having made Poppy momentarily impervious to his battle with the geese, she stared back at Santino, only dimly wondering why he was standing in heavy rain and getting drenched. What on earth was he doing in Wales? How could he possibly have found out where she was? She met his beautiful eyes, dark as ebony and shameless in their steady appraisal, and she knew she ought to slam the door closed in his face. Seeing him in the flesh again hurt. It only served to refresh painful memories of how much that one night, which had meant so little to him, had meant to her. For just a few hours she had been happier than she had ever hoped to be, but her happiness had flourished in a silly dream world, not in reality, and punishment had not been long in coming.
‘Are you planning to call the geese off?’ Santino enquired gently. ‘Or is this supposed to be a test that picks out the men from the boys?’
Forcing herself free of her nervous paralysis, Poppy lifted the broom by the door and shooed the geese back to allow Santino a free passage indoors.
‘Grazie, cara,’ Santino drawled, smooth as silk.
Her soft mouth wobbled. With an inner quiver, she recalled the liquid flow of Italian words she hadn’t understood in the hot, dark pleasure of that night. She turned her burning face away, but not before he had seen the shuttered look in her once trusting and open gaze. She was ashamed of her own weakness. She knew she ought to tell him to go away, but she just didn’t have the strength to do that and then never know why he had called in the first place. At least Tilly was out, she thought guiltily, and she wouldn’t find herself having to make awkward explanations for his visit.
As Poppy led him into the sitting room Santino bent his dark glossy head to avoid colliding with the low lintel. The room was packed to the gills with furniture and so short of floor space he was reluctant to move in case he knocked something over.
The atmosphere hummed with undercurrents. Her restive hands clenched together, longing leaping through her in a wildfire wicked surge. Lips parted and moist, in a stillness broken only by the crackling of the fire in the brass grate, she gazed back at him and leant almost imperceptibly forward. Santino needed no further encouragement. Body language like that his male instincts read for him. Without a second of hesitation, he reached for her. Tugging her slight body to him, he meshed one possessive hand into a coil of her Titian red curls and tasted her lush mouth with a slow, smouldering heat that demanded her response.
She was in shaken turmoil at that sensual assault, and a muffled gasp escaped Poppy. His tongue delved with explicit hunger into the tender interior of her mouth. The liquid fire of need ignited in her quivering body faster than the speed of light. She was imprisoned in intimate, rousing contact with his big, powerful length, and her spread fingers travelled from his shoulder up into his luxuriant black hair to hold him to her.
And Santino? In the course of that single kiss, Santino went from wary defensiveness to the very zenith of blazing confidence that he was welcome. Indeed, he was totally convinced that everything was one hundred and one per cent fine. He would have her back in London by midnight. Mission accomplished. Simple, straightforward—why had he ever imagined otherwise?
Then, without the smallest warning, Poppy brought her hands down hard on his arms to break his hold. She wrenched herself free of him with angry tears of self-loathing brimming in her eyes. A wave of dizziness assailed her and she had to push her hands down on the dining table to steady herself and breathe in slow and deep. There was just no excuse for her having let him kiss her when he belonged to another woman. As for him, he was even more of a rat than she had believed he was. He was a hopeless womaniser!
‘What’s wrong?’ Santino breathed in a tone of audible mystification and indeed annoyance.
Her back turned to him, Poppy finally managed to swallow the tears clogging up her vocal cords and she stared with wooden fixity out the window at his car. ‘What are you doing in Wales?’
‘I had a business meeting in Cardiff earlier.’ Santino had decided to play it cool. He was a step ahead of her, he believed and he was already thinking of how to present his having phoned Australia as the ultimate in casual gestures.
But Poppy took the wind right out of his sails by saying, ‘I suppose my landlady gave you my forwarding address.’
Infuriatingly, so simple a means of establishing her whereabouts had not even occurred to Santino, but, ignoring that angle, he cut to the chase. ‘I wanted to see you.’
He had some nerve. Did he really believe that she was still that naive? In the area on business and at a loose end on a Friday afternoon, he had decided to look her up. Why? Well, she had been free with her favours before and why shouldn’t he assume that she would be again? No man could think much of a woman who let him make love to her on his office sofa for a cheap, easy thrill. Poppy felt horribly humiliated.
‘I would’ve thought that most men in these circumstances would’ve been glad not to see me again,’ Poppy countered painfully in a small voice.
Santino wondered why it was that, when she had run to the other side of the country to avoid him, he was being accused of not wanting to see her. Suddenly he too was asking himself what he was doing in Wales. Suddenly he suspected that he could well be within an ace of making a total ass of himself.
‘Why would you assume that?’ Santino enquired.
‘Well, if you don’t know that for yourself, I’m certainly not going to be the one to remind you!’ Poppy condemned chokily, for she refused to lower herself to the level of mentioning Jenna Delsen’s name. She refused to give him that much satisfaction. No doubt his ego would relish the belief that she was heartbroken at the news of his engagement. Or maybe he imagined that she was still in blissful ignorance of the true nature of his relationship with the beautiful blonde.
Unable to work out exactly where the unproductive dialogue was going, Santino decided that it was time to be blunt. ‘Why did you send me a card telling me that you loved me?’
If the window had been open at that moment, Poppy would have scrambled through it and fled without hesitation. Aghast at that loaded question, she went rigid.
‘I don’t think that’s an unreasonable question,’ Santino continued, tension flattening his accented drawl into the command tone he used at work. ‘And I’m tired of talking to your back.’
Seething discomfiture flamed hot colour into Poppy’s cheeks, but pride came to her rescue. Flipping round on taut legs, she encountered brilliant dark-as-midnight eyes and forced a dismissive shrug. ‘For goodness sake…the valentine card was a joke!’
The silence that fell seemed to last for ever.
Santino had gone very still, his strong bone structure clenching hard. ‘A joke…?’ A flame of raw derision flared in his gaze as he absorbed that demeaning explanation. The most obvious explanation, yet one that for some reason he had never considered. ‘What are you…fourteen years old or something?’
‘Or something…’ Her nails were digging purple welts into her damp palms while she struggled to control the wobble that had developed in her knee joints. ‘It was just a stupid joke…and then Craig got hold of it and blew it up into something else and I ended up looking like an idiot!’
‘I hope you don’t also end up pregnant,’ Santino framed with a ragged edge to his dark, deep drawl, wide, sensual mouth compressed, the pallor of anger lightening the bronzed skin round his hard jawline. ‘I doubt very much that that would strike even you as a joke.’
Poppy gazed back at him in appalled silence, her tongue cleaving to the roof of her mouth, for not once since that night had she even considered that there might be consequences. She had, without ever really thinking about it, simply assumed that he had taken care of that risk for her.
‘You mean, you didn’t…?’ she began shakily.
‘I’m afraid not.’ Brooding dark eyes acknowledging the level of her dismay and disconcertion, Santino released his breath in a slow speaking hiss of regret. ‘But I do accept that, whatever happens, the responsibility is mine.’
CHAPTER SIX
AT THAT moment, Poppy wanted to curl up in a ball like a toddler and cry her heart out, for what Santino had just revealed shed a very different light on what had motivated his visit.
Since when had she got so vain that she believed Santino Aragone was so bereft of females willing to share his bed that he had sought her out in Wales? The idea was laughable, ridiculous! Now she was remembering his tension when he’d first arrived. Had she precipitated that kiss? Had that been her fault once again? Or just one of those crazy mishaps that occurred when people were all wound up and not really knowing how to react or what to say?
Well, it scarcely mattered now, Poppy conceded painfully. Santino had come to find her and speak to her for a very good reason, and indeed the fact that he had made the effort told her much more about his strength of character than anything else. He had been worried that he might have got her pregnant. That was the only reason he had taken the trouble to seek her out again. Most men, particularly one who had just asked or had been about to ask another woman to marry him, would have done nothing and just hoped for the best. But Santino had not taken the easy way out.
‘The night of the party…’ Santino caught and held her swift upward glance ‘…we had both been drinking. I have never been so reckless, but then I don’t have a history of that kind of behaviour and I know that you had no history at all.’
Feverish colour flared in Poppy’s tense face. She was still in shock at her own naivety, her own foolish, pit
iful assumptions about why he had come to see her. It took enormous will-power for her to confront the more serious issue. Might she have conceived that night? A belated rethink on what might have caused her recent bouts of nauseous disinterest in food froze Poppy to the spot. And what about the little dizzy turns she had written off as being the results of not eating or sleeping well? Was it possible that she was pregnant? She had never bothered to keep track of her own cycle. How long had it been since the party? A couple of weeks, more? Her brain was in turmoil, refusing to function. When had she last…? She couldn’t remember. It seemed like a long time ago. Santino had just delivered what had to be the ultimate male put-down. He had come to tell her she might be pregnant!
Poppy shifted her head in a dazed motion. ‘I really don’t know yet if I’m…you know…I don’t know…er…either way.’
Santino took a slight step forward. She looked so much like a terrified teenager. She couldn’t even find the words to talk about conception. He wanted to close his arms round her, drive out the panic and uncertainty clouding her eyes, tell her that she had nothing to worry about and that he would look after her. And then he stiffened, sudden bitter anger flaring through him, making him suppress his own natural instincts. The valentine card had been a joke, a childish, stupid joke with no sense that he could see, but then someone might have dared her to do it for a laugh. How did he know? He didn’t feel as if he knew anything any more about Poppy.