‘Hello, Tiger,’ she murmured, a smile flickering round her hps.
‘Poppy, don’t tease me,’ he groaned. He lowered himself down beside her and laid a trembling hand over one breast. ‘So soft—so beautiful,’ he whispered, his breath puffing over her skin like a warm summer breeze. Then he lowered his head, his lips closing over the aching peak, and suckled deeply. Arrows of white heat stabbed her.
‘James,’ she sobbed, and then his mouth was on hers and his hands were cradling her face, steadying her against the fury of his kiss. Their bodies tangled, limbs entwined, the rough texture of his thrilling against the satin smoothness of her skin. She arched against him, her hands shaking so badly she had to clamp them on his shoulders to steady them.
‘Please,’ she moaned against his lips, and he moved across her, holding himself back for just a moment more.
He lifted his head and stared down into her eyes. ‘Look at me, Poppy,’ he said gruffly, and then with one long, deep thrust he claimed her.
‘James?’
He lifted his head and kissed away her tears. ‘Are you all right?’
She gave a shaken little laugh. ‘I think so. Are you?’
He rolled to his back and drew her into his arms again. ‘I don’t know. I don’t know what happened there, but it wasn’t what I was expecting.’
His hands smoothed her skin, the caress gentle, tender—loving. ‘I knew you’d got under my skin,’ he said eventually, ‘but I didn’t realise it was going to feel like that. I’m sorry, I’m just a bit—shell-shocked, I suppose. It’s the first time in over five years that I’ve made love to anyone.’
Poppy propped herself up on one elbow and stared down at him in astonishment. ‘What? You’ve been celibate for five years—since Clare—?’
‘No. But it’s the first time I’ve made love since I lost her.’
She searched his eyes and found tenderness and confusion. ‘Oh, James,’ she whispered, and, lying down so that he couldn’t see her misting eyes, she pressed a kiss against his chest. His arms closed round her, his hands flat against her skin, cradling her protectively while the tears pooled in her eyes.
‘You were wonderful tonight,’ he said softly. ‘The perfect hostess.’
She blinked away the tears. ‘I’m sorry I was nasty to Helen.’
‘You weren’t nasty, and anyway she probably deserved it. She can be a little pompous.’
‘Pompous’, Poppy thought, was not the word she would have used. How about downright nasty? His hand trailed over her shoulder and she turned her head and kissed it, pushing Helen out of her mind. His fingers twisted round to cup her jaw, and, rolling her over, he brought his mouth down to hers.
Without warning heat flared between them, and with a ragged groan James slid one thigh between hers and rocked against her. His breath hissed between his teeth, and Poppy arched against him, welcoming him into her body.
This was where she belonged, here with this powerful and yet humble man who had so much love to give. Please, God, let him give that love to me, she thought. Don’t let him hide it away again.
He arched against her, crying out her name as the harsh shudders of his climax racked his body, and, as her own body contracted around him, her last thought as she felt the deep liquid pulse of his release was that they had taken no steps to prevent her from conceiving his child.
Please, God, she thought, give me his child to love, and then the passion claimed her...
CHAPTER TEN
THE streamlining of the Birmingham company seemed to take almost all of James’s attention during the next few weeks. The boys were on holiday, and Poppy managed to hijack James for long enough to go back to the zoo with them and see the penguin they had ‘adopted’.
He was fine, doing very well, and none the worse for his exploits, to everyone’s relief. The boys wanted to stay for lunch, but Poppy was feeling a bit queasy and so they bought some sandwiches and ate them on the grass under a tree. It was positively spring-like now, the sun gloriously warm, and all the trees were in bud.
The may blossom was out everywhere, and here and there they saw late-flowering cherry trees with their wonderful pink canopies as they drove back to Norwich. The boys were chattering happily, quite different from the sinisterly quiet lads they had been on the day of the penguin’s abduction, and when they arrived back they went straight into the kitchen and demanded food.
Poppy opened the freezer, took one look at the contents and ran out of the room, up the stairs to her flat and into the bathroom. James found her there a few minutes later, kneeling on the floor as white as a sheet.
‘Are you all right?’ he asked softly, crouching down beside her.
‘Yes,’ she mumbled. ‘I think I must have picked something up.’
She let him help her back to bed, and later on when he came up he brought her some soup and toast, which she ate ravenously.
‘Perhaps you were just hungry?’ he suggested when he came to remove her tray a few minutes later.
She nodded, too weary to think about it. He was probably right.
He perched on the edge of the bed and took her hand. ‘Poppy, will you be all right if I go back to Birmingham tomorrow? We’ve got some technical meetings scheduled in the factory and I ought to be there, if you can cope.’
‘I can cope,’ she promised. ‘I feel better now. I don’t know what it was. You go.’
So he went, and she did cope, but she found she felt queasy for a few more days and the only thing that seemed to help was eating.
That was easy. She ate, and she was fine. End of problem. She’d been getting a bit thin anyway, so she welcomed the extra pounds she put on. James, too, seemed to welcome them, not that they had very many opportunities to be alone together while the boys were on holiday.
Then they were back at school for the summer term, but still James seemed to be busy dividing his time between Norwich and Birmingham. On the rare occasions they were able to snatch a few uninterrupted hours, Poppy found that the loving they shared grew more tender and magical with every touch.
She was sure James loved her, but he never said so in as many words.
Come to that, nor did she, but still lingering in the back of her mind was her conversation with Mrs Cripps early on, when she’d said something about the previous nanny. Had James had an affair with her? Quite possibly, Poppy thought, but she didn’t feel like coming out and asking James, and as sure as eggs she wasn’t about to ask Mrs Cripps!
And so the nagging doubt lingered, and Poppy wondered if she was just the latest in a string of women who had taken the edge off James’s loneliness.
If so, why didn’t he take Helen up on her offer? She was certainly a very attractive woman, and Poppy knew for a fact that James would only have to crook his little finger and she’d come a-running. Perhaps she was too valuable an asset to risk disturbing the status quo with a dalliance?
Certainly she was taking James away from Poppy and the boys at every opportunity, and as spring melted into summer Poppy knew she had to do something soon. Quite apart from her own frustration and disappointment about the lack of time she had with James, there was another rather more significant reason why she needed her relationship with him resolved, and resolved fast.
She was pregnant, the baby conceived on that first wonderful night together. Her wish had been granted, and now she had to deal with the consequences.
However, knowing James as she did, she realised that if she told him he would ask her to marry him just to do the right thing by her and the baby. He was that sort of man, and if she allowed him to do that she would never know if he truly loved her or if he was with her simply because of their child, and she couldn’t bear to live with him and love him only to find out perhaps years later that he had never really loved her after all.
No, she had to know one way or the other, and the only way to find out was to force the issue—but how?
In fact the opportunity presented itself quite naturally. The first
weekend in June was the day of the church fête—called by her brothers the fête worse than death—and it was traditionally held at her parents’ farm. Poppy always helped if she was around, and this year she had told James she needed the weekend off so she could run the cake stall and the tombola.
At the start of the week James announced that he had a series of meetings scheduled in Birmingham for the coming weekend.
‘But that’s the weekend of the fete!’ Poppy protested.
‘Fête?’ James said blankly.
Poppy sighed. ‘I told you ages ago I’d need the weekend off. I have to help.’
James looked helpless for a moment. ‘Poppy, I-can’t you take the boys with you?’
‘Again?’ she said drily. ‘James, I’ve had one weekend off since April. Just one. I’m their nanny, not their mother,’ she added gently. ‘They need you—I need you—and you’re never here for us now. We hardly ever spend any time with you because you’re always in Birmingham.’
He rammed his hands through his hair and leant back against the sofa wearily, rolling his head towards her. ‘I have to go, Poppy. The changes have to be overseen.’
‘At the weekend? Every weekend?’ Poppy sat forward. ‘Tell me again, James, who does the scheduling?’
He shrugged. ‘Helen, usually—Poppy, it’s not what you think. It isn’t like that. Helen and I—well, we aren’t—’
He floundered to a halt.
‘You aren’t what, James? Lovers?’
He swallowed. ‘Exactly. She just arranges the meetings for the only times we’re all available. Perhaps because she doesn’t have a family she doesn’t see the problem.’
‘And perhaps you can’t see that she wants you, James.’
He shook his head. ‘No, Poppy, you’re wrong. You and Helen have never hit it off, I know, and I realise she can be difficult to work with, but you make it sound as if she’s trying to take me away from you!’
The incredulity in his voice, more than his words, told Poppy that he really did have no idea of what Helen was up to. How could he be so dense? she wondered. Ultimatum time, she realised.
She drew a steadying breath. ‘James, no matter what the reason, this situation has got to end. I love you, and I want to be with you, but I’m not going to stand back and be your nanny and mistress and take second place to your job or your business partner or anything else. Either the boys and I are the most important things in your life, in which case you have to start showing it by being here for us, or we’re not, in which case I’m out of here because I won’t be put on the shelf and taken down whenever your lust and your hectic programming coincide!’
He sighed harshly. ‘Poppy, of course you’re important to me—’
‘Then start showing it! I’m going to my parents this weekend, James, to help them as I’d promised. Now, either you cancel your meetings in Birmingham or you find yourself another nanny, because something’s got to give and I’m sick of it being me.’
And without another word she went up to her flat, closed the door firmly and went to bed.
By Friday she was convinced she’d lost James packed to go to Birmingham, having told Poppy tersely that he was going and thought her attitude was unreasonable and that she had totally misunderstood Helen.
She had refused to discuss it any further. ‘Go if you feel you have to, James, but I mean what I say. Let us down this weekend and I’m leaving you for good.’
‘Poppy, please—’
‘It’s your choice, James,’ she told him quietly. ‘It’s me or Helen. It’s up to you.’
‘But there is no Helen. I mean, she’s not—’ he shrugged ‘—we’re not—Poppy, you’re wrong.’
‘Am I? I don’t think so. You know where we’ll be. The choice is yours, James. Either you’re there for the fete or it’s all over.’
His face hardened. ‘You’re being unreasonable.’
‘No. I’m fighting for something that matters to me—and so is Helen. It’s not my fault you’re too blind to see it.’
And she called Bndie, opened the back door and went out for a walk. He was gone by the time she returned, and she went up to his room, threw herself down on his bed and howled her eyes out.
Please, God, don’t let me lose him, she thought, and then wondered if she hadn’t been too pushy. Maybe she should just have told him about the baby. It was a wonder he hadn’t noticed, in fact, because she was starting to show quite seriously.
Her mother noticed, of course, the moment she arrived with the boys. She took one look at Poppy, sent the twins off with Tom to see the sheep in the top field and sat Poppy down in the kitchen with a cup of tea.
‘When’s it due?’ she asked.
Poppy didn’t pretend not to know what she was talking about. This was her mother, after all. Of all people she would understand. And so Poppy told her, ‘Christmas.’
Her mother’s eyes narrowed. ‘Christmas? Looks more like October to me. Is it twins?’
Poppy lifted her shoulders helplessly, and then the tears started to fall. Audrey Taylor, faced with a daughter whose life might be in tatters, gathered her child and her grandchildren against her ample bosom and rocked them all gently.
Poppy wrapped her arms around her mother’s waist and hung on for dear life. ‘Oh, Mum, I’ve been such a fool. I knew it was going to happen, the signs were so clear—I should have gone to the doctor, or at least the chemist.’
‘Unless you wanted this to happen.’
She stared at her. ‘Are you crazy?’
‘Does James know?’
Poppy shook her head. ‘No. I wanted to know if he loved me for myself. I’m not interested in him doing the decent thing. I want him all or not at all. In fact, I’ve issued him with an ultimatum, and I think I’ve probably just lost him, so perhaps you’d better steel yourself to being an unmarried grandmother.’
Poppy’s smile was watery and very fragile, but it was a start.
‘Don’t count your cluckens. He may come through for you, Poppy, and even if he doesn’t, it’s not the end of the world. You know you won’t be homeless, and your children will always be welcome here, no matter what.’
That set Poppy off again, and when she finally hiccuped to a halt her mother sent her to have a bath and change and tidy up her face before her father and brothers came back to the house and saw her.
She looked out of her bedroom window and saw Peter and her father setting up the stalls for the afternoon, and the vicar was there unloading crockery, just as he unloaded it every year.
And yet this year, for Poppy, everything was different.
It might be the best day of her life, and it might be the worst.
She pulled on a loose cotton dress that fitted where it touched, in the vain hope that her little tummy might go unnoticed, and went down to the kitchen to see what she could do to help.
There were scones to bake and cups to wash, and the morning flew by in a flurry of activity.
Then it was the afternoon, and the vicar was there declaring the fête open, and Poppy’s heart broke into a million pieces because James was nowhere to be seen...
‘Right, everybody, that’s it for today, I think, unless you’ve got anything else to add, James?’
He looked up at Helen, smiling at him tentatively, and wondered how he could have been so dense.
‘No. No, nothing to add. Thank you, everyone,’ he said, and turned to Helen. ‘What now?’
The others filed out while she packed up her things and fiddled nervously with a pen. Helen never fiddled nervously.
‘Well, I thought as we’d got nothing scheduled till tomorrow we might go down to Stratford-upon-Avon and go for a walk by the river—perhaps go to the theatre tonight. It’s Romeo and Juliet—“
‘And do you have tickets?’
Faint colour touched her cheeks. ‘They’re holding two for us, pending confirmation.’
‘And then?’ he asked gently. ‘What did you have in mind for us then, Helen?’
‘And then?’
Her eyes fluttered closed. ‘Maybe—perhaps...’
He drew her into his arms and held her gently. ‘No, Helen. I’m sorry—so, so sorry, but no.’
She straightened away from him, moving out of his arms, pride holding her rigid. ‘There was a time when you didn’t say no,’ she reminded him.
‘That was years ago, Helen, before I even met Clare. We were different people then, and it didn’t work. Now we’re poles apart. I’ve got the boys—’
‘And Poppy.’
‘And Poppy,’ he said, hoping it was still true.
‘Do you love her?’
James’s eyes softened. ‘Yes, but she’s really nothing to do with this. Our relationship was over years ago, Helen, before I met Clare. My marriage changed me, and losing Clare changed me even more. Even if I’d never met Poppy, there’d still be no hope for us, Helen. I respect you, I admire you, and I’m very fond of you, but I don’t love you and I don’t want to spend my life with you. I’m sorry.’
‘And you want to spend it with Poppy?’
‘Yes,’ he said softly, realising that it was true. All he had to do now was convince her—
‘You’d better go to her, then.’
‘What about tomorrow?’
She smiled wryly. ‘That was just a ploy to keep you near me for the weekend. I can manage tomorrow.’
He gave her an answering smile. ‘I’m sure you can. In fact I’m sure you can manage all sorts of things.’ He took the tortured pen out of her hands and set it down, turning her to face him. ‘How about managing the Birmingham end for me?’
‘All of it?’ Her eyes widened.
He nodded. ‘I’m sure you’re every bit as capable of doing it as I am—maybe even more so. I haven’t got the mental energy to build up another company again. I’ve got other things I want to do with my life, other places I’d rather be.’
‘Are you sure? I mean, about me taking on this place?’ She gestured around her at the offices.
Just Another Miracle! Page 15