Penny Jordan - Best Man To Wed?

CHAPTER EIGHT

CHAPTER NINE

EPILOGUE

Copyright

PROLOGUE

POPPY CARLTON stared mournfully across the now empty garden, furiously trying to blink away her tears.

It seemed only yesterday that she and Chris used to play here. She had been happy then, never thinking that there might come a day when she and her cousin would not be so close, a day when someone else, another woman, would become the main focus of his life, his time, his future, his love.

Fresh tears brimmed and welled over. Poppy dashed them away with the back of her hand.

She had known for months, of course, that Chris and Sally were going to marry, but somehow, until the actual day of the wedding, she had gone on... What? Hoping that he would change his mind, that he would look at her, love her as a woman and not just as a cousin?

‘Your turn next,’ Chris had laughed affectionately at her as she had leapt forward with Claire, Sally’s stepmother, and Star, her closest friend, to catch the bouquet which Sally had dropped as she’d slipped on the stairs.

Her turn next. Impossible. She would never marry now. How could she when the man she loved, the only man she had ever loved or ever would love, was lost to her?

And of course her other cousin, James, Chris’s elder brother and best man, would have to have witnessed the whole thing—the falling bouquet, her instinctive attempt to save it along with Claire and Star, and, worst of all, the compassion and, humiliatingly, the relief as well in Chris’s eyes as he had made some cumbersome joke about her at least waiting until he and Sally had returned from their honeymoon before fulfilling the traditional prophecy that went with the catching of the bride’s bouquet.

Oh, yes, James had seen all of that and predictably had made no attempt to spare her the full force of his cynical denunciation of her feelings as he had told her, ‘Grow up, Poppy; grow up and wise up. It would never have worked; the pair of you would have been in the divorce courts within a year if Chris had ever been fool enough to take you up on what you’re so pathetically desperate to give him.’

‘You don’t know that,’ Poppy had spat back angrily. ‘You don’t anything.’

‘Oh, no,’ James had mocked her softly. ‘You don’t know what I know.’ He had added, ‘And if you did...’ He had paused, smiling nastily at her before challenging her with, ‘Of course, if you ever feel like finding out...’

‘I hate you, James,’ Poppy had retaliated passionately.

No, she would never marry now, and all Sally’s determined attempt to engineer it so that she was one of the trio to catch the bridal bouquet had done was reinforce that fact.

CHAPTER ONE

SLOWLY, gravely, Poppy knelt in front of the bonfire that she had just constructed, oblivious to the damp seeping into the knees of her jeans, the dying rays of the evening sunlight turning her silky brown hair a dark, rich red and illuminating her in a beam of light as, head bowed, she carefully struck a match with such seriousness that she might have been igniting a funeral pyre.

Which in effect she was, Poppy acknowledged tiredly as she watched the kindling that she had carefully arranged start to burn, flames crackling as they ran from twig to twig, racing towards the wooden trinket box at their heart.

As she stood up Poppy had to dig her hands deep into the pockets of her jeans to prevent herself pulling the kindling aside and snatching the box to safety.

It was over, she told herself mercilessly, closing her eyes, unable to look, unable to watch almost a whole decade of ceaseless devotion and love being eaten up by flames. A sharp breeze sprang up out of nowhere, ruffling the silky curtain of her hair, scattering sparks from the fire, whirling-dervish-like, amongst its flames, teasing them, snatching from them a handful of photographs, most of them charred beyond recognition, only one of them still recognisable, the pale pink lipstick shape of her own mouth imprinted brightly across its surface.

Tears stung Poppy’s eyes, her heart twisting and aching with anguish as her emotions overcame her will-power and she stretched out helplessly to clasp the photograph which fate, it seemed, had decreed that she should not destroy.

As Chris’s beloved features swam before her, tears filled her eyes and she missed the photograph, the wind whirling it out of reach. With a small cry, Poppy tried to pursue it, but someone else reached it before her, taking it from the breeze’s playful grasp with mocking ease, a taunting expression crossing his saturnine face as he looked at it and then back at her.

‘James!’ Poppy said his name with loathing as he came down the garden towards her, still holding her photograph.

James might be her beloved, darling Chris’s elder brother and her cousin but no two men could have been more unalike, Poppy reflected bitterly as James stopped walking and studied her bonfire.

Whereas Chris was all sunny smiles, warmth and laughter, good natured, easygoing, an open, uncomplicated individual whom it had all been too heart-breakingly easy for her to fall in love with, James was just the opposite.

James rarely smiled, or at least not at her, and James was most certainly not good-natured, nor easygoing and certainly not uncomplicated; even those who liked and approved of. him, such as her mother, were forced to admit that he was not always the easiest person in the world to deal with.

‘It’s because he had to step into his father’s shoes whilst he was still so young,’ her mother always said in his defence.

‘He was only twenty when Howard died, after all, and he had to take full responsibility for looking after his mother and Chris, as well as the business.’

Her mother had to defend James because he was her nephew. Poppy knew that but she hated him, loathed him, and she knew that he reciprocated those feelings even if he cloaked his in a more urbane and taunting mockery towards her than she could ever achieve towards him. It shocked her that people who didn’t really know them always claimed that of the two brothers James was by far the better looking...

‘He’s very, very dangerously sexy,’ one of the girls who worked for the small family company which James had taken over on his father’s death had told her.

According to her mother, by hard work and dedication he had built the company into something far more impressive than it had ever been during his father’s day.

‘I’ll just bet he’s a real once-in-a-lifetime experience in bed,’ the girl had added forthrightly.

Poppy had shuddered to listen to her, thinking that if she really knew what James was like, how cruel and hard he could be, she wouldn’t think that. Personally Poppy couldn’t think of any man she’d want less as a lover, but then there was only one man that Poppy wanted to fulfil that role in her life...in her heart...in her bed, and there always had been.

She had been twelve years old, a girl just on the brink of womanhood, when she had looked across the table at her first semi-grown-up birthday party and fallen head over heels in love with Chris. And she had gone on loving him and hoping, praying, longing for him to love her in return, not just as his cousin but as a woman ... the woman. Only he hadn’t done so.

Instead he had fallen in love with someone else. Instead he had fallen in love with pretty, funny Sally. Sally, who was now his wife... Sally, whom Poppy couldn’t hate even though she had tried very hard to do so.

Chris and James didn’t even look very much like brothers, if you discounted the fact that they shared the same impressive height and breadth of shoulder, Poppy decided now, watching James in angry resentment. Whereas Chris had the warm good looks of a young sun-god, his floppy brown hair golden at the ends, his eyes the same blue as a warm summer sky, his skin a mouth-watering gold, James looked more demoniac than godlike...