Best Man To Wed?. PENNY JORDAN
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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...
Like Chris, he too had inherited his Italian grandmother’s warm skin colouring, but in James it was somehow harder, more aggressively masculine, bronzer than Chris’s softer gold, just as his eyes were a far harder and colder nerve-freezing light aqua—the kind of eyes that could chill your blood to ice from three metres away if they chose. His hair, too, was much darker than Chris’s—not black but certainly very dark brown, with dark flecks of burnt gold that gleamed like amber in the sunlight.
Poppy was not a complete fool; she could see that physically some women might be drawn to a man of James’s type, and that of his type, perhaps, as the girl at work had said, he was an outstanding example, but she could never find him attractive. There was his temper, an ice-cold, rapier-sharp, humiliatingly effective weapon of destruction onto which she had run in furious, blind hotheadedness more times than she could bear to remember, and his sarcasm, which could rip your pride to shreds like the mountain cougar’s velvet-sheathed claws.
‘What the hell is going on?’ he demanded now as he walked towards her.
Mutinously Poppy glowered at him. He hadn’t looked at the photograph as yet and she itched to demand its return, her stomach muscles cramping with tension.
‘Mum and Dad are out,’ she told him ungraciously. ‘There’s only me here...’
‘It’s you I wanted to see,’ James told her urbanely, walking past her to squat down on his heels and study her bonfire.
Why was it, Poppy thought, watching warily, that such an action by any other man dressed as James was now—in an expensive, immaculately tailored business suit, highly polished shoes and a pristine white shirt—would have immediately rendered him ridiculous, but made James look completely the opposite? And why, she demanded irritably of life, should the bonfire—her bonfire—deposit its unwanted windborne detritus of smoke and sooty smudges in her direction and not his?
Life just wasn’t fair...
Fresh tears smarted in her eyes. Hastily she blinked them away just as she heard James commenting sardonically, ‘What exactly is the purpose of all this self-sacrifice Poppy? Not, one trusts, some immature and ignoble hope that out of the ashes of this maudlin act a new and stronger love for Chris will rise, like a phoenix, only this time one that he shares, because if so—’
‘Of course not,’ Poppy denied swiftly, too shocked by his contemptuous accusation to pretend not to understand what he meant—or to deny the purpose of the bonfire.
It was typical, of course; only James could make that kind of assumption about her motivation for doing something; only James would accuse her so unfairly.
‘If you must know,’ she told him bitterly, ‘I was trying to do what you’ve been telling me I should do for years, and that is to accept that Chris doesn’t... that he never—’ She broke off, swallowing hard as her emotions threatened to overwhelm her.
‘Damn you to hell, James,’ she swore shakily. ‘This has nothing to do with you... and you have no right—’
‘I am Chris’s brother,’ he reminded her crisply, ‘and as such it’s my brotherly duty to protect him and his marriage from—’
‘From what?’ Poppy demanded shakily. ‘From me...?’ Bitterly she started to laugh. ‘From me,’ she repeated. ‘From my love—’
‘Your love!’ James