by Penny Jordan
But they were not in love and she had conceived his child whilst believing... whilst wanting another man, and that was the source of her shame and anguish, of her dread at the prospect of marriage to him.
She was relieved when the lunch was finally over. Having said goodbye to Star outside the restaurant, she and Claire were left alone together. As Claire turned to her, clearly about to say something, Poppy saw James’s familiar Jaguar driving towards them, James himself at the wheel, and she froze, torn between her need to turn and flee and her knowledge that physically she felt incapable of moving so much as a muscle. The Jaguar stopped abruptly in front of them and James got out and strode towards them.
Poppy winced, and she felt James’s fingers curl round her arm, locking on it in a grip that she couldn’t break. ‘James, what are you doing here? How did you know where to find me?’
‘I looked in your diary,’ he told her witheringly. ‘Get in the car.’
‘James... I...’
I don’t want to go with you, she had been about to say, but he shook his head, telling her grimly, ‘Not now, Poppy; I’m not in the mood for it. Where the hell have you been?’ he demanded as he propelled her towards the Jaguar. ‘Why the hell haven’t you been in touch with me?’
As she turned towards him he warned her, ‘No games, Poppy; you know what I mean, you know what it is I want to know...’
Just for a heartbeat Poppy contemplated lying to him, telling him that she wasn’t pregnant after all, but the impulse soon died, shrivelled by the hot, dry blast of his anger.
‘I was right, wasn’t I?’ James continued mercilessly, after he had bundled her into the car, slid into the driver’s seat and set the car in motion. ‘You have conceived my child.’
‘Yes,’ Poppy admitted tonelessly. Why, when she knew how little emotion there was between them, how lacking in tender, loving feelings their relationship was, did she have this urge to cry, to turn to James and beg him to stop the car and put his arms round her, hold her, make her feel safe... make her feel protected...make her feel loved?
She tensed her body, expecting his anger to accelerate at her confirmation of her pregnancy with the same velocity with which the car had increased speed, but instead he remained oddly quiet—so quiet in fact that Poppy felt impelled to turn her head and look at him—the first time she had looked at him since he had stopped the car and come striding so angrily towards her.
James wasn’t paying any attention to her; his gaze, his concentration appeared to be fixed on the empty road ahead of them.
‘I... I won’t... I can’t not have my baby,’ she told him doggedly, realising only as she gave voice to the shaky words just how strongly she already felt about her child, how protective of it, how determined always to keep it from hurt and from harm.
Now James did look at her, and the look in his eyes made her wince slightly as he told her starkly, ‘If I thought for one moment that you might... This baby is mine as well as yours, Poppy, and if I thought that you’d do anything—and I do mean anything to harm it...’
Poppy’s body shook as she listened to him. That he would insist on them both ‘doing the right thing’ she had never doubted—he was that sort of man—but the emotion she had heard in his voice as he’d told her that the baby—her baby—was his child as well had left her lost for words, grappling with the shock of suddenly discovering a side to him that she had never imagined existed.
She knew, of course, how protective he could be towards his close family, but it had never occurred to her that those feelings might extend to a child he had never even intended should be conceived.
‘We’ll need to talk to your parents,’ she heard him warning her, ‘and then my mother...’
‘Do we... are we...? They’ll have to know the truth,’ she told him, unaware of how haunted and unhappy she looked as she whispered rather than stated the words.
‘Yes,’ he agreed quietly. ‘Or at least part of it. I warn you, Poppy, that not just for your own sake but for the baby’s sake as well there is one truth that it is advisable that no one should ever know.’
Poppy’s heart started to thump heavily as he turned his head to look at her.
‘What... what do you mean?’ she asked him, her mouth dry with foreboding.
‘They must never—no one must ever have any reason to think that our child... our relationship... is the result of anything other than love.’
‘Love?’ Poppy swallowed hard as she stared at him aghast. ‘But no one will really believe that. They all know the way I feel about Chris...’
‘They all know that you had an adolescent crush on my brother,’ James corrected her coldly.
‘I can’t pretend that I’ve fallen in love with you,’ Poppy told him. ‘No one would ever believe me.’
‘No? Then you’ll just have to find a way of making them believe you,’ James informed her. ‘Unless, of course, you actually want people to guess the truth.’
‘No,’ Poppy denied sharply, her face burning with hot colour.
‘No,’ James said sardonically. ‘You’re caught between two equally unpalatable choices, I’m afraid, Poppy. You either pretend you love me or you take the risk of people questioning why, if you don’t, you and I conceived a child. It’s a question of the lesser of two evils.’
‘Chris will never believe that I’ve fallen in love with you,’ Poppy protested feverishly.
‘He is far too busy with his own life and his new wife to have any time to spare questioning what’s going on in yours. Face it, Poppy, what you choose to do or not to do with your life isn’t of much interest to Chris, other than as a cousin, and if anything—’
‘He’ll be only too relieved not to have the embarrassment of me loving him any more,’ Poppy broke in shakily. ‘Yes, so you’ve already told me.’
‘Are both your parents at home this evening?’
‘Yes—yes, I think so,’ Poppy confirmed as she tried to grapple with the confusion of her thoughts. Part of her ached and longed to turn the clock back and to have things as they were, but if that were possible that would mean ... Her hand moved automatically towards her stomach. The discovery of how emotionally attached she had become to the thought of her child in such a short space of time shocked her.
‘Good. We’ll need to talk to them as quickly as possible. I think so far as the general public is concerned the fact that the family has barely got over one big wedding should serve as a reasonable excuse for the haste of ours...’
‘But people are bound to guess, especially once the baby—’
‘So let them guess,’ James shrugged as he shot back his cuff to glance at his watch. ‘I’ll come round about eight,’ he told her as he brought the car to a halt outside her parents’ house.
Poppy reached numbly for the doorhandle. She felt tired and drained, alone, and even afraid. This wasn’t how she had imagined things would be... how her life, her marriage would be. And never, ever in her darkest nightmares had she envisaged a scenario so starkly devoid of love and emotion.
James had got out and was now standing on the pavement beside her. As the panic flared inside her she turned towards him.
‘We can’t marry one another, James,’ she protested. ‘We don’t love each other. We have nothing in common, nothing to keep us together, nothing to make our marriage real.’
All her fears and her pent-up sense of loss and anguish were contained in her voice and her expression as she turned pleadingly towards him, but James ignored them, taking hold of her right there in her parents’ drive, his hands firm and compelling as he gripped her upper arms and told her savagely, ‘No! We’ve got this much, Poppy.’
And then he was kissing her, his mouth hard and warm on hers, burning the numb immobility of her lips into fierce, painful life as they softened and then clung to his, his touch conjuring up inside her a sharp, whirlwind sensation and taut, aching need.
Their surroundings, their situation, everything else faded into insignificance as Pop
py clung helplessly to him whilst her body responded to his touch, his kiss.
When he finally released her, it took her several seconds to realise where they were and why. Tears glittered brightly in her eyes as she started to turn away from him, her face hot with shame. Why was it that she responded so immediately and so physically to him? Why...?
‘Poppy,’ she heard him saying when she made to walk away. The sound of his voice halted her and she turned automatically to face him. ‘We’ve also got this,’ he reminded her, one hand on her arm, the other, fingers spread, placed against her stomach.
She could feel the warmth of his touch through her clothes—male and somehow oddly possessive—and even though she knew it was impossible Poppy could have sworn that the new life within her responded somehow to his touch, knew it almost.
Head bowed, she stood there unresisting as the tears again filled her eyes like liquid crystals. She could feel James moving towards her, closing the gap between them. She could feel the warmth of his breath as he bent his head towards her, and the fear that he might kiss her again, might bring back the wretched, treacherous surge of desire that he seemed to summon up within her so effortlessly lent her the impetus to push away from him and half run towards the sanctuary of the house.
‘I’m afraid that I’m really the one to blame.’ James’s hand reached out and took hold of Poppy’s. His grip felt oddly comforting, warming the icy chill of her own nervously tense fingers.
James had just finished telling her parents that they intended to marry as soon as they could—and why. The silence which had followed his announcement had caused Poppy to hang her head in shame as she’d waited for the blow to fall and for her parents to demand to know how she came to be carrying James’s child when they both knew how much she loved Chris, but to her astonishment neither of them made any such comment. Instead, they hugged her lovingly whilst her father cleared his throat.
‘Oh, darling, I always knew that eventually you and James would sort out your differences, although I must admit, I didn’t expect it to happen quite so—’
‘It’s my fault,’ James repeated, gently tugging Poppy towards him so that she had no alternative but to allow him to draw her into the protection of his body.
And he told her parents with an apparent sincerity that had Poppy holding her breath and staring up at him in wide-eyed disbelief, ‘Having waited for so long, having loved and wanted her for so long, once Poppy... Well, let’s just say that I let my feelings get the better of me without fully thinking through the potential consequences. And, wrongly or not, I can’t pretend that the end result isn’t one that fills me with great joy, even though for the sake of conformity I should have taken steps...
‘My main concern in all of this is that Poppy isn’t upset and that you’ll forgive me for depriving you of the opportunity to spend the next twelve months organising our wedding,’ he told Poppy’s mother wryly.
‘Well, I must admit that you have rather surprised us,’ Poppy’s mother confessed, ‘although... Don’t look like that, darling,’ she reassured Poppy. ‘I do remember how it feels to be so very much in love, you know,’ she said gently. ‘Your father and I...’
Poppy’s father coughed again, making her mother laugh.
‘It will have to be a quiet family wedding, of course; have you made any plans? Poppy will need a dress, of course, and then there’ll be the wedding breakfast...’
‘No,’ Poppy protested. ‘I...’ She flushed as both her parents looked at her. ‘I won’t need a dress,’ she told them huskily. ‘Not for a register office wedding. I—’
‘It won’t be a register office wedding,’ James interrupted her curtly. ‘We’ll be getting married in church,’ he told her mother, to Poppy’s shock.
And then, before Poppy could say anything, he cupped her face in one hand and there, in full view of her parents, turned it up towards his own, kissing her lightly on the tip of her nose and then far more lingeringly on her mouth before saying softly, ‘I don’t want anyone thinking that either of us regrets what’s happened or that our child isn’t welcome and a wanted addition to our lives. And I certainly don’t want them thinking that our marriage is anything other than a celebration of the love we feel for one another and for him or her.’
It wasn’t until he kissed the moisture from the corners of her eyes that Poppy realised she was crying. As James released her she saw that her mother’s eyes looked suspiciously damp as well.
‘I can’t wear a white dress,’ she told her mother shakily. ‘It will have to be—’
‘Ivory or cream,’ her mother agreed, apparently totally misunderstanding her. ‘White has never been a good colour for you. I remember when I was buying your christening robe...
‘If it’s just going to be a family affair, James, I think we should have the wedding breakfast here. We’ll have it catered, of course. Have you told your own mother yet?’
‘No, Poppy and I are going to see her later.’
This was news to Poppy but she had no energy left to argue. She was still shaken by James’s ability to lie so convincingly. If she hadn’t known better, even she would have been taken in by the little performance he had just put on for her parents.
And she couldn’t help thinking how much, if she had genuinely loved James, those words, that confirmation of his commitment to her and to their child would have meant to her. It struck Poppy all at once how little she actually thought about Chris these days, but then she had hardly had the luxury of having the time to think about him, had she? Before, when there had been no James in her life, no plans to make for the future, no other matters to concern her, she had had the leisure to indulge in as many daydreams about Chris and how it would be if he loved her as she wished.
And besides, it seemed wrong somehow, unfair to her unborn child to indulge in the immaturity of daydreaming about a man she could never have—a man who was not that child’s father.
It shocked her a little bit that her parents should so easily accept the supposed transfer of her love from Chris to James:
She had loved Chris.
Had loved him?
For some reason Poppy felt as though she was suddenly standing on the edge of a very deep and dangerous chasm which had totally unexpectedly opened virtually beneath her unsuspecting feet.
‘Ready?’ she heard James asking her.
She swallowed nervously. Ready for what? For the future—their future? How could she be when it wasn’t a future she would have chosen for herself?
Six weeks after, they were married in church with her wearing an ivory lace and silk wedding dress which had originally been made for James’s Italian great-grandmother. The dress had been a gift from James’s aunt, who had travelled from her home in Rome especially to bring it and, Poppy suspected, to congratulate her on her good taste and good fortune in, marrying her favourite relative.
It had only had to be let out a little bit at the waist. Her pregnancy might not be showing physically in her body as yet, Poppy acknowledged as she stood mutely at James’s side after the ceremony, his wife now and no longer just his cousin, but she suspected that the time she had had off work with the debilitating bouts of sickness which had accompanied the early weeks of pregnancy had alerted most people to the reality of the situation.
However, no one had actually said anything, apart from Sally, who had commented rather enviously earlier in the day as she’d helped Poppy to dress for her wedding, ‘Chris and I said that we would wait a few years before we started a family. I thought that was what I wanted but now... I suppose there’s something about conceiving a child by the man you love that adds a special depth to your relationship... a special closeness. You only have to look at how happy Claire and Brad are,’ she said wistfully, ‘now that they’re married and expecting a baby...’
Poppy hadn’t known what to say. How could she tell Sally of all people the truth? And now it was too late to tell anyone anything. Now she and James were married, husband and wife, a
couple, a pair...parents-in-waiting.
Poppy shivered, closing her eyes as she remembered the moment when James had lifted the heavy antique veil from her face to look at her in absolute silence, before raising his hands to cup her face.
Her whole body had trembled so much that it had even felt as though his hands were trembling as he’d bent his head and then slowly kissed her, not with sensual passion, not with any emotion she could put a name to or recognise, but with something else—something in the way he’d looked at her, something in the solemnity of the vows they had just taken that had brought a lump to her throat and made her lips quiver beneath his.
Had anyone other than she noticed the way his fingers had gently brushed her stomach as he’d released her face, his touch as much a wordless, secret promise to their child as his vows had been a public one to her?
Poppy doubted it; that gesture had not been for public view; that gesture, that vow had been something private between James and his son... or daughter—something which she’d felt at that moment had actually excluded her. It had also made her acutely conscious of the reason why they were marrying and of the fiction of James’s public display of love for her.
Chris came up to them now, to envelop his brother in a bear-hug of emotion and to give Poppy a wide, beaming grin. His hair needed cutting and the way it flopped into his eyes made him look both boyish and slightly bashful.
As she listened to Sally scolding him lovingly for unfastening the top button of his shirt and removing his tie, Poppy wondered what would have happened if it had been Chris’s child she was carrying and not James’s; how would Chris have reacted in such circumstances? She tried to envisage him calmly taking control as James had done, seeing her parents, explaining what had happened to them, taking the blame and the responsibility, and she was forced to acknowledge that if Chris had been the father it would have been more likely that she would have been the one to take charge, to do the explaining... to take the blame.