Best Man To Wed?. Penny Jordan

      

      “What happened last night...

      “It didn’t... I didn’t... I thought you were Chris... I was dreaming about him and when... You must have known that I would never... That...”

      Poppy stopped abruptly as she saw the dangerous warning expression on James’s face, her stomach dropping sickeningly as she realized how angry he was.

      “Go on,” he invited her softly. “You were saying that you thought I was Chris, that you were dreaming about Chris, but you weren’t asleep when we made love, were you, Poppy? You knew very well who it was, who was holding you...touching you, pleasuring you,” he told her tauntingly, “even if you do claim now that you wanted it to be my brother....”

Dear Reader,

      What is more natural than a bride wanting her closest friends also to find happiness in love? For Sally, this means tricking three of her wedding guests into catching her bouquet! Three women, each very different, but all with their own reasons for never wanting to marry. That is why they agree to a pact to stay single, but just how long will it take for the bouquet to begin its magic?

      Penny Jordan has worked her magic on these three linked stories. One of Mills & Boon’s most successful and popular authors, she has written three compelling romances—all complete stories in themselves—that follow the lives—and loves—of Claire, Poppy and Star. Best Man to Wed? is Poppy’s story. She is the close cousin of Sally’s new husband, and she is devastated at having lost the man she wanted to marry—and Poppy hardly needs the best man telling her to grow up and find herself a real man!

      THE BRIDE’S BOUQUET—three women make a

      pact to stay single, but one by one they fall, seduced

      by the power of love

      Look out for Star’s story in

      Too Wise to Wed? July 1997

      Mills & Boon Presents #1895

      Best Man to Wed?

      Penny Jordan

       www.millsandboon.co.uk

      MILLS & BOON

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      Table of Contents

       Cover

       “What happened last night…

Dear Reader

       Title Page

PROLOGUE

CHAPTER ONE

       CHAPTER TWO

       CHAPTER THREE

       CHAPTER FOUR

       CHAPTER FIVE

       CHAPTER SIX

       CHAPTER SEVEN

       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