Best Man To Wed?. Penny Jordan

twisting. ‘You don’t even begin to know the meaning of the word. In the eyes of the world you might be a mature woman of twenty-two, but inside you’re still an adolescent,’ he told her crushingly, ‘with all the danger to yourself and to others that that implies.’

      ‘I am not an adolescent,’ Poppy denied furiously, angry flags of temper burning in her cheeks.

      ‘The way you can’t control your emotions says that you are,’ James corrected her coldly. ‘And, like an adolescent,’ he continued bitingly, ‘you positively enjoy wallowing in your self-induced misery, the self-aggrandised “love” you claim you feel for Chris. But you, of course, being you, have to drag everyone else into the plot as well.’

      ‘That’s not true,’ Poppy gasped furiously. ‘You—’

      ‘It is true,’ James told her grimly. ‘Look at the way you behaved at the wedding... Do you think that a single person there didn’t know .what you were doing, or how you felt?’

      ‘I wasn’t doing anything,’ Poppy protested, her face as white now as it had been red before.

      ‘Yes, you were,’ James told her. ‘You were trying to make Chris feel guilty and to make everyone else feel sorry for you. Well, it isn’t people’s pity you deserve, Poppy...it’s their contempt. If you really loved Chris—really loved him—you’d put his happiness before your own selfish, self-induced misery.

      ‘You claim that you’re not an adolescent any longer, that you’re an adult. Well, try behaving like one,’ James told her witheringly.

      ‘You have no right to speak to me like that,’ Poppy told him chokingly. ‘You have no idea how I feel or what—’

      She froze as James burst out laughing—a harsh, contemptuous sound that splintered the early evening air.

      ‘No idea...? My dear Poppy, the whole town knows how you feel.’

      Poppy stared at him.

      ‘Nothing to say?’ he jeered.

      Poppy swallowed painfully. People did know how she felt about Chris. She couldn’t deny that, but not because she had deliberately flaunted her feelings to make Chris feel guilty, as James had so unfairly claimed.

      It was simply that she had been so young when she had first fallen in love with Chris that it had been impossible for her to keep her feelings hidden, and she had loved him so long that people were bound to have noticed. But she had never, ever, as James was claiming, used her feelings to try to manipulate Chris, or, indeed, anyone else, into feeling sorry for her.

      Of course, she deplored the fact that people were aware of her love for Chris—why else on the evening when he and Sally had broken the news of their engagement to the family had she made a silent vow that somehow she had to find a way to stop loving him?

      All right, so far she might not have been successful, but at least she had tried—and was still trying.

      It should have helped, she knew, knowing that Sally was so right for Chris and that they were so very, very much in love; with any other girl but Sally she might have suspected that that gesture of hers in ensuring that Poppy was one of the trio who was tricked into catching Sally’s wedding bouquet had been, at best, a clear warning to her that it was time for her to find a man of her own and, at worst, a tauntingly vindictive underlining of the fact that she had lost Chris. But Sally was far too genuinely nice and warm-hearted to do anything like that and her motives, Poppy knew, had been completely altruistic.

      That hadn’t stopped it hurting, though. And now here was James deliberately making that hurting worse.

      ‘How I feel... what I do is none of your business,’ was the only response she could manage to James’s taunt.

      ‘No?’ James gave her an ironic look. ‘Well, what is my business is the fact that you are employed by the company as a linguist and interpreter and, as such, I see that you’re down to fly out to Italy for the international conference next Wednesday.’

      ‘Yes,’ Poppy agreed listlessly. The previous year, when the conference had been arranged, she had believed that Chris would be representing the company at the conference, and when he had asked her if she would like to go too she had walked on air for days afterwards, her imagination fuelling wildly romantic and, she realised, looking back, totally impossible fantasies featuring the two of them.

      The reality, she knew now, would be rather dif ferent. Even if Chris had still been going, the four days of the conference would be filled with meetings, whilst she would be called upon to use her language skills, both in verbal translations and paperwork, which from previous experience she knew would keep her tied to her hotel bedroom when she wasn’t actually attending the conference with the company’s small sales team.

      ‘The flight time’s been changed,’ James informed her. ‘I’ll pick you up here at six-thirty. I’ve got to drive past on my way to the airport, so—’

      ‘You’ll pick me up?’ Poppy interrupted him, shocked. ‘But you aren’t going. Chris...’

      ‘Chris is on honeymoon, as you very well know, and won’t be back for another week,’ James reminded her grimly, giving her a tauntingly sardonic look as he added unkindly, ‘Surely even you aren’t self-deluding enough to believe that he’d cut short his honeymoon to go to Italy with you? Or was that what you were secretly hoping, Poppy... secretly wishing he would do? My God, just when the hell are you going to grow up and realise that—’

      ‘That what?’ Poppy interrupted him furiously, fighting to control the way her mouth had started to tremble as she goaded James wildly. ‘Go on, then, say it. Say what we both know you’re just dying to say, James. Or shall I say it for you...?’

      Her chin tilted proudly as she forced herself to look straight into his eyes without flinching. ‘When am I going to realise that Chris doesn’t love me, that he will never love me... that he loves Sally...?’ she said bravely.

      She knew that her eyes were over-bright with betraying tears, but she couldn’t help it; her emotions were too strong for her, too overpowering.

      ‘Of course I know that Chris won’t be going to Italy,’ she told James tiredly, turning away from him as the box at the heart of her small bonfire suddenly crackled fiercely and was engulfed by flames.

      The pain inside her heart as she watched it burn was so sharp and driving that she had to force herself not to reach into the fire and retrieve the box, shaking it from the flames. Inside it were all her precious, cherished memories and souvenirs of her years of loving Chris: the present he had given her for that momentous twelfth birthday when she had first fallen in love with him... the card he had sent her...the other gifts he had given her over the years.

      Quite mundane, perhaps, in many ways, and certainly not the gifts of a lover; no doubt in James, for instance, the small, precious hoard that she had guarded so tenderly would only provoke derision and contempt, but to her...

      Yes, she had known that Chris wouldn’t be going to Italy, but it had never occurred to her that James would be attending the conference in his place. She had assumed that someone else from the sales team would go instead. She frowned suddenly, something striking her.

      ‘If you’re going to Italy, you won’t need me there,’ she announced as she turned back to look at him. ‘You speak Italian fluently.’

      As well he might, Poppy reflected ungenerously. After all, his grandmother on his mother’s side was Italian and both he and Chris had frequently spent summer holidays with their Italian relations. But whereas James had always been very fluent in the language, Chris had not absorbed it quite so well.

      ‘Italian, yes,’ James agreed coolly, ‘but this is an international conference, remember, and your knowledge of Japanese is required. So, if you were entertaining any ideas about spending your time mooning around daydreaming about Chris, I warn you that we’re going to Italy to work...’

      ‘You don’t have