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PROLOGUE

POPPY CARLTON staredto 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 ht 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 aith the back of her hand

She had known forto , 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 forith 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 no 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 bestbouquet, her instinctive atte with Claire and Star, and, worst of all, the coly, the relief as well in Chris’s eyes as he haduntil he and Sally had returned fro the traditional prophecy that ith 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 knohat I know’ He had added, ‘And if you did’ He had paused, s her with, ‘Of course, if you ever feel like finding out’

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

No, she would never ineer 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 da rays of the evening sunlight turning her silky brown hair a dark, rich red and illuht as, head bowed, she carefully struck aa funeral pyre

Which in effect she was, Poppy acknowledged tiredly as she watched the kindling that she had carefully arranged start to burn, fla 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 herselfher eyes, unable to look, unable to watch al eaten up by fla the silky curtain of her hair, scattering sparks fro theraphs, nition, only one of thenisable, the pale pink lipstick shape of her own htly 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 swaraph, the hirling it out of reach With a small cry, Poppy tried to pursue it, but so it fro expression crossing his saturnine face as he looked at it and then back at her

‘Jaarden towards her, still holding her photograph

Ja Chris’s elder brother and her cousin but no two men could have been more unalike, Poppy reflected bitterly as Ja and studied her bonfire

Whereas Chris was all sunny s, an open, uncoly easy for her to fall in love with, James was just the opposite

James rarely smiled, or at least not at her, and Ja 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 bec

ause 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 his even if he cloaked his in amockery 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 Ja

‘He’s very, very dangerously sexy,’ one of the girls orked 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 co farhis father’s day

‘I’ll just bet he’s a real once-in-a-lifetihtly

Poppy had shuddered to listen to her, thinking that if she really knehat 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 lifein her heartin 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 serown-up birthday party and fallen head over heels in love with Chris And she had gone on loving hi for him to love her in return, not just as his cousin but as a womanthe 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, as now his wife Sally, whoh 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 saht and breadth of shoulder, Poppy decided noatching Jaood looks of a young sun-god, his floppy brown hair golden at the ends, his eyes the saold, Jaodlike

Like Chris, he too had inherited his Italian grand, but in Jaressively old, 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 broith dark flecks of burnt gold that gleaht

Poppy was not a coht be drawn to a irl at work had said, he was an outstanding example, but she could never find him attractive There was his tely effective weapon of destruction onto which she had run in furious, blind hotheadedness more times than she could bear to remember, and his sarcasar’s velvet-sheathed claws