page24 (1/2)

‘Stop it,’ she heard Jaly Then he said, ‘It’s me you’re —mine!’

‘Don’t you think I know that?’ she returned bitterly Her dress suddenly felt uncoht round her waist, her head ached and she felt hot and tired

‘I hate all this hypocrisy,’ she told Jarily ‘All this pretence’

‘Really? You didn’t seeht you convinced yourself you were in bed with Chris and not with me,’ James reminded her bluntly

Shocked by the unexpectedness of his attack, co act of love in church, Poppy could only stare at him in silence until she was rescued by the welco, are you all right? You look rather pale Come and sit down Everyone’s here now and the caterers are ready to serve lunch’

CHAPTER EIGHT

‘IT WON’T be long now’

Poppy had balked at the idea of a honey out that it would look odd if they didn’t go away, and in the end she had had to give in, although she had wished she hadn’t when he had told her where they were going

‘Italy!’ she had protested ‘No, I can’t, not Italy; it will reht with at the hotel,’ she had begun, childishly driven into the panicky reaction by her own misery

But Ja her firht with at the hotel was you’

‘One night you didn’t coly

‘Yes, but not because I ith so’

Poppy hadn’t quite been able to bring herself to look at hio back to Italy’

‘We don’t have much choice,’ Ja us the villa as a wedding gift and it would look churlish to refuse’

Poppy had knowht James’s mother had not used the villa since Ja, she said, to keep her happy memories of the holidays they had spent there intact

Now she had told James and Poppy it was time that other members of the family enjoyed it, and since Jae than Chris she had decided that James and Poppy should have it

Poppy had been there once with her parents, as a child, and she remembered hoed she had been by the Tuscan countryside, by the richness of its colours and the warm vibrancy of its people and its life

One unexpected side effect of her pregnancy had been that her body terees, and the air-conditioning in the car that James had hired for them was a welcome antidote to the heat of the Italian summer, beneath which the Tuscan countryside drowsed

Whenever Poppy thought of the area she always thought of it in terms of its colours—amber, saffron, warm browns and rich terracotta—the colours of the earth, colours which, for her, echoed its richness and warhtened by the cerulean sky

The villa—their villa noas s gift from James’s father to his mother

‘Jao, ‘and I’ve often wondered if that is why he is so e than Chris

‘You do love him, don’t you, Poppy?’ she had asked quietly ‘Because I kno much he loves you, how much he has always loved you’ And Poppy had bowed her head

She had no idea hen James could so obviously and easily lie to his mother, she seemed unable to do the same, but perhaps her aunt had taken the tears in her eyes as a sign of her love for James rather than the reverse, Poppy decided, because she had not pressed the ently