The Awakening of Poppy Edwards by Marguerite Kaye Read Free Book Online

kicking out, nails on my back, her breath on my cheek, so tight around me that it was seconds before I exploded, too. And minutes, long minutes, before I realised we hadn’t used any protection. It was more minutes after that before I managed to care.
    And it was days after, when she told me there was no harm done, that I discovered a part of me, a tiny part of me, but part of me all the same, that was disappointed. I should have run then, but I didn’t. What I did was I pretended it hadn’t happened, that I didn’t care, because I never had before, and I was so good at it, the pretending, that for a while it worked.

Chapter Five
    Poppy
    When Randolph first told me about his affair, I was shocked. He tried, he said, to keep away from her. Every time he told himself that would be the last. It broke his own rules, you see, her being married. He’d never broken them before, but no matter how wrong he believed it to be, he still kept going back.
    I expect you see where this is going. Lewis wasn’t married. Had never been close, from what he told me, just like me. But despite the fact that it was breaking one of our strictest rules, we couldn’t seem to stop. We told ourselves every time that it would be the last. Then we did it again. ‘It will wear itself out,’ I said to him. We’d been at his studio all day trying out all sorts of technical things with sound recording equipment that looked like something from a hundred years in the future to me. My voice sounded scratchy when he played it back, but it was still my voice. The little room with the big microphone thing was empty by then. I was exhausted. Sex should have been the last thing on my mind. It was the first.
    It was Randolph who came up with the get-out clause. ‘You’re sure it’s just the sex?’ he asked me over lunch one day. And when I nodded, though he looked quite unnecessarily sceptical, he said more or less what I’d said to Lewis. ‘Then it’s just a case of riding it out, if you’ll forgive me being so crude. And if you can get a bit of publicity for yourself, then all the better. Throw me over for Cartsdyke,’ he said when I looked confused.
    ‘I can’t. He would hate it. And then when it was over…’
    ‘This is 1924, Poppy, not 1824. Infidelity is all the rage, and I’m not suggesting that you’re unfaithful, my dear, I’m simply suggesting you abandon your butter-wouldn’t-melt image and become more of a Modern. You’re beautiful and you’re a star. Make the most of it, and of your passion for that man, because neither will last forever. And as to him hating it—honestly? I’ll bet you anything you like he’d hate it even more if you and I continued to tell everyone we were an item. Ask him.’
    So I did. I asked Lewis, and after a lot of frowning, he said it was a neat solution. Publicity. No-guilt, no-strings sex for as long as we wanted. And no rule-breaking, not really, because this was in its own way a business deal. And that’s how I salved my conscience, too, though I have to say my conscience didn’t need much salving.
    Word got out about Bunty’s when I signed to Cartsdyke, and anyway I was singing in the studio, taking lessons, too, so I didn’t miss it. I was happier than I’d been in a long time.
    I was happy before. I think I said that. I thought I was, anyway. As happy as I could be, considering I’d had to learn to live without the only family I’d ever known, the only person I’d ever really cared for, to say nothing of exiling myself and starting out on a brand-new career all alone. I hadn’t been happy when I arrived in California, mind you. I’d been cut up, lonely, miserable, grieving.
    But I tried never to look back. I couldn’t change it, so I wouldn’t waste time doing the woe-is-me thing. Another thing I’d learned early on. When you’re one of hundreds with not even a distant relative to come visit you every now and then, there’s no one to feel sorry for you. So when I got to