Celebrate the legend that is bestselling author
PENNY JORDAN
Phenomenally successful author of more than two hundred books with sales of over a hundred million copies!
Penny Jordan’s novels are loved by millions of readers all around the word in many different languages. Mills & Boon are proud to have published one hundred and eighty-seven novels and novellas written by Penny Jordan, who was a reader favourite right from her very first novel through to her last.
This beautiful digital collection offers a chance to recapture the pleasure of all of Penny Jordan’s fabulous, glamorous and romantic novels for Mills & Boon.
About the Author
PENNY JORDAN is one of Mills & Boon’s most popular authors. Sadly, Penny died from cancer on 31st December 2011, aged sixty-five. She leaves an outstanding legacy, having sold over a hundred million books around the world. She wrote a total of one hundred and eighty-seven novels for Mills & Boon, including the phenomenally successful A Perfect Family, To Love, Honour & Betray, The Perfect Sinner and Power Play, which hit the Sunday Times and New York Times bestseller lists. Loved for her distinctive voice, her success was in part because she continually broke boundaries and evolved her writing to keep up with readers’ changing tastes. Publishers Weekly said about Jordan ‘Women everywhere will find pieces of themselves in Jordan’s characters’ and this perhaps explains her enduring appeal.
Although Penny was born in Preston, Lancashire and spent her childhood there, she moved to Cheshire as a teenager and continued to live there for the rest of her life. Following the death of her husband, she moved to the small traditional Cheshire market town on which she based her much-loved Crighton books.
Penny was a member and supporter of the Romantic Novelists’ Association and the Romance Writers of America—two organisations dedicated to providing support for both published and yet-to-be-published authors. Her significant contribution to women’s fiction was recognised in 2011, when the Romantic Novelists’ Association presented Penny with a Lifetime Achievement Award.
Second Time Loving
Penny Jordan
CHAPTER ONE
NOT far now. Angelica had just driven through the last village on Tom’s list, and, according to the route he had worked out for her, the lane to the cottage should only be a couple of miles ahead of her.
She was glad that the drive from London was nearly over. Her back was stiff with tension, her eyes gritty and tired. Tired…She smiled cynically to herself. Eighteen months ago, even twelve months ago, if anyone had told her that tiredness, exhaustion, both physical and mental, and most of all emotional was going to overrun and dominate her entire life she would have laughed at them. But then she hadn’t known what she knew now: that this numbing, destructive, all-encompassing form of exhaustion, this longing to close her eyes, curl up in a small ball to sleep and go on sleeping was a form of depression as dangerous and invasive in its way as its far more publicised and recognised cousins.
She had learned an awful lot during these last eighteen months though, too much perhaps, and certainly a good deal that she would rather not have learned. Her mouth twisted painfully. She ought to have remembered that old adage about there being no fool like an old one; not that at twenty-eight she was old precisely, even though if, right at this moment, she felt as though she were inhabiting the body of a woman thirty years her senior rather than one supposedly at the height of her mental and sexual peak.
Her sexual peak. The twist of her mouth became even more pronounced. In these days of increasing concern over and responsiveness to the growing threat of AIDS, it was perhaps not the stigma it had once been to be a woman of over twenty-one with so limited a sexual history that she was still actually a virgin, but it was still something she preferred to keep to herself; a vulnerable Achilles’ heel, in someone who, to the rest of her small world at least, was the subject of admiration and envy.
When she had first taken over her father’s ailing business, manufacturing an old-fashioned brand of face cream and cleansers supplied on a mail-order basis to a very limited list of customers, she had done so because she had no alternative. When she was fresh from serving her articles with a firm of accountants, and had just passed her exams, her father’s sudden heart attack and death had left her mother solely dependent on an income from a company which had become more and more precariously financially based.
It had been a chance conversation with a friend which had led to her turning round the whole focus of the company, so that instead of marketing its traditional products Angelica had taken the huge risk of completely reorganising the company and marketing products which were based entirely on natural ingredients.
There had been no time for careful market research; no time to do anything other than make her decision and then act upon it.
The success of the company was something that sometimes surprised even her. It had expanded to such an extent that she had had to invest in new factory premises and an increased work-force, and had taken on the kind of financial and emotional burdens that went with economic success.
And yet she had thrived on it, revelled in the challenge. When others flagged, she had laughed at them; when others doubted, she had stuck to the force of her own convictions and been proved right.
Her mother was now living very comfortably indeed in an elegant flat in Brighton, her future secure; Angelica herself had a tiny but very valuable mews cottage, tucked away from view in one of London’s precious and increasingly rare oases of peace and quiet. All of the mews houses had separate garages, and the mews itself had no vehicular access to the pretty cobbled courtyard they all shared.
On admittedly rare warm summer weekends, it was not unusual to see all its inhabitants breakfasting al fresco in the courtyard in a manner more reminiscent of France than Britain, on delicacies supplied by a local delicatessen.
It had been on one such morning that she had first met Giles. He had been living in one of the cottages on a temporary basis. He had told her that he had been loaned it by some friends who were spending six months in the States.
Later she had discovered that this was not the truth; that in fact the house belonged to the parents of his previous girlfriend, and that he had casually moved in and refused to move out, claiming the property as his by virtue of his relationship with their daughter. Giles had had a gift for distorting the truth, for bending it to suit his own selfish purposes, and she, like the fool she was, had been completely taken in by him.
It didn’t help that her friends had been equally easily deceived, that they had been equally stunned by the truth. They had quickly and determinedly rallied around her when the blows had fallen, not singly, but in a massed attack which had left her feeling as though her heart and her mind had been beaten to a jelly that made it impossible for her to rationalise herself out of her anguish and suffering.
And yet she had been so lucky…so very lucky. If her mother hadn’t broken her arm just before she and Giles were due to take that holiday in Provence, if she hadn’t returned unexpectedly to London that evening to collect some papers she had needed…If Giles hadn’t been arrogant and reckless enough to spend not just the evening but the night as well with someone else, and if she hadn’t seen that someone else leaving his house in the early hours of the morning, she might never have discovered the truth—or at least she might only have discovered it when it was too late.
And the worst of it was that to her own mind at least she had been so trusting, so idiotic, that she had actually believed that he loved her, that she