“You’re a cool one,” Dominic said.
“Walking back into my life…crawling into my bed just as though the last five years have never happened.”
Annie felt as though a huge weight was crushing down inside her.
“Please,” she croaked. “I don’t understand.”
“Do you think I understood when you walked out on me…on our marriage?”
Their marriage…!
“We can’t be married,” she whispered painfully. “I don’t know you….”
“Now I have heard everything. Tell me, Annie, do you make a habit of going to bed with men you don’t know? Is that another part of your personality I never knew existed? Just like your propensity for disappearing without explanation?”
Twice now he had mentioned her walking out on him…disappearing. What kind of relationship must they have had for her to do that?
“I can’t stay here. I have to go,” she began unsteadily.
“No way! Not until you’ve told me why you did it, Annie. Why you walked out on me.”
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.
Back in the Marriage Bed
Penny Jordan
CHAPTER ONE
ANNIE paused halfway up the stairs of her pretty Victorian cottage, a softly tantalising smile curling her mouth in secret appreciation, a dreamy, distant look hazing the normal clarity of her widely spaced intelligent grey eyes. She had had the dream again last night, the one that featured ‘him’. And this time, last night, he had been even more deliciously real than ever before. So real, in fact…
As her cheeks pinkened betrayingly and her eyelashes modestly swept down to conceal the expression her eyes might inadvertently betray, Annie could feel the sharp thrill of remembered pleasure running hotly through her body. Last night when he had held her, touched her…A fierce shiver openly tensed her body and a little guiltily she hurried the rest of the way upstairs.
She only had an hour to get ready before leaving to collect Helena and her husband. The three of them were going out for a special celebratory meal, and by rights it was that she ought to be thinking about, not some impossibly wonderful and totally unreal man she had created out of her own imagination, her own dreams…her own need…
Her frown deepened a little. For a woman of twenty-three without a man in her life, without a lover in her life, the sheer intensity of the sensuality of the periodic dreams she had about the fantasy male she had mentally labelled her perfect lover, her soul mate and other half, were becoming increasingly explicit. A sign of her loveless, manless state, or an indication of the power of her imagination? Annie didn’t know. What she did know, though, was that since she had first started dreaming about him none of the real men she had met had had the power to compare with him, nor to touch her emotions.
She was looking forward to the evening ahead. Helena was not, after all, just her closest friend and a substitute mother figure to her; she was also the woman, the surgeon, who was responsible for saving her life. No, Annie corrected herself quickly, what Helena was responsible for in many ways was giving her life, giving it back to her after others, less determined, less compassionate, less seeing, had said that…
Tensely Annie swallowed. Even now, nearly five years after the event, after the accident which had so nearly cost her her life, the mere thought of how close she had come to death had the power to strike an icy chill of terror right through her.
Perhaps illogically, the fact that she had no memory, either of the events leading up to the accident itself nor the weeks when she had been in a coma, made her fear of how easily she might not have survived all the more intense.
As she pushed at her bedroom door the slight awkwardness of her arm, which was the sole physical legacy she now had left of the accident, showed itself in the way she had to open it. Her arm had been so badly crushed, so badly damaged, that the senior registrar on duty when she had been rushed into the accident unit had been on the point of having her prepared for an amputation when Helena, who had only dropped in at the hospital to see another patient, had happened to walk through the unit and had been called over by him for a second opinion.
As the hospital’s senior microsurgeon Helena had immediately taken charge, deciding it might be possible to save Annie’s arm.
Her face had been the first one Annie had seen when she had first regained consciousness, but it hadn’t been for many, many weeks after that that she had learned, not from Helena herself but from one of the nurses, how lucky she was that Helena had chanced to be in the hospital when she had been brought in.
It had been Helena who had spent hour after hour at her bedside talking to her whilst she lay in a coma, dragging her with the strength of her will and her love back to the world of the living, and Annie knew that she would never, never cease to revere and love her for all that she had done.
‘You aren’t the only one who has gained,’ Helena often teased her gently. ‘You have no idea how much higher my professional stock has grown since it’s become publicly known that my personal surgical procedure saved your arm. Your arm is worth more than its weight in gold to me, Annie…’ And then her face would soften as she’d add, far more tenderly, ‘And you, my dear, are more special to me than I can find the words to say. The daughter I never thought I would have…’
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