www.millsandboon.co.uk

      Dear Reader,

      Back in the 1980s, I never missed buying the latest Penny Jordan. I read her novels as escapism. She was, indisputably, one of the great Mills & Boon^® authors who kindled my own desire to write romance. She had a magical ability to get under the skin of her characters, adding a depth and quality to her stories that few could equal. Her heroines were so real in their thoughts that they often stopped me in my tracks. Sadly, she is gone now—but the legacy of her many books remains.

       Lynne Graham

      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 a 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.

      PROLOGUE

      ‘EXCUSE me!’ Sadie Roberts grimaced as her plea was ignored and she had to try to wriggle her way past the small group of men, all hanging fawningly on the every word of the man who was addressing them. And what a man, Sadie acknowledged with a small, irritated female surge of hostile and unwanted but still undeniably fierce awareness of him. If maleness was an essence, then this man possessed a potency that made Sadie’s sensitive female receptors twitch warily.

      He stood a good four inches above the older man who stood faithfully by his side, and whilst his voice was cool and low pitched it had a timbre that made Sadie shiver sensually, as though a soft, scented velvet glove had been slowly stroked over her bare skin.

      Trapped where she was by the sudden surge of people trying to move down the narrow tented corridor that led from one part of the trade fair to another, Sadie wobbled perilously on her unfamiliar high heels—the shoes, like the heavy make-up, were her cousin Raoul’s idea—and found herself being inexorably pushed closer to the arrogant stranger. So close, in fact, that she could have put out her hand and touched him. Not that she had any intention or desire to do such a thing. Had she? Wasn’t she secretly thinking… wanting…? Frantically Sadie made a grab for her reckless thoughts.

      He, the man she was tensing her body into denying its reaction to, had lifted his hand to look at his watch, its fingers lean, tanned, the nails neatly cut and clean, but still very masculine. It was a hand that belonged to a man who was fully capable of dealing competently with any number of manual tasks, whilst the suit he was wearing clearly identified that he was equally capable of writing a cheque to pay someone else to do them!

      Oh, yes, he would be very good at writing cheques, Sadie decided. He had that kind of arrogance. A wealthy man’s arrogance. It was there in the cool look of hauteur he was slanting over her; a slow, thorough visual inspection that was a disturbing combination of sensuality and slicing assessment.

      Another rough push as someone else fought their way through the tightly packed crowd almost sent Sadie straight into him, so that their bodies might have meshed in a shared physical exchange that would sting her blood and stop her breath.

      What was the matter with her? Why should she feel so alarmed, so unnerved, so… affected by the knowledge that beneath the cool silk mohair of the immaculate suit he was wearing surely lay a body that was all raw masculinity, solid hard muscle and sinew, all…?

      Immediately Sadie froze, pushing away her unwanted and disruptive thoughts.

      Irritated with herself and her uncontrollable reaction to him, she seized the opportunity provided by the thinning of the crowd and made herself walk away.

      Hot-faced, she hurried back down the corridor in search of her cousin Raoul.

      ‘Come here, Sadie, and let the guys get a whiff of our scent.’

      Stony-faced, Sadie turned to face her cousin and co-director.

      She was still furious with Raoul for the trick he had pulled on her this morning, in persuading her to wear the perfume house’s current scent. This was a scent created in Raoul’s father’s time—when he had briefly managed the small family-owned business. And even she was more annoyed with herself, for being gullible enough to fall for it. She should have listened to her own instincts and refused to go along with Raoul’s plans the moment she had smelled the appalling concoction which was now offending her own olfactory senses! Instead, she had given in to a bout of sentiment and told herself that she wanted to do everything she possibly could to mend the breach in their family!

      She had assumed that she was simply going to accompany Raoul to the trade fair. But Raoul had other ideas! The clothes, the make-up and the ‘big’ hairstyle he had bullied her into were bad enough, and just not ‘her’ at all, but she had bitten on her lip and given in—in the interests of cousinly harmony. But, oh, how she wished now she had not done so!

      For the last few interminable hours she had been subject to a barrage of leering looks, suggestive remarks and totally unwanted physical intimacies from the would-be male buyers Raoul had persisted in inviting to sample the perfume she was wearing on her skin!

      She loathed the scent. It was everything that Sadie detested most about modern synthetic-based perfumes, completely lacking in character and subtlety, with no staying power, and thin and cold where a perfume should be rich and warm, lingering on the senses like good chocolate or a lover’s caress. And, even worse, this perfume had a brashness about it, a sexuality—there was really no other word—that Sadie personally found so loathsome that she now actually had a nauseating headache from wearing it!

      ‘That’s it. I’ve had enough. I’m going back to the hotel right now!’ Sadie told her cousin grimly, as she evaded the unwelcome attentions of the red-faced overweight buyer who had been trying to nuzzle the side of her throat.

      ‘What’s wrong?’ Raoul demanded, grinning slyly at her.

      ‘What’s wrong?’ Sadie took a deep breath.

      Eighteen months ago, on the death of her much loved maternal grandmother, Sadie had inherited a thirty per cent shareholding in the small prestigious French