All about the author…

       Penny Jordan

      PENNY JORDAN has been writing for more than twenty-five years and has an outstanding record: more than 165 novels published, including the phenomenally successful A Perfect Family, To Love, Honor and Betray, The Perfect Sinner and Power Play, which hit the Sunday Times and New York Times bestseller lists. She says she hopes to go on writing until she has passed the 200 mark, and maybe even the 250 mark.

      Although Penny was born in Preston, Lancashire, U.K., and spent her childhood there, as a teenager she moved to Cheshire, where she’s continued to reside. Following the death of her husband she moved to the small, traditional Cheshire market town on which she based her CRIGHTONS books.

      She lives with a large, hairy German shepherd dog—Sheba—and an equally hairy Birman cat—Posh—both of whom assist her with her writing. Posh sits on the newspapers and magazines that Penny reads to provide her with ideas, and Sheba assists by demanding the long walks that help Penny to free up the mental creative process.

      Penny is a member and supporter of both the Romantic Novelists’ Association and the Romance Writers of America—two organizations dedicated to providing support for both published and yet-to-be-published authors.

      CONTENTS

      PROLOGUE

      CHAPTER ONE

      CHAPTER TWO

      CHAPTER THREE

      CHAPTER FOUR

      CHAPTER FIVE

      CHAPTER SIX

      CHAPTER SEVEN

      CHAPTER EIGHT

      CHAPTER NINE

      CHAPTER TEN

      CHAPTER ELEVEN

      CHAPTER TWELVE

      PROLOGUE

      ‘OHHHH, NO!’

      Her anxious warning protest had come too late, and now she was pressed hard against the very male body of the robed man who had been turning the corner at the same time from the opposite direction.

      Her startled cry and the clear visual imprinting her eyes had relayed to her brain—of a tall, broad-shouldered and very arrogant-looking handsome male, with the most extraordinarily green eyes she had ever seen—was all there’d been time for before that image had been blanked out by her abrupt and far too intimate contact—visually and physically—with his body.

      Now, with her face virtually buried against his shoulder, her senses were being assaulted by that intimacy in every sensory way that there was. She could feel the heat of his body, and smell its personal slightly musky male scent, mingled with the cool sharpness of the cologne he was wearing. She could feel, too, the heavy thud of his heart beating out a demand that called to her own heartbeat to follow it. Lean, strong fingers gripped her arm, bare flesh to bare flesh setting a panicky, firework-intense burst of lava-hot sensation spilling through her own body.

      The manner in which they had collided had brought her up against him in such a way that she now realised she was leaning against one of his thighs, her own having somehow softened and parted to admit its muscular male presence. The lava flow changed from a rolling surge of heat into an explosion of female arousal that wrenched any kind of control over her body from her and claimed it for itself. Quivers of female recognition at his maleness were softening her flesh into his. Breathing was becoming a dangerously erotic hazard that leached her small soft moan of longing into the once sterile silence of the corridor.

      She mustn’t do this. She mustn’t raise her head from the muscle-padded warmth of his shoulder to look up into his face. She mustn’t let her desire-dazed gaze dwell yearningly on his mouth. She mustn’t quiver and then sigh, and then place her hand on his chest, whilst lifting her gaze reluctantly from his mouth to his eyes, so that her own could whisper to him how much she ached to trace the sensuality of that full lower lip set beneath its sharply cut partner with her fingertip, or better still with her tongue-tip, caressing it into a reciprocal hunger for the kiss she now wanted so badly.

      No, she must not do any of those things—but she was doing them, and he was looking back at her as though he wanted exactly what she wanted, and for all the same reasons.

      The air in the corridor hadn’t changed, but she still shivered and trembled and then moaned as he lowered his head to hers, his free hand sliding into the untidy tangle of her honey-streaked curls.

      She could feel the warmth of his breath against her skin—feel it and taste it, with its erotic mix of promised delights. Longingly she watched the slow descent of his mouth towards her own, savouring each millimetre of movement that brought him closer—until finally he stopped. Then she looked up at him, her face relaying a message that was a mixture of female pride and passionate longing. His eyes blazed with emerald fire and the pure intensity of male sexual arousal, burning the air between them.

      Sam raised herself up on the tips of her toes, her lips parting on a shaky breath of urgent need, clinging to his robe as she did so to support herself. What she was inhaling and tasting now was an aphrodisiac