PENNY JORDAN, one of Mills & Boon’s most popular authors, unfortunately passed away on 31st December 2011. She leaves an outstanding legacy, having sold over a hundred million books around the world. Penny 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 New York Times and Sunday Times bestseller lists. Loved for her distinctive voice, she was successful 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.’ It is perhaps this gift for sympathetic characterisation that helps to explain her enduring appeal.

      Penny Jordan also wrote World War II sagas as Annie Groves, published by HarperCollins.

       CHAPTER ONE

      ‘I CAN’T take you no further, lass, seein’ as I’m bound for Wicklethwaites Farm and you’re wantin’Rawlesden,’ the carter informed Marianne in his broad Lancashire accent, as he brought the cart to a halt at a fork in the rutted road. ‘You must take this turning ’ere and follow the road all the way down to the town. You’ll know it before you gets there on account of the smoke from Bellfield Mill’s chimneys, and then you keeps on walking when you gets to the Bellfield Hall.’

      ‘Why do you say that?’ Marianne asked the carter uncertainly.

      She needed to find work—and quickly, she acknowledged as she looked down into the too-pale face of the baby in her arms. A lone woman with no work and a baby to care for could all too easily find herself in the workhouse—as she knew already to her cost.

      The rich might be celebrating the Edwardian era, and a new king on the throne, but nothing had changed for the poor.

      ‘I says it on account of him wot owns it—aye, and t’mill an’ all. There’s plenty round here who says that he only come by them by foul means, and that the Master of Bellfield wouldn’t think twice about ridding himself of anyone wot was daft enough to stand in his way. There’s one little lass already disappeared from these parts with no one knowing where she’s gone. Happen that’s why he can’t get no one working up at the hall for him. No one half decent, that is…’

      ‘He doesn’t sound very pleasant,’ Marianne agreed as she clambered down from the cart, and then thanked the carter as he handed her the shabby bundle containing her few possessions.

      ‘I still dunno wot would bring a pretty lass like you looking for work in these parts.’

      Marianne could tell that the carter was eager to know as much about her as he could—no doubt to add to his stock-in-trade of gossip. He had already regaled her with several tales of the doings of those who lived in the town and the small farms on the moors beyond it, with a great deal of relish. Marianne suspected it was an enclosed, shut-off life here in this dark mill town, buried deep in a small valley between the towering Pennine hills.

      Her large brown eyes with their fringing of thick black eyelashes shadowed slightly in her small heart-shaped face. The carter had referred to her as a ‘pretty lass,’ but she suspected that he was flattering her. She certainly did not feel like