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.
So Close and No Closer
Penny Jordan
CHAPTER ONE
RUE knew she had a visitor long before the old-fashioned bell-pull clanged in the small front porch. Horatio had started rumbling deep in his throat the moment the car pulled up outside. It would probably be Jane Roselle coming to collect the delphiniums she had promised to have ready for her. If so, she was going to have to wait for half an hour, because she was early, and Rue hadn’t quite finished tying up the bunches.
Five years ago, when she had first started growing and drying her own flowers and herbs, she had had no idea how quickly her small business would escalate, or the pleasure it would give her, but then, five years ago she had not thought it possible that life could hold pleasure for her ever again. She had been wrong, though. Perhaps her enjoyment was not the kind a young woman in her mid-twenties would normally expect, because it did not encompass any of the things that the rest of the world might consider necessary for happiness. There was no man in her life, for instance—no lover or husband to share her small pleasures and pains. She had no children, no family of any sort, barring Horatio.
But she was content in her aloneness, preferring it, even welcoming it for its security.
The bell clanged again, more impatiently, and Horatio’s growl deepened.
Rue deftly tied another bundle of the tall dried flowers and then hurried across the stone-flagged floor of the drying shed to wash her hands in the old-fashioned stone sink in the corner.
Her home, Vine Cottage, had once been part of a much larger estate. Vine Cottage itself had housed the estate gardener and, because of this, attached to it was a large assortment of outbuildings, including the comfortably sized drying shed with its old-fashioned heavy beams so ideal for hanging her flowers from. Next door to it was a small two-storey stable with a boarded loft and thick stone walls that kept dry in the wettest of weathers.
From the doorway in the upper storey, which had once been used, with the help of its small hoist, to store animal feed for the winter, it was possible to see as far as the big house itself and the hills beyond, as well as to look over her own ten-acre field, which was now, as they approached the end of summer, a glorious mass of rank upon rank of rich colour as her flowers bloomed.
She was just approaching the most critical period of her busy year. A dry late summer and early autumn meant that she could pick her flowers at their peak. Wet, windy weather destroyed the fragile blooms and could mean a whole season’s work going to waste.
Horatio whined at the door as she walked towards it. He was a dog of large size and indeterminate breed. She had found him abandoned half a mile outside the village three winters ago and, having been unable to trace his owners, had adopted him, or rather he had adopted her, she admitted ruefully as he followed her into the house.
Vine Cottage, with its small stone-mullioned windows, seemed dark and cool after the hot sunshine outside. The original cottage had grown over the centuries and the house was now in fact a good size, although the many interconnecting rooms made it awkward to traverse in a hurry, Rue acknowledged.
The small front hallway was little more than a tiny passage with no natural daylight. So when Rue opened the front door she was momentarily blinded by the sunlight, and had to blink rapidly as her eyes adjusted to its brightness, before she realised that her visitor wasn’t the customer she had been expecting, but a total stranger…a total male stranger.
Instinctively her fingers curled into Horatio’s collar, finding comfort in the soft fur and reassuring solid muscle beneath it, and as though he felt her tension Horatio uttered a deep-throated growl of warning.
‘Miss Livesey?’
He had a very deep voice, as one might expect for a man of his height and breadth, Rue acknowledged, at the same time as she acknowledged that he was obviously not a man who was used to being kept waiting, if that faint tinge of impatience, hardening his words to incisive irritation, was anything to go by.
As she nodded in acknowledgement, he stepped forward. ‘If I could have a word with you?’
And, although he phrased the words as a question, Rue was left in no doubt that he fully intended them as a statement of intent. She was forced to step back into the narrow darkness of the hall.
The man had to duck his head to step under the lintel. All the cottage doorways were low; that did not bother her, as she was barely five foot four herself, but it would be bound to cause her visitor a good deal of irritation were he forced to inhabit Vine Cottage, as by her estimate he was a good two inches above six feet tall.
Rue thought momentarily of the doorways at the big house, spacious, elegant doorways many of them, designed by Robert Adam to go with the spacious, elegant rooms they opened into. It would surely be difficult to find two
