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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.
Fight For Love
Penny Jordan
CHAPTER ONE
THE letter came on a grey, wet morning in mid-June; just the sort of cold, damp summer day that made one’s thoughts turn lustfully to sun and heat, Natasha thought enviously as she studied the unfamiliar American postmark.
Texas—how many names could exercise such a powerful effect on the diverse imaginations of the Western world? But she knew no one from the Lone Star State, unless … Her forehead pleated in a faint frown as she flicked through her memory.
There had been that American last year. A faint smile curled round the corners of her mouth as she remembered the male in question. Tough and weathered like the Texas plain, he had displayed all the stubborn grittiness a dedicated television soap watcher could have wanted. She had rescued him from the wheels of a London taxi, closing her ears to the string of swear words turning the air blue, and her eyes to the sight of his stetson worn with an immaculate dark pin-striped business suit.
He was, she discovered, on his way to a business appointment at the Connaught, and she had helped him on his way, but not before he had insisted on taking a note of her name and address. She had judged it safe enough; after all, he looked as though he was well into his seventies.
She had been surprised, though, when he had invited her to dinner, and her boss at the prestigious Bond Street art gallery where she worked had cautioned her against accepting.
Maybe that was why she had. There was a wide vein of stubbornness in her own character—a legacy from a far-off Russian ancestress, whose unlikely blood still ran in the veins of an otherwise phlegmatic Cheshire farming family.
She put down the letter and stared out of her flat window at the dull grey vista of rooftops and television aerials. It was on days like this when she longed most to exchange the stifling claustrophobia of London for the open fields and gentle skyline of the Cheshire plain.
She had been brought up there on the farm that had been in her father’s family for generations, but after her parents’ tragic death in a multiple motorway pile-up, the farm had had to be sold off. She had been sixteen at the time, and it would have been impossible for her to run it herself; her father’s main love had been the developing and breeding of a new strain of cattle—an expensive programme that called for a far greater degree of knowledge than any sixteen-year-old could have.
Even so, after nine years she still missed it, still ached whenever she drove past well tended fields. Deep down inside, part of her would always feel this deep empathy for the land that went with being a farmer’s daughter.
She sighed faintly, imagining Adam’s shock if he were ever to look into her mind. Her boss was the epitome of a sophisticated man-about-town. Natasha knew that he would be more than willing to take their relationship beyond its present status of boss and employee were she to indicate to him that she wished him to do so.
She also knew that most of her friends would consider him a good catch—excellent husband material. He was independently comfortably off. He owned a pleasant house in a Chelsea mews, and it was being rumoured that within the next five years, he would be invited on to the board of the gallery which he now managed. So why did she continue to hold him at arm’s length? He was the right age for her, and good-looking in a blond, languid fashion, but if she was ever to tell him of this deep need inside her to live on the land, to be part of it and its cycle, she knew that he just wouldn’t understand.
Perhaps her looks were to blame for that. She just didn’t look the way men visualised a farmer’s daughter should look.
She was just over average height and willow-slim, her cloud of dark red hair curling lavishly on to her shoulders when it wasn’t constrained into the chic chignon she wore for work. Her eyes were long and slightly slanting, a deep tawny-gold, like those of a jungle cat. Her face had the sort of bone structure loved by the modelling world. As a teenager it had been suggested, in fact, that she should model, but she hadn’t been interested. She had been in love then. She smiled a little wryly for her teenage self. The object of her affections had been the son of another local farmer, but Rob, a sturdy Cheshire lad with his head set firmly on his shoulders, had not been interested in her. However, by the time her teenage crush on him had faded, her parents were dead, and she was living away from Cheshire in the care of the aunt and uncle who had taken her into their London home.
They had retired now to Spain, and to all intents and purposes she was on her own.
So why didn’t she give Adam the encouragement he was waiting for? He would make a good husband and father, and she wanted children … a family … Maybe it was because he didn’t represent enough challenge … She smiled wryly to herself and turned to study her letter again.
Fortunately, this morning she was not due into the gallery until mid-morning, since they never did much business so early in the
