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.
Bitter Betrayal
Penny Jordan
CHAPTER ONE
‘YOU’RE doing what?’ Jenneth asked her oldest and closest friend in astonishment, almost unable to believe what she was hearing, despite the crystal clarity of Louise’s excited voice.
‘Married. You know…to have and to hold, et cetera et cetera…A mortgage…kids…the whole bit,’ Louise repeated obligingly, while Jenneth’s astonishment almost hummed along the telephone wire from York to London.
Jenneth clutched the receiver and said protestingly, ‘But you’ve always sworn you’d never marry! You wanted to be independent. You…’
‘That was before I met George,’ Louise told her unrepentantly.
George! Jenneth almost boggled, not just at the thought of her high-flying, career-orientated girlfriend getting married, but at the thought of her marrying a man called George…Had she ever been asked to stretch her imagination to the almost impossible lengths of visualising Louise getting married, she would have believed it would be to someone with a far more exotic name than George…
Sighing faintly, she ignored her cooling cup of coffee and the fact that unless she terminated her telephone call right now she was never going to get the preliminary sketches for the McGrath mural finished by lunchtime, and said severely, ‘You never said anything two months ago when we met for lunch.’
‘I hadn’t met him then,’ said Louise simply, and then added quickly, ‘Look, Jen, I want you to be there…on the day, I mean. We’re getting married in three weeks’ time, at home, in the village church. We’re having the whole bit…George says we might as well, since neither of us will get the chance again. I can’t wait for you to meet him. I wish we could get together before the wedding, but George is going to be away in Japan on business…’
She chuckled richly as she heard Jenneth saying in a faint voice, ‘I don’t believe I’m hearing any of this.’
They had virtually grown up together and had been close friends all their lives, living in the same small village, going to the same school, and even later on to the same university, and then Jenneth’s parents had moved further north and she had gone with them, eventually setting up her existing small studio in the barn attached to her parents’ house outside York, while Louise had found herself a job in London in the frenetic world of advertising.
That had been seven years ago. Now Louise had her own agency, while Jenneth had developed her artistic talents to the point where she was greatly in demand locally for the murals which had become her speciality. In addition she had a half-share in a small private gallery in York itself. She and Louise had never totally lost touch, but these days it was impossible for them to meet as often as both of them would have wished.
Jenneth’s parents had been killed just after their move to the north, leaving Jenneth solely responsible for the welfare of her then pre-teenage twin brothers…
There had been times when they had been a heavy responsibility indeed, but the knowledge that her parents would have wanted them all to stay together, coupled with her own deep-rooted sense of duty and responsibility, had helped her through the worst of the bad times.
The twins had now just finished their last year at school, two tall fair-haired males who towered over her and at times almost swamped her with their fierce protectiveness towards her…
Well knowing why Jenneth hadn’t given her an instantaneous response, Louise coaxed, ‘Promise me you’re going to be there. It’s three weeks on Saturday. I’m not having any bridesmaids or anything like that, but I need you there, Jenneth…Seriously…’
There was just enough emotion in her voice for Jenneth to check the automatic refusal hovering on her lips, and Louise took advantage of her silence to add, ‘I’ve booked you a room at the Feathers. Can’t put you up at home, I’m afraid, the place will be brimming over with aged aunts and the like, although Mum and Dad are both looking forward to seeing you…’
‘I don’t know if I can make it, Louise,’ Jenneth told her, staring unseeingly out of her studio window and into the verdant jungle of the house’s back garden.
The house had a very large garden, far too large for her to manage, but she and the twins loved their home. The barn which she had had converted into her studio was ideal for her work, and none of them had wanted to move after the accident, although once the boys were at university…They had been arguing about it ever since Christmas, Kit and Nick both determined to persuade her not to put the house up for sale, even though she had pointed out to them that once they were at university it would be far too large for her, and that the money from the sale would realise lump-sum nest-eggs for them when they set out into the world.
Her hand clenched around the receiver, her palm suddenly sticky with tension, with all that she wanted
