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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.
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.
Christmas Eve Wedding
Penny Jordan
MILLS & BOON
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CHAPTER ONE
A LITTLE hesitantly Jaz pressed the button for the lift to take her to her hotel bedroom. She was alone in the dimly lit foyer apart from the man who was also waiting for the lift. Tall, broad-shouldered, and subtly exuding an aura of very male sexual energy. Being alone with him sent a frisson of dangerous nervous excitement skittering over her skin.
Had he moved just that little bit closer to her whilst they waited, blocking her exit and hiding her from the view of anyone walking past the lift bay so that only he knew she was there, or was she imagining it? Like she had ‘imagined’ that look he had just given her body…her breasts…
And had he noticed the treacherous reaction of her body to his sexually predatory glance? The taut peaking of her breasts, the sudden soft gasp of her indrawn breath. Could he tell that recklessly she was in danger of actually becoming physically excited, not just by his presence but also by her own thoughts?
There was an awesome sexuality about him that made her tremble inside with arousal and guilt.
Was it possible he guessed what she was thinking? Was that why he had moved closer to her?
Colouring up self-consciously, Jaz looked away from him, determined to focus her thoughts elsewhere. She pondered on what had brought her to this hotel in New Orleans in the first place.
On the other side of the city her godfather would be going through the final details of the sale of his exclusive and innovative English department store to the American family who had been so eager to buy it, to add to their own equally prestigious and larger chain of American stores. They needed the store to give them an entrée into the British market.
She knew that her own job as the store’s display coordinator and window designer was totally secure, but it had been a struggle for her, and a test of her determination and resolve to prove herself and succeed in her chosen career.
Her parents, loving and caring though they most certainly were, had initially been shocked and disbelieving when their only child had been unable to share their commitment to the farm she’d grown up on, and had instead insisted on making her own way in the world.
They had been very reluctant to accept her decision to go to art college, and Jaz knew that it was really thanks to the intervention of her godfather, Uncle John, that her parents had finally taken her seriously. Thanks to him too that she now had the wonderful job she did have.
It was no secret that her parents still harboured the hope that she would fall in love with someone who shared their own lifestyle and ambitions, but Jaz was fiercely determined never to fall in love with a man who could not understand and did not share her feelings. She felt that the right to express the artistic side of her nature had been hard-won, and because of that it was doubly precious to her. She was ambitious for her talent, for its expression, and for the freedom to use it to its maximum capacity, and she knew how impossible that would be if she were to marry a man like her father, kind, loving and generous though he was.
To further validate her ability she had recently been head-hunted by a top London store, but she had chosen to remain loyal to her godfather and to the unique and acclaimed store which had originally been begun by his grandfather.
Now in his late seventies, her godfather had been for some time looking for a worthy successor who would nurture the store’s prestigious profile, and although at first he had been dubious about selling out to new owners on the other side of the Atlantic, a visit to New Orleans to see the way the Dubois family ran their business—a trip on which he had invited Jaz to go with him—had convinced him that they shared his own objectives and standards. Since he had no direct heirs to pass the business onto, he had decided that the best way to preserve the traditions of the store was to sell it to the like-minded Dubois family, a decision Jaz herself fully endorsed.
As the lift arrived and the
