PENNY JORDAN - Stranger From The Past

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 JORDANis 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.

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OF COURSE, it would have to be raining, Sybilla reflected with disgust as she emerged from the supermarket with her overladen trolley.

It didn’t help to improve her mood either, she knew, acknowledging that the rain had been forecast and that because she had already been running late she had decided to take a chance and hope that it held off until she had completed her shopping.

The way her life was going at the moment she really ought to have known better, she admitted ruefully as she stood under the shelter of the supermarket building and eyed the vast packed car park.

Her car was parked right at the back; the car park had been full when she’d arrived and that had been the only spot she could find.

She eyed the pencil-slim cream length of her skirt with a sinking heart as she acknowledged how inappropriate a garment it was in which to push a heavily laden trolley across a car park which seemed specifically designed not to ease the transportation of one’s shopping to one’s car, but to actively hinder it. The rain was becoming heavier; there were puddles on the tarmac, she was wearing a long-sleeved silk shirt, her skirt, brand-new expensive tights and equally brand-new and expensive high-heeled shoes.

She looked, she admitted as she glanced around, rather ludicrously inappropriately dressed for her task.

The majority of the other women shoppers were wearing comfortable, brightly coloured, weatherproof casual clothes, and flat or low-heeled shoes.

But then it was hardly her fault that her business partner’s husband should have been involved in a car accident, necessitating Belinda’s rushing off to his bedside, while it fell to her to step into Belinda’s shoes, give up her precious day off, and take over Belinda’s appointments for the day.

Fortunately Tom, Belinda’s husband, had not been badly hurt; even so, Sybilla could well understand her friend’s desire to be with him.

Perhaps if she hadn’t offered to do her neighbours’ shopping for them as well as her own she could have put off this trip to the supermarket, but Mr and Mrs Simmonds were elderly and had been so grateful for her offer of help with their shopping that she had felt she couldn’t possibly cancel the trip.

Another wry glance at the dense cloud-packed sky confirmed that the rain wasn’t likely to let up, and, since she could hardly stay where she was for the rest of the day, nor somehow magic her car to miraculously appear at the supermarket door, she really had no alternative but to accept that she was going to have to get wet and minimise the damage to her clothes as best she could.

Gritting her teeth, she stepped out from under the canopy, resolutely pushing the trolley in front of her, groaning when she discovered that she had somehow or other managed to find herself one of those rogue trolleys with four wheels that appeared to want to go in the completely opposite direction to that she was pushing in.

It was too wet and she was too impractically dressed to get down and try to free the jammed wheels, which meant that somehow or other she was going to have to control the trolley by leaning against the left-hand side of it at the same time as she pushed it.

Normally blessed with a good sense of humour, Sybilla reflected that today was most definitely not going to be her day.

She tried not to imagine what the muddy spray of water from the tarmac was doing to the backs of her legs, and was within a few yards of her car, and just about to give a soft sigh of relief, when a large expensive-looking Daimler saloon car swept towards her.

Automatically she stopped, trying to pull the trolley out of the way, but, instead of it responding to her wishes, the inadvertently sharp tug she had given it made it yaw dangerously to one side.

Of course, she made an immediate grab for it, but it was too late; dangerously overladen with the burden of her neighbours’ shopping as well as her own, to her absolute horror the trolley started to tip to one side.

As she leaned across it to try and steady the trolley it bumped painfully into her shin, and she felt the metal tear into the fragile fabric of her tights before finally toppling over.

The car, meanwhile, which had been the unwitting cause of her downfall, had stopped a couple of yards away, the driver no doubt intending to reverse into the empty parking space nearby.

Naturally enough, though, Sybilla didn’t have much time to spare to pay attention to what was going on around her. She was far too concerned about how she was going to get her trolley back on its wheels, so at first she did not pay any attention to the opening and closing of the car door, save to mentally acknowledge that it had occurred with a very soft and expensive clunk, rather than with the sharp tinny sound her car door made.

To be confronted therefore with a pair of immaculately polished male shoes, topped by equally immaculate and very expensive-looking dark-coloured trousers, startled her so much that she automatically abandoned the trolley and tried to stand up, horribly conscious of the appearance she must present: her fair hair hanging in rain-sodden strands around her face, her cream shirt and skirt no doubt liberally spattered with dirty rainwater-spots, her tights ripped beyond redemption, and her general appearance was one of a woman so totally unable to control her life that she was not in the least surprised that the man seemed to assume that she needed some help.

She would have accepted it, and thanked him for having the consideration to offer it, if, just as she was getting to her feet, she hadn’t heard his voice.

Immediately she froze, recognising it instantly, even though she knew it must be all of a decade since she had last heard it. True, in that decade it had altered, deepened, hardened perhaps…certainly matured, but there was no evidence that his years of working in America had altered his speech pattern. As the man put out his hand to help her to her feet Sybilla withdrew icily from him and, without bothering to lift her head and look at him, was just starting to say coldly and admittedly untruthfully that she could manage when the passenger-door of the Daimler opened, and a woman wearing a pair of high-heeled shoes even more expensive and less weatherproof than her own came clicking across the tarmac towards them, exclaiming in a bored voice, ‘Gareth, what on earth is going on? We’re going to be dreadfully late, although why on earth you couldn’t have got your grandfather’s solicitor to come up to the house instead of our having to trail down here into this dreary little town…’

The sharp, petulant words suddenly ceased. Deliberately refusing to look at or acknowledge either of them from her semi-squatting position, Sybilla turned her back on them and then started to get to her feet.

Behind her she could hear the woman saying contemptuously, ‘For goodness’sake, Gareth, let’s go. What an idiotic thing to do. Stupid woman.’

Sybilla could feel the hot angry colour rising up under her skin. She had always cursed its fairness, just as she had always hated her soft fair hair, longing for the more dramatic colouring she so envied in others: thick, curly, almost black hair, warm olive-tinted skin that tanned quickly and, well, eyes that were a sharp definite colour rather than softly luminous and somewhere between lavender and grey.

In the old days Gareth had always favoured girls with exotic semi-Mediterranean looks. She remembered one whom he had brought home from London with him, a dark gypsy-like wildness about her, a full, pouting red mouth, sparkling brown eyes…She and Gareth had been inseparable. She remembered how she had envied her…resented her. She had been fifteen at the time, Gareth almost twenty-two.

She suppressed the small stab of remembered pain. She had been such a child, nursing a huge crush on someone so unobtainable that her silly childish love for him had been totally ludicrous.

She had heard him say so himself. Not to her, of course. No, the conversation she had overheard had been between Gareth and his grandfather.

She had gone up to the house on the pretext of visiting Gareth’s grandfather, but in reality hoping for a glimpse of Gareth, and perhaps, just perhaps he might deign to spend a few heavenly minutes with her, talking with her.

She had used the side-gate to the garden, scrambling through the undergrowth, pausing as she’d reached the summer house and heard Gareth’s voice.

What had prompted their conversation she never knew. All she did know was that, as she’d frozen outside the summer house, hearing with awful clarity every single word of what was being said, in that handful of seconds her childish adoration for Gareth had changed into a corrosive and bitter self-contempt, a loathing of her own immaturity, her foolishness, so that in that moment it was as though she had been split in two, one half of her still being the foolish child who had so stupidly worshipped Gareth, the other a new Sybilla, an adult, aware Sybilla, who could see her folly for all that it was.

Yes, of course—he had eyes in his head, Gareth had said. Of course he could see how Sybilla felt about him. Of course he was aware of the dangers of the situation, and of course he intended to do all that he could to remedy it. It would make his task easier, he had pointed out grimly to his grandfather, if he had not encouraged Sybilla to treat the Cedars as though it were her second home.