“We are still married,” Dracco reminded her.
“Our marriage was never annulled.”
Imogen’s face cleared. “You want an annulment?” She ignored the stab of pain biting into her heart and concentrated instead on clinging to the relief she wanted to feel. “Well, of course, I will agree and—”
“No, I don’t want an annulment.” Dracco cut across her hurried assent. “Far from it. What I want is a child.”
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.
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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.
The Blackmail Baby
Penny Jordan
MILLS & BOON
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PROLOGUE
‘SO YOU’RE going to go through with it? You’re going to go ahead and marry Dracco, even though he doesn’t love you?’
Imogen flinched as the full venom of her stepmother Lisa’s words hit her. They were in Imogen’s bedroom, or at least the bedroom that had been Imogen’s until after her father’s death. Since then Lisa had declared her intention to sell the pretty country house where Imogen had grown up and to buy herself a modern apartment in the small market town where they lived.
‘Dracco has asked me to be on hand to help him entertain the clients,’ Lisa had said at the time of her shock announcement about the house. ‘He says he can see how much more business the company has been attracting since I became your father’s hostess. Unfortunately your mother never seemed to realise just how vitally important being a good hostess was.’
She had given the openly dismissive, almost contemptuous shrug with which Imogen had become teeth-grittingly familiar whenever Lisa spoke about her late mother. Instinctively Imogen had wanted to leap to her mother’s defence, but she had sufficient experience of Lisa to know better than to do so. Even so, she had not been able to stop herself from pointing out quietly, ‘Mummy was ill. Otherwise, I know she would have wanted to entertain Daddy’s clients for him.’
‘Oh, yes, we all know that you think your precious mother was a saint.’ Imogen had seen the furious look of hostility in Lisa’s hard blue eyes. ‘And Dracco agrees with me that you made life very difficult for your father all these years by constantly harping on about your mother, trying to make him feel guilty because he fell in love with me.’
Lisa had preened herself openly, making Imogen’s stomach churn with sickening misery and anguish. Then her stepmother had continued triumphantly, ’Dracco considers that your father was very fortunate to be married to me. In fact…’ She had stopped, giving Imogen a small, secret little smile that had made her heart thump heavily against her ribs. It hurt, unbearably, to hear Lisa speaking about Dracco as though a special closeness existed between them, especially when Imogen was so desperately in love with him herself!
Imogen had never truly been able to understand how her beloved father had fallen in love with a woman as cold and manipulative as Lisa. Granted, she was stunningly attractive: tall, blonde-haired, with a perfect and lushly curved body, totally unlike Imogen’s own. Imogen took after her mother, who had been petite and fine-boned with the same thick dark mop of untameable blackberry curls and amazingly coloured dark violet eyes. And, where Imogen remembered her mother’s eyes shining with warmth and love, Lisa’s pale blue eyes were always cold.
Imogen had loved her father far too much, though, to say anything to him. Her mother had died when she was seven, and when he’d decided to remarry when she was fourteen Imogen had made up her mind to accept her new stepmother for his sake. She had adored her father and been fiercely protective of him, in her little-girl way, after her mother’s death, but she had been ready to welcome into their lives anyone who could make him happy.
Lisa, though, had quickly made it plain that she was not prepared to be equally generous. She had been thirty-two when she married Imogen’s father, with no particular fondness for children and even less for other members of her own sex. Right from the start of their relationship she had treated the young girl as an adversary, a rival for Imogen’s father’s affections and loyalty.
Lisa had been in their lives less than three months when she had told Imogen coolly that she considered it would be far better for her to go to boarding school than live at home and attend the local private school her mother had chosen before succumbing to the degenerative illness which had ultimately killed her. It had been Dracco who had stepped in then, reminding Imogen’s father that his first wife had hand-picked her daughter’s secondary school even when she knew she would not be alive to see Imogen attend it. It had been Dracco too who had come to that same school to break the news of her father’s fatal accident to Imogen, tears sheening the normally composed and unreadable jade depths of his eyes.
That had been nearly twelve