Mills & Boon® proudly presents a very special tribute
PENNY
JORDAN
COLLECTION
DESERT NIGHTS Available in August 2012
WEDDING NIGHTS Available in September 2012
MEDITERRANEAN NIGHTS Available in October 2012
CHRISTMAS NIGHTS Available in November 2012
PASSIONATE NIGHTS Available in December 2012
SINFUL NIGHTS Available in January 2013
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 a 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.
Dear Reader,
It was a standing joke between Penny Jordan and myself that we’d become a couple of Mills & Boon’s ‘oldest inhabitants.’
My writing career with the company began in 1975—the Golden Age—when the authors were free to go wherever our imaginations took us, except inside the bedroom, of course. The door to that was barely ajar in those days. Romance has always been a tremendously personal genre—a shared fantasy between author and audience, so whatever happened when the door shut was all in the mind rather than on the page, and possibly none the worse for that.
The dark, dangerous hero with a touch of cruelty about him was what the readers wanted then, and titles containing words like ‘Lucifer’, ‘Satan’ and ‘Devil’ added an extra, anticipatory thrill, as vulnerable but spirited girls were pitched against men who rarely took ‘no’ for an answer.
When Penny began writing for Mills & Boon in the early eighties, she was one of the leaders in demolishing the lingering sexual taboos. Her books, with their powerful alpha male heroes, immediately touched a chord with millions of women worldwide and she was a phenomenal success.
Penny was also immensely hard-working and prolific, partly because, as a shrewd North-country lass, she didn’t altogether trust her success, about which she was unfailingly modest. In addition, she was always generous and helpful to beginning writers, who came to regard her as a friend as well as mentor.
She will be sorely missed, so it’s good to have these tribute editions, if only to remind us all how marvellous she really was.
Goodbye, Penny love, and God bless.
Sara Craven
Passionate Nights
The Mistress Assignment
Mistress of Convenience
Mistress to Her Husband
Penny Jordan
The Mistress Assignment
Penny Jordan
CHAPTER ONE
‘WELL, here’s to Beth; let’s hope that this trip to Prague is a success and that it helps her to get over that rat Julian,’ Kelly Harris announced, picking up her glass of wine.
‘Well, she certainly deserves some good luck after all that’s happened,’ Anna Trewayne, Beth’s godmother, sighed, following suit and pausing before drinking her wine to add worriedly, ‘I must admit that I feel partly to blame. If I hadn’t persuaded the two of you to open your shop here in Rye-on-Averton, Beth would never have met Julian Cox in the first place.’
‘There’s only one person to blame for Beth’s unhappiness,’ the third member of the trio, Dee Lawson, Beth and Kelly’s landlady, announced starkly, ‘and that’s Julian Cox. The man is a complete and utter …’
She stopped speaking momentarily, lifting her glass to her lips, her eyes darkening painfully as she quickly hid her expression from the others.
‘We all know what he’s done to Beth, how much he’s hurt and humiliated her, telling her that he wanted to get engaged, encouraging her to make all those plans for their engagement party and then telling her the night before that he’d met someone else, making out that she’d misunderstood him and imagined that he’d proposed. Personally, I think that instead of bemoaning what’s happened what we should be doing is thinking of some way we can punish Julian Cox for what he’s done to her and make sure he can never do it again.’
‘Punish him …?’ Kelly enquired doubtfully. She and Beth had been friends from their first days together at university and Kelly had enthusiastically agreed to her friend’s suggestion that they set up in business together.
‘Rye-on-Averton is the kind of pretty rural English town that artists and tourists dream about, and my godmother was only saying the last time I was there that the town lacked a shop selling good-quality crystal and chinaware.’
‘Us … open a shop …?’ Kelly had protested a little uncertainly.
‘Why not?’ Beth had pressed enthusiastically, ‘You were saying only last week that you weren’t particularly enjoying your job. If we found the right kind of property there’s no reason why you shouldn’t be able to make your own designs to sell in the shop. With my retail experience I could be responsible for the buying and we could share the work in the shop.’
‘It sounds wonderful …’ Kelly had admitted, adding wryly, ‘Too wonderful … We’d need to find the right kind of premises, and it would only be on the strict understanding that we share the finances of the business equally,’ she had warned her friend, knowing that although Beth had no real money of her own her grandparents were rather wealthy and Beth was their adored and adoring only grandchild.
But Beth had swept aside all her objections, and in the end Kelly had been as enthusiastic about their shared project as Beth herself.
Over the last twelve months since the shop had first opened they had gone from strength to strength and then, just over eight months ago, Beth had met Julian Cox.
He had pursued her relentlessly whilst Kelly had stood helplessly to one side and watched as her friend became more and more emotionally