A Cure For Love

A Cure For Love
PENNY JORDAN

Penny Jordan needs no introduction as arguably the most recognisable name writing for Mills & Boon. We have celebrated her wonderful writing with a special collection, many of which for the first time in eBook format and all available right now.Remedy for an aching heart… Though Lacy's brief marriage went disastrously wrong, she still has her daughter, Jessica. But there has been no man since Lewis, the one who loved and left her, twenty years ago. Lacy is a woman in full control of her own life, devoted to raising money to fight a life-threatening disease. And if the pain of the past has not disappeared, at least it knows its place. But now Lewis is back, determined to know his daughter. The truth he reveals wreaks havoc with everyone's life – especially Lacy's.She's terrified she may make the same mistakes: that she might fall in love… and lose once again.

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.

A Cure for Love

Penny Jordan

www.millsandboon.co.uk (http://www.millsandboon.co.uk)

CHAPTER ONE

‘ARE you ready yet, Mum? Honestly, I feel as nervous as though I were the one having to make the speech.’

‘I’m not making a speech, merely handing over the cheque to Dr Hanson,’ Lacey Robinson responded to her daughter’s excited chatter.

In point of fact she was guilty of evasion. She was nervous. Helping to raise the money for the research into the rare and devastating disease—which, while carried in the female genes only, manifested itself in physical symptoms in the male sex, like haemophilia and other similar disorders—had been one thing. Standing up in public to hand over to the hospital the cheque for the money they had raised was another.

She had already told herself very firmly that such self-consciousness was ridiculous in a woman of thirty-eight with a nineteen-year-old daughter, but that hadn’t stopped the butterflies at present crowding her stomach.

‘I’m so proud of you, Ma,’ Jessica told her, crossing the kitchen to come and put her arms round her and give her a hug. Of the two of them Jessica was easily the taller, topping her mother’s slender five-foot-two frame by a good four inches, but their colouring was the same. Both of them had the same silky fine dark hair and the same wide-spaced grey eyes, the same unexpectedly full lips, although in Lacey’s case there was a vulnerability about her features which was missing from those of her more ebullient daughter.

‘I haven’t done anything,’ Lacey protested now. ‘It’s the people who donated the money in response to our appeal who deserve recognition and praise.’

‘Yes, of course,’ Jessica agreed. ‘But you were the one who organised everything, who first started the appeal.’

‘Only after I’d heard about little Michael Sullivan at work. It was so heartbreaking. I still don’t know how on earth Declan and Cath have managed to come to terms with the tragedy of it. To have lost two children before little Michael, from the same inherited disorder…’

‘Can Michael ever be cured?’ Jessica asked her quietly.

‘No, not cured, but with the money we’ve raised further research can take place into ways of alleviating the effect of the deterioration of the central motor system, and of course, now that they’ve managed to isolate the gene which causes the disease, a…Well, with the new techniques they have for discovering the sex of an embryo at a very early stage in a pregnancy, the parents can opt to have only girls who, while they carry the disease, are not affected by it.’

‘You mean that now the Sullivans could choose to have only daughters?’

‘Yes.’

‘Well, I don’t care what you say, I’m still proud of you,’ Jessica told her warmly, adding, ‘I’m glad they decided to have the presentation now, while I’m at home.’

Jessica was in her first year at Oxford, taking a degree course which would one day equip her with excellent qualifications. If Jessica was proud of her, then how much more was she proud of her daughter? Lacey reflected lovingly.

Life had not been easy for Jessica, an only child, a fatherless child…A child without the financial advantages of many of her peers, she could so easily have grown up rebellious and resentful, unhappy and alone, but, almost right from the moment she was born, she had been a sunny-natured, happy child.

It was typical of Lacey that she herself took no credit for her daughter and, as she wryly told friends, she could certainly take no credit for her scholastic abilities, nor her excellence at sports. Those were qualities—gifts—Jessica had received from her father.

‘Come back, Ma. Where are you?’ Jessica teased her now, waving her hand in front of Lacey’s face and grinning at her.

‘You know what I think, don’t you?’ Jessica commented thoughtfully ten minutes later when they were both in Lacey’s small car, driving towards the civic hall where the presentation was to take place. ‘I think that our Dr Hanson rather fancies you, Ma.’

Lacey flushed. She couldn’t help it. That was the curse of her pale Celtic skin colouring.

Jessica saw this betraying reaction and laughed before asking semi-seriously, ‘Why have you never remarried, Ma? I mean, I know you loved him, but after he’d left you, when it was all over and you were divorced…didn’t you ever…haven’t there…?’

‘Been other men?’ Lacey invited wryly.

It was her policy and always had been to be as open and as honest with her daughter as she could, and, although this wasn’t a topic they had ever discussed before, she sensed that, now that Jessica was living away from home, she was beginning to look far more questioningly at her mother’s past, at her life, comparing it perhaps to the lives of other women of the same age.

‘Well at first I was too…too upset…too…’

‘Devastated,’ Jessica supplied for her. ‘I know he was my father, but how he could have done that to you…?’

‘It wasn’t really his fault, Jess. He fell out of love with me. It happens.’

‘And you were never tempted to tell him about me. I mean…’

‘Yes…yes, I was tempted,’ Lacey admitted honestly. ‘But he’d already made it clear to me that he didn’t love me any longer; that he wanted our marriage to end. I didn’t know until after he’d left that I was expecting you; perhaps I should have.’

‘No…no, Ma. You did the right thing…the only thing,’ Jessica assured her quickly, putting her hand over her mother’s and giving her a warm smile. ‘Don’t you ever think you didn’t. I know people whose parents stuck it out supposedly for their sakes. It must be awful to be brought up in that kind of atmosphere, never really knowing if both your parents are going to be there when you get home from school, feeling they’re only together because of you. No, I might only have had you but I’ve never, never doubted that you loved me and wanted me.’

For a moment the two women exchanged looks of shared love and respect and then Jessica reminded her mother slyly, ‘But you still haven’t answered my original question.’

‘No. Well, as I said at first, it was the last thing on my mind, and then as you grew older…Well, to be honest with you, Jess, there just never seemed to be the time, or at least it’s probably more honest to say that there never was a man for whom I wanted to make the time.’

‘Perhaps you were afraid…afraid of allowing anyone to get too close to you in case they hurt you the way he…the way my father hurt you,’ Jessica suggested shrewdly.

‘Perhaps,’ Lacey agreed.

‘Well, it can’t have been because you didn’t have the opportunity,’ Jessica added forthrightly.

She laughed when Lacey flushed again.

‘Oh, Ma…sometimes you make me feel as though you’re the little girl. Look at you! I’ve seen the way men give you a second look, the way they watch you. And it’s not just because you look sexy.’