Free Spirit

Free Spirit
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.Resisting the boss. Hannah Maitland was a career girl who knew exactly what she wanted out of life. Men, even distractingly attractive ones like Sila weren't high on her list of priorities.Silas Jeffreys knew all about her "no relationship " policy but, try as he might, he just couldn't ignore his attraction to her - especially when she was working alongside him nine to five every day.Would she ever be persuaded that business could become pleasure?

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.

Free Spirit

Penny Jordan

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

CHAPTER ONE

‘OH, YOU’RE off then, are you, darling?’ Hannah’s mother mourned, as Hannah came rushing into the kitchen, her weekend bag swinging from her shoulder.

It was a secret sorrow of Mrs Maitland’s that, having produced four sons in succession before the arrival of a much longed for daughter, that daughter should turn out to be a determined career girl. She was proud of Hannah, of course she was, but she couldn’t help feeling a little envious when her husband’s parishioners mentioned family marriages and grandchildren.

With four sons scattered to the four corners of the earth, pursuing their chosen careers, surely it was only natural for her to wish that Hannah, her only daughter, had chosen to stay at home and settle down? Tom, her husband, laughed at her whenever she voiced this complaint, reminding her gently that Hannah had every right to choose her own way of living her life.

As she watched her crossing the kitchen, Rosemary Maitland studied her covertly. Even now, after twenty-six years, it still amazed her that she and Tom had produced this ravishingly beautiful creature, with her tall, slender body, and delicately oval-shaped face. Her tawny eyes had been inherited from Rosemary’s own grandfather but, widely spaced and set between thick, dark lashes, Hannah’s possessed an allure Rosemary could not remember her grandfather’s having. Hair as tawny as her eyes, every conceivable shade of brown streaked with red and blonde, which nowadays was confined to a neat, elegant bob, had once curled half-way down her back until Hannah had announced that it was too untidy and not the image she wanted to project as a financial accountant.

Her daughter’s choice of career was something that constantly amazed Rosemary. Where on earth had she got it from, this flair with figures? Certainly not from her, nor from Tom. Rosemary suppressed a small chuckle, remembering the many hours she and her husband had toiled over their household accounts.

A vicar’s wife learned young how to manage on slender means, but they had been lucky; a generous bequest from a great-aunt had enabled them to educate all five children privately and to finance them through university.

‘I’m sorry I’ve got to rush, Ma,’ Hannah apologised, ‘but I promised Linda that I’d call round. She’s having problems with the Inland Revenue. She’s got an appointment to see them this afternoon and I’ve promised I’ll go with her. You know what she’s like about figures. The mere sight of a column of them turns her into a dithering idiot, which is a shame because she’s a marvellous businesswoman in every other sense.’

‘Yes, I’ve heard that the shop’s doing very well,’ her mother agreed. ‘I called in a few weeks ago and was dangerously tempted to buy the most beautiful tapestry cushion, Kaffe Fassett, I believe it was.’

Making a mental note to check with her friend on what exactly it was her mother had seen, Hannah went over to her and gave her a fond hug and a quick kiss. Her mother’s birthday was coming up soon and the tapestry cushion would make a surprise present for her. Hannah had already bought her main present, a beautiful tweed suit from Jaeger, which she knew her mother would love.

‘Give Linda my love, won’t you?’ her mother told her as she followed her out of the kitchen.

The vicarage was old and rambling and without the benefit of central heating, other than a very primitive handful of radiators that ran off the temperamental back boiler in the kitchen. Since this boiler required a fearsome amount of stoking to keep the radiators even moderately warm, it was the expressed opinion of the Maitland family that it was easier to do without the heating than to try to make it work. Her parents’ life hadn’t been an easy one, Hannah acknowledged, as she walked swiftly over to her car, and yet they were happy, far happier than the majority of her contemporaries’ parents.

Her car had been a twenty-sixth birthday present to herself, a steel-grey Volvo, practical and sturdy.

‘I’m sorry your father isn’t here to see you off,’ her mother apologised, as Hannah got into the driver’s seat.

Hannah grinned, and for a moment it was possible for Rosemary Maitland to believe she was looking at Hannah as she had been as a teenager, all coltish legs and long, untidy hair. Now all that seemed to be left of that girl was that teasing grin, and even that was seldom in evidence these days. Hannah looked exactly what she was, a very successful businesswoman, dressed and groomed in a way that mirrored her life-style and her ambition, and looking at her, observing the elegant charcoal-grey pinstripe suit and the cream silk blouse designed like a shirt, without any feminine frills or flounces to it, Rosemary couldn’t help feeling a little sad. She was proud of Hannah, of course she was, but she just wished that she would relax a little more; for instance, what had happened to that infamous temper Hannah had had as a child, a temper which her brothers had so often unkindly sparked off by tormenting her?

These days Hannah was everything that was reasoned and controlled. Too controlled, perhaps. Hannah started the engine and, with a final wave to her mother, set off down the overgrown drive.

The Dorset village which was home to her parents, and which had been home to her until she’d left for university, was small and picturesque, but that didn’t mean that life for its inhabitants was without its problems. Parents mourned as their sons and daughters, unable to get jobs, moved away from home. Work on the land, which had once been labour-intensive, was now mechanised to such an extent that farm workers’ cottages fell into disrepair as they became vacant, and farmers neither had the inclination nor the need to replace their workforce.

Now many of those cottages were being snapped up by people from London, up and coming career men and women, much like herself, with a keen eye for a bargain, and the knowledge that money invested in property was a wise investment. The village had changed even in her short lifetime.

Her father was close to retirement, and even though neither her father nor her mother had said anything Hannah knew they were both worrying about how they would manage and where they would live once her father had to give up the vicarage.

She and her brothers had discussed this problem the last time they were all together the previous Christmas. None of her brothers was married, preferring like her to be footloose and fancy free, and between the five of them they had agreed that they would all start saving towards being able to buy their parents a comfortable home.

After all, it was only right that they should do so, Mark had commented earnestly. Had their father invested his inheritance in bricks and mortar, instead of in their education, he would not be worrying about his retirement now.

Who else but a vicar would call his sons Matthew, Mark, Luke and John? Hannah wondered as she turned into the traffic. The boys took it well, even though there had been a period in their teens when all of them had opted to use their second and less conspicuous names. Once, their mother had confessed that it had been she who had called them after the Apostles, and Luke had teased her that the only reason she had chosen such names for them was because, in her disappointment at not producing the daughter she longed for so much, she had simply thought of the most convenient names.

Hannah had grown up surrounded by love and laughter. Her father was a gentle, intelligent man, who cared deeply about the human race and who suffered with it. Her mother was everything a vicar’s wife should be: supportive, understanding, generous both with her time and her patience, cheerfully tolerant of the demands others made on her husband’s time and of the financial hardship their life together had involved.

Even now, her mother still made her own jams and chutneys, still used every scrap of produce the huge, rambling vicarage garden gave, not so much these days because they needed it—after all, there were now only two mouths to feed, three if one counted Simon, a cat who had adopted them—but simply because for so many years she had not been able to afford to waste anything that now the habit had become ingrained with her. Hannah thought wryly of the half-opened cartons of this and that, discarded from her own fridge without a second thought. She rarely cooked for herself, preferring to eat out.

Most lunchtimes she ate with clients of the company for whom she worked. Most evenings she ate either snacks while working at home or went out with friends. How different her life-style was now from her mother’s!

This visit home, as always, her mother had probed gently into her personal life. What she wanted to know was if Hannah had fallen in love. Hannah had gently evaded her questions, not because she resented them but simply because she didn’t know how to explain to her mother that falling in love for her was something that just wasn’t going to happen. She had seen what the pressures of modern living did to too many of her friends’ relationships to risk such intimacy herself, and vicars’ daughters weren’t like the rest of the female population, they either revolted and went completely wild or, like Hannah herself, they lived by a set of rules and regulations, so totally out of step with modern mores as to be archaic.

Not that either parent had ever put any pressure on Hannah to conform to special standards different from those of her peers, but she and the boys, most especially Hannah herself, had grown up desperately aware of how very vulnerable their father was to public opinion. While it might be all very well for the daughter of the local entrepreneur to be out discoing at fourteen years old, while the local landlord’s daughter might have her name splashed all over the gossip press with impunity, and while other stalwarts of the Women’s Guild might discreetly let slip that their daughters were involved in intimate relationships which did not include a wedding ring, Hannah was in no doubt at all that the local community as a whole would not only strongly disapprove of any such behaviour on her part, but would also carry that disapproval to the ears of her father, and, quite simply, Hannah had never felt able to put that burden on him.

Now, of course, she was living away from home and in London, where she had her own airy apartment in the refurbished docklands area, and she had grown into the habit of evading intimacy, preferring solitude to ‘coupledom’, so that she automatically fended off those men who did approach her sexually. Fair-mindedly, she had to admit that her single state wasn’t entirely because of her parents.

There had also been her career. She had worked single-mindedly to achieve the high position she now held: consultant to one of the managers of a very small but well-established firm of financial experts. The genteel poverty of her childhood wasn’t something she had enjoyed, she felt ashamed to admit now.

There had been times when she had envied other children their possessions, their toys, their spending money, even though with wisdom and security she could appreciate that the gifts she had received from her parents had been of far more value than mere material possessions. Even so, she had been left with a desire, almost a craving, for financial security, not the kind of security that came from marriage to a wealthy man, but the kind of security she could earn for herself.

The village wasn’t busy. It was half-day closing. Hannah’s mother had been surprised when she had telephoned early in the week to say that she was taking a couple of days off, and to ask if it was convenient for her to come home. She hadn’t said anything then about Linda’s desperate telephone call to her the previous day, begging her to advise her.

Linda Askew was the daughter of a local businessman. She and Hannah had been at school together, and their friendship had been established then. The only child of wealthy parents, Linda had chosen not to go on to university as Hannah had, but her parents’ death in a car crash two years ago had revealed the shocking fact that the business was virtually bankrupt. In order to pay off her father’s outstanding debts, Linda had sold virtually everything.

Forced to confront the necessity of earning her own living, she had bought a small property in the village and decided to use her interest and expertise in various forms of needlework to establish a small shop. The business had done well. Linda was a sympathetic and caring person. She had a flair for designing, and her tapestries had become much sought after.

An approach from a glossy magazine had resulted in them marketing one of her tapestries as a special offer to their readers. The offer had been wildly successful, and it was because of the funds she had received via this offer that Linda found that she had now run into problems with the Inland Revenue. They had confronted her with a demand for tax which, she had told Hannah tearfully, she simply could not pay.

Having previously dealt with her own accounting system, she had not known whom to turn to, and so Hannah had offered to come down to the village and go with her on her appointment to see the tax inspector. Because it was half-day closing, it was relatively easy for her to park in the main street of the village.

Checking that the burglar alarm was in place and firmly locking her door, Hannah walked briskly towards Linda’s shop, not going to the front door but going the full length of the row of stone-built houses and then round the back, past the long, narrow gardens, where the richness of the autumn-hued flowers was just beginning to take over from the brilliant blaze of summer.