Law Of Attraction

Law Of Attraction
PENNY JORDAN

Judge and JuryWith both her professional and personal life in such a mess, Charlotte realized she was lucky to land a position with the prestigious law firm of Jefferson & Horwich even as a junior partner. But Daniel Jefferson was like salt in a wound. He was everything she'd dreamed of being acclaimed, honored. And very much in demand.Next to him Charlotte felt like a failure, and Daniel didn't help her confidence, commandeering her as his assistant and watching her closely. Her raw edge of resentment and anger kept her attraction to this very sexy man at bay…until Daniel voiced his very clear objections to the distance.

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.

Law of Attraction

Penny Jordan

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

CHAPTER ONE

CHARLOTTE paused outside the block of offices, studying the plaque which read ‘Jefferson & Horwich, Solicitors’.

Her knees were trembling slightly and the skirt of her dark blue wool suit, which if anything had seemed rather prim in London, suddenly felt uncomfortably short.

She tugged at it a little self-consciously as she glanced around the busy market square.

It was only just gone eight in the morning, but it was market day and the stallholders were already hard at work preparing for their day’s trading.

Perhaps she ought to have bought herself a new suit, something more suitable for a very junior, albeit qualified solicitor, just starting work in a new practice, but the trouble was that new clothes were a luxury she simply could not afford at the moment.

‘Jefferson & Horwich’. She read the name again.

Well, Richard Horwich she had already met. He had interviewed her for the job. A comfortable middle-aged family man who epitomised everyone’s mental image of a solicitor with a country practice.

But as for the Jefferson…

Charlotte took a deep breath.

Face it, she told herself bitterly. You would rather be working for almost anyone than Daniel Jefferson. The new golden hope of the legal profession, the man who had single-handedly—well, almost, if you excluded the odd barrister or so, and the usual full complement of legal staff—championed the cause of the downtrodden, in this case the victims of the negligent and callous refusal of a large drugs company to accept that the side-effects of their drug had caused detrimental physical symptoms in some of those people prescribed it, never mind doing anything about it, and had won for them not only recognition of the drugs company’s negligence, but also one of the largest sums in compensation ever awarded by a British court.

As she stood staring at the polished brass nameplate on the front of the elegant Georgian building she couldn’t help contrasting her circumstances with those of Daniel Jefferson.

She too was a qualified solicitor. She too had once had her own premises with her name alongside the door, and she too had once championed the cause of those who sometimes seemed most to need legal advice and who nearly always could least afford it. But there the resemblance between them ended.

Where Daniel Jefferson was successful, feˆted, inundated no doubt with people wanting him to act for them, especially since the Vitalle case had made the headlines, she was now forced to seek work as an employee…forced to start again right at the foot of the ladder, her home, her business and even her fiancé gone, swallowed up by the recession which was slowly strangling and destroying so many businesses.

Perhaps she ought, as her parents and her friends kept telling her, to feel grateful that she had been able to get another job with such relative ease instead of still being so full of anger and resentment about all that she had lost.

But she was angry and she was resentful. She had worked so hard. First just when she was studying, and then in her first job as the only female newly qualified solicitor in the large London practice where she had been lucky enough to be employed.

She had even learned to bite on her tongue and not to retaliate when the men she worked with tried to demote and degrade her, giving her the dullest and most routine jobs, and even on one infuriating occasion actually asking her to make coffee for the rest of them. Yes, she had worked hard then, and always with one goal in mind. Her own practice…and before she was thirty.

She had been over the moon when by what had seemed to be the most amazingly fortuitous stroke of good luck she and Bevan, her fiancé, had happened to come across a small local single-partner practice for sale.

It had been just about the time that people were moving out of London in swarms, extolling the virtues of country living, and, as Bevan had told her, she would have been a fool not to have jumped on the bandwagon.

She had bought the practice with a mortgage the size of which had made her wince. And she had also bought herself a small elegant town house several streets away.

After all, as she and Bevan had agreed, once they were married the town house would be large enough for them both, and then later they could sell it at a decent profit and buy something larger.

Their part of the world was an up-and-coming area with property prices going through the roof, as Charlotte had discovered when she was gazumped both on the house and on the business. Fortunately she had been able to borrow enough to outbid the would-be gazumpers, but that had left her with no cash at all and a large overdraft as well as her huge mortgage.

She had been a little afraid then, but Bevan had laughed at her. What was wrong with her? he had demanded. She was only taking the same kind of risk that men had to take all the time. ‘What is it with you women?’ he had challenged her. ‘You want equality and then when you get it…’

He had shrugged without finishing his sentence, but she had known what he was implying.

Bevan was inclined to be irritable and quick to make judgements. He lived a very high-powered existence as a dealer working in the City.

Charlotte had met him through a colleague and at first she had been a little put off by his manner, but he had pursued her so determinedly that she had not been able to help being flattered.

Their engagement was an unofficial, casual arrangement, more a declaration of an intent to marry once they had both achieved a certain status in their lifestyles than a formal betrothal.

Charlotte knew that her parents, especially her mother, were a little perplexed with this arrangement. An engagement, to her mother, meant a diamond ring and a date fixed for the wedding.

Charlotte had had neither the ring nor the date for the wedding, and now she had no fiancé either.

Broodingly she looked at the immaculately painted shiny black door. Once she opened it and went in she would be walking into a completely new life. Taking a retrograde step to a stage in her career she had thought she had left behind her years ago.

She was thirty-two years old. Too old to be going back to the bottom of the heap. But then, it was her own fault. She was the one who was responsible for her failure. She knew that.

‘You failed because you took on too many charity cases,’ Bevan had told her brutally when she had broken down in tears as she had told him the news that her accountant had told her that she could no longer go on. That she must cease business and that if she was lucky—very lucky—she might just…just be able to sell both properties for sufficient to clear the outstanding mortgages.

Was that it? Was it because she had perhaps unwisely taken on too many cases which, while worthwhile, she had always known would never pay their way? Or was it because she was simply not a good enough solicitor, that she had not worked hard enough, that she did not have the drive…the skill…the ability to attract the kind of clients she had so desperately needed to build up her cash flow? The kind of clients that the Daniel Jeffersons of this world seemed to have in abundance, she reflected miserably.

And why not? When you had been feˆted by every heavyweight national paper there was, when every serious magazine had run articles on you, and every pseudo-current-affairs programme had promoted and praised you, you would be inundated with people who wanted to give you their business.

As the old saying had it, nothing succeeded like success.

Which was why, in the middle of the worst recession for decades, Jefferson & Horwich were taking on new staff…which was why she was here, standing numbly on the doorstep of these premises, knowing that she ought to be grateful to whatever streak of compassion it had been which had persuaded Richard Horwich to take her on.