Perfect Marriage Material

Perfect Marriage Material
PENNY JORDAN

Tullah Richards knows she shouldn't be fantasizing about her boss. She'd come into the company convinced she'd despise the womanizing Saul Crighton.But the more she works—and socializes—with him, the more she comes to realize that this devoted single father of three young children is perfect marriage material. She knows it—she just has to find a way to prove it to Saul.Follow the turbulent lives of the Crighton family in this dramatic sequel to A Perfect Family and The Perfect Seduction"Women everywhere will find pieces of themselves in Jordan's characters." —Publishers Weekly

Welcome to Penny Jordan’s miniseries featuring the Crighton family.

This is no ordinary family, because, although the Crightons might appear to have it all, shocking revelations and heartache lie just beneath the surface of their perfect, charmed lives. Into this family comes a young, spirited woman, with heartfelt prejudices against one particular Crighton son.

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 PerfectSinner 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 Crightons (#udcac84e5-c51c-519c-b607-50426fb7065c)

A Perfect Family

The Perfect Seduction

Perfect Marriage Material

Figgy Pudding

The Perfect Lover

The Perfect Sinner

The Perfect Father

A Perfect Night

Coming Home

Starting Over

Perfect Marriage Material

Penny Jordan

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

Table of Contents

Cover (#u29c42828-e77a-5e4a-9f97-678632df39e7)Excerpt (#uccf95ed5-ab5c-5ef4-a430-da3b33be5ed7)About the Author (#ufdc98797-7ec8-57ef-881c-0d82d82b1f59) The Crightons Title Page (#uf9aef625-76ba-5b1e-a345-9fc42e71573a) CHAPTER ONE CHAPTER TWO CHAPTER THREE CHAPTER FOUR CHAPTER FIVE CHAPTER SIX CHAPTER SEVEN CHAPTER EIGHT CHAPTER NINE CHAPTER TEN CHAPTER ELEVEN EPILOGUE Copyright (#litres_trial_promo)

CHAPTER ONE (#udcac84e5-c51c-519c-b607-50426fb7065c)

TULLAH reached tiredly for the receiver as the telephone started to ring. She had just walked into her flat. Despite the fact that the company she worked for was cutting back on both taking on and promoting staff, the amount of work passing over her desk seemed to increase every day. Officially she finished at five-thirty but tonight, just like every other night for the past six weeks or so, it had been gone nine before she actually left work. But not for much longer... Thank goodness.

‘Tullah Richards,’ she announced softly into the receiver in the faintly husky and rather sensual voice that her friends teased her sounded far too sexy for the determined career woman she proclaimed herself to be.

‘Tullah! Wonderful. I’ve been trying to get hold of you all day. It’s still on for this weekend, isn’t it?’

Tullah smiled as she recognised the voice of Olivia. She and Olivia had worked together a few years earlier and had remained good friends even though Olivia was now married with a small daughter and living in the Cheshire countryside, whilst she had remained in London determinedly pursuing her chosen career path. But not for much longer. By an odd quirk of fate, she, too, would soon be moving to Haslewich....

‘Yes, if it’s still OK with you,’ she responded to Olivia’s question.

‘We’re looking forward to it,’ Olivia assured her. ‘What time do you expect to arrive?’

‘About five, I think. I’m supposed to be meeting the rep from the relocation people at one and we’re going to go round several properties they’ve picked out for me.’

‘Properties...that sounds very grand,’ Olivia teased.

Tullah laughed. ‘I wish,’ she agreed. ‘Actually I’ve already told them that I shan’t be able to afford anything much more expensive than a single-bedroomed flat, or preferably a small cottage, although I understand with the influx of new residents from Aarlston-Becker relocating to Haslewich, property locally is at something of a premium.’

‘Some of it is,’ Olivia agreed. ‘I think initially there was a feeling amongst the upper echelons of Aarlston-Becker that they’d be able to exchange their city semis for seven-bedroomed country mansions and ex-vicarages, complete with paddocks for ponies and Gertrude Jekyll—style gardens. However, the reality hasn’t been quite like that. Property is cheaper here, but... There are some very pretty little houses in Haslewich itself. Great-Aunt Ruth already has four new neigh-bours on Church Walk where she lives and we’ve certainly been handling a big increase in conveyances.

‘What will happen about your London flat, by the way?’

‘Oh well, I’ve been quite lucky there. Sarah, the girl I share with, is getting married and she and her new husband are buying me out, so at least I’m not having to hang fire waiting for a buyer, although part of the deal when Aarlston-Becker offered me the job was that they would cover all my moving costs, including any bridging loans I might need, plus making sure I got a mortgage.’

‘That’s my girl.’ Olivia laughed. ‘I must say I’m really looking forward to your moving up here. It will be like old times. I can’t believe sometimes that it’s over three years since I left the company. So much has happened. Caspar and I’ve married and we’ve had Amelia, the practice has really become busy this past year and Uncle Jon and I have been talking about taking on a qualified legal assistant or even possibly a full solicitor.’

‘Mmm...well, you certainly did make the right decision leaving when you did,’ Tullah assured her darkly. ‘The amount of cutbacks we’ve been having are quite frightening.’

‘They’ll be sorry to lose you, though,’ Olivia returned. ‘I must say I felt awfully proud of you when I heard that you’d been head-hunted to join Aarlston-Becker.’

‘Along with a good dozen or so other people,’ Tullah felt bound to point out, ‘and only because they’d decided to relocate to Haslewich almost at the last minute instead of going ahead with their original plans to move their European divisional headquarters to The Hague because the British incentives were so much better.’

‘Well, you’re certainly going to be working for a first-class international organisation,’ Olivia told her enthusiastically. ‘I know how impressed my cousin Saul has been since he joined them six months ago. Like you, he, too, was head-hunted by them when they first relocated and—’

‘Saul,’ Tullah interrupted her, an unusual sharpness entering her normally soft husky voice.

‘Mmm...he’s one of my cousins, well, perhaps a second or even a third on my father’s side. I’m never quite sure with our tangled family history. You may not remember him although he was at the wedding and the christening, as well. Tall, dark and—’

‘Handsome,’ Tullah supplied grittily, adding trenchantly, ‘So far as I can remember, Olivia, you have at least half a dozen second and third male cousins who could answer that description.’

‘Maybe,’ Olivia agreed and then her voice softened slightly as she continued, ‘But there’s only one Saul.’

‘If only,’ Tullah muttered sourly under her breath. Then raising her voice so that Olivia could hear her, she remarked, ‘I do remember him—vaguely. Very dark, rather autocratic and quite the gallant, as I recall. He made a big fuss about making sure everyone knew what a good father he was, but I seem to remember it was your Aunt Jenny who actually seemed to be spending the most time looking after his children.

‘I thought that his side of your family lived in Pembroke,’ she added disdainfully.

‘They did...they do. It’s just that since Uncle Hugh is virtually fully retired, he and Ann spend a good deal of their time travelling abroad. Uncle Hugh is a keen sailor and, well, to cut a long story short, Saul is divorced now and he thought it would be better for the children to grow up in an environment where they had close family ties, and in fact that was the clinching element in his taking this job with Aarlston’s. Quite a coincidence, really, both of you working for their legal department but then, of course, it is a huge multinational organisation.

‘There was quite a lot of local antagonism towards them when they first moved into the area. Aunt Ruth said it reminded her of when the Americans arrived during the Second World War, only they had the benefit of silk stockings and chocolate to ease their way into the community.

‘Aunt Jenny was saying the other day that she’d heard on the local grapevine via Guy Cooke, her business partner—his widespread family are Haslewich, you should know. They’ve been here right from the word “go”—the general consensus of opinion tends to be in favour of the influx, or at least the boost to the local economy that it brings with it.’