Special Treatment

Special Treatment
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.Susannah was a successful writer for Tomorrow magazine, but the new managing director - the dynamic Hazard Maine - made it clear that he thought she was cheating her way to the top. It didn't help their working relationship, either, that Susannah found him devilishly attractive. So attractive that she allowed him to believe the worst of her; so that she wouldn't be tempted to fall in love with him!Why, when he despised her, id he insist on singling her out?

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.

Special Treatment

Penny Jordan

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

CHAPTER ONE

THE BRIEFING WAS over. Rather unsteadily, Susannah got up and hurried out into the corridor, needing the sanctuary of the small cubby-hole that passed for her office.

Her teeth were clenched so hard that her jaw ached, and so did her head. Her nervous system, always the first thing to react when anything upset her, had gone into overdrive.

‘You rather got the cold shoulder from our new lord and master, didn’t you, darling? I wonder why,’ a slow female drawl came from behind her.

Oh, God, the last thing she wanted right now was to have to parry Claire Hunter’s acid curiosity!

The older woman had been with the magazine ever since its inception. Where her work was concerned, she was brilliant, quite without equal, witty and clever with her malicious tongue-in-cheek reporting of the foibles and fickleness of the fashionable world, which was her métier; but woe betide anyone who forgot to give Claire the recognition she considered her due.

Hazard Maine had not done so, and now she, Susannah, was having to pay the price, she reflected wryly, parrying her colleague’s inquisitive comment with a dismissive shrug of her shoulders and a casual, ‘No idea. New-broom syndrome, I suppose. I just happened to be first in the firing line. That will teach me to arrive at the last minute and get lumbered with a seat in the front row.’

Claire seemed satisfied with her response, and Susannah shut the door of her office behind her in relief. Damn Hazard Maine. Hazard Maine! What sort of a name was that, for God’s sake? He was probably American, of course, and his name was almost as familiar to her as her own. Most of his career years had been spent in New York and Sydney, and he had only recently been recalled to head the prestigious Tomorrow magazine, which was the flagship of MacFarlane Publishing.

She knew already that they weren’t going to get on. But then she had known that ever since Saturday …

Susannah closed her eyes momentarily. As if she didn’t have enough problems in her life, without adding any more! The very last thing she needed was to be on bad terms with her new boss. She and Richard had got on so well. Richard had encouraged and helped her. Richard …

It was pointless wishing Richard back in the editor’s seat. His wife, Tom MacFarlane’s only child, had made it plain that she was tired of sharing her husband with the demands of a highly successful monthly magazine, and Richard had reluctantly accepted that, unless he wanted to lose his wife, he was going to have to join his father-in-law on the board.

Maybe Aunt Emily was right, and it was Susannah’s vibrant chestnut hair that attracted all the problems that seemed to clutter her life. She ought to adopt Claire Hunter’s cool, dismissive approach to life, instead of allowing herself to become so involved in the problems of others—problems which inevitably, in some alchemic way, became her own.

Take last Saturday, for instance. Susannah groaned, pushing long, slim fingers into her already unruly curls. God, the very last thing she wanted to do was to remember that!

It had all been David’s fault, damn him. Susannah scowled ferociously, glowering at her typewriter.

She had been a fool ever to allow herself to become involved with David Martin, and it didn’t help knowing that she had fallen into the same trap as a good proportion of the rest of her sex.

Falling in love with a married man was so … so tacky, she fumed, hazel eyes glowing green as her temper got the better of her. She ought to have known … but how could she have done? They had met initially as guests on a local radio chat show. He had been working in television then, she for a local newspaper. They had had so much in common that, when he suggested dinner and a drink after the show, she had not even thought about refusing. Caution had never been one of her strong points and, by the time she had discovered he was married, she was almost in too deep.

It had been a friend who told her, a very concerned and apprehensive girl-friend who had known her for years, and who had guessed that she couldn’t know what, apparently, everyone else did—namely, that David was married.

Susannah had taxed him with it, and rather shamefacedly he had admitted that he had deceived her, pleading that it had only been by omission.

At first, he’d pleaded, he had not thought it important to tell her that he was married, and then by the time that it was … Well, he had been too scared of losing her to admit the truth.

Torn between the strength of her feelings—her own impulsiveness and the old-fashioned moral strictures she had grown up with—she hadn’t known whether to thank or curse Aunt Emily. Orphaned in the first months of her life, when a freak storm had overturned her father’s small boat, killing both her parents, she had been brought up by her only living relative. Being brought up by an elderly spinster, who was more properly her dead father’s aunt and not her own, did not equip one for life in the eighties, she had reflected miserably at the time. Another girl would have pushed aside her moral scruples and taken what life offered, but Susannah wasn’t like that. David was committed to someone else, and so, heartbreaking though it had been at the time, she had announced to Aunt Emily that it was time she spread her wings, and had started looking for a new job in London.

She had been lucky, thus confirming the old adage about those unlucky in love, or so she had told herself at the time.

In eight months, she had come a long way from the miserable twenty-three-year-old who had left Leicestershire feeling that nothing in life was worth while.

Richard, her boss, had practically adopted her. He had a keen eye for up-and-coming young reporters, whom he took a pride in nurturing and encouraging. She was lucky to have found a job working under him, so she had learned on the newspaper grapevine, and she was forced to concede that it was right. She was just beginning to get back her self-confidence, just beginning to feel that life, after all, might be worth living, albeit a different sort of life from the one she had envisaged that she and David would share, when David himself had shown up in London.

How he had inveigled her address out of Aunt Emily, Susannah didn’t know. He had arrived late one cool summer night, when it hadn’t stopped raining all day. She had been feeling tired, but exultant. A piece she had done, from an interview with a girl who had accidentally got caught up in a siege situation, had been highly praised by Richard and, as if to confirm that she was at last finding her feet in the fast-paced world of the city, two of Susannah’s female colleagues had insisted on her joining them for lunch. They were older than she was, and far more experienced and sophisticated, and it had been a heady experience to have them including her in their conversation as an equal.

She was, they had informed her, marked out as a woman who would go far.

‘We owe it to our sex to help and encourage one another. It’s time we found a way of beating the Old School Tie male system.’

Susannah had come away from the lunch feeling both elated and drained at the same time, her mind made up. From now on, she was going to concentrate on her career. From now on, no more men for her, married or unmarried.

To open her front door and find David standing there, and, what was worse, to feel her heart lurch in the old familiar way, had been dauntingly depressing.

He had insisted on coming in. He had left Louise, he had told her. Their marriage was over, and he was now free to start a new life with her.

She had been tempted. It was no good pretending that she hadn’t. David had wanted to spend the night with her, and she had almost given way. Only the uncomfortable memory of how Aunt Emily would look at her if she knew what Susannah was doing had stopped her. It was ridiculous in this day and age to have such Victorian scruples, but she couldn’t help it. Aunt Emily had done her work too well. As a teenager, Susannah had believed that, once she met the man she loved, all her moral doubts about the rights and wrongs of premarital sex would simply fade away, but it wasn’t as easy as that.

‘What are you trying to tell me?’ David had demanded incredulously. ‘That we can’t make love until we’re married?’

Put like that, it sounded archaic, and worse, scheming—as though she was bartering her body for a wedding ring.

‘No … It’s just that I’m not ready yet, David … I can’t explain …’

She had been perilously close to tears, shaking her head to try and blink them away, but to her relief David hadn’t been annoyed. Instead he had laughed and taken her into his arms.

‘What a fraud you are,’ he had teased her. ‘What would the world think if they knew that Ms Susannah Hargreaves, that champion of free will and women’s rights, is really a timid little virgin?’

She had been too relieved then to feel angry at his aura of sexual superiority; that had come later. She shivered a little, remembering the glitter of anticipation in his eyes. How much had David wanted her because he genuinely loved her, and how much because he saw her as a challenge?