The City-Girl Bride

The City-Girl Bride
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.When elegant city girl Maggie Russell is caught in a flood, rugged Finn Gordon comes to her rescue. He takes her to his isolated farmhouse, laughs at her impractical designer clothes – and sets about removing them, item by item… !Sit back and enjoy Penny Jordan's emotional, sensual story of a woman who's more used to city streets than country lanes. When Maggie meets Finn, she's about to be awakened – her wild lover of the wilderness turns out to be a real gentleman, who's to the manor born…

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.

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.

The City-Girl Bride

Penny Jordan

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

PROLOGUE

THE head of the Perfect Matches Department, English Speaking Division, scratched the top of his wing in irritation.

‘Now look what’s happened,’ he complained to his newest and least experienced recruit. ‘They’ve called a summit meeting of all the top angels in Cupid Department to discuss the current state of romance. Far too many people are refusing to fall in love and make commitments. If this continues we shall be out of business and a fine thing that would be. Of course they would call this wretched conference when I’m already short-staffed and I’ve just finished drawing up this session’s list of ideally matched pairs. It’s too late to put things on hold now, and besides—’ he glowered darkly ‘—this session I’m determined that we’re going to meet our target, I am not having that pompous idiot from the Third Agers Section telling me yet again that he’s matched up more couples than us. But there’s just no one to do the work.’

‘There’s me.’ His newest assistant reminded him eagerly.

The head of the department sighed as he studied the hopeful smile of his trainee recruit. Enthusiasm for one’s job was all very well, and to be applauded of course, but in this particular recruit’s case that enthusiasm needed to be tempered by the caution of experience and time. However, right now…Right now he had six couples to get together: couples who as yet had no idea that they were meant for one another, couples whose romances needed to be set in motion asap.

Reluctantly he acknowledged that on this occasion he would have to bow to expediency and ignore his forebodings. Handing over his carefully compiled list, he told his junior ‘Every one of these couples has been carefully vetted and checked for compatibility. In this department we do not put couples together unless we are sure they will stay together. Everything is set in place and nothing can go wrong. All you have to do is make sure that each and every one of them is in the right place at the right time. You must follow my instructions exactly. No experimentation or short cuts. Do you understand?’

All students had to learn, of course, but it was, to say the least, unfortunate that this particular student’s experimentation had led to a New York socialite’s pedigree chow falling desperately in love with her neighbour’s prize-winning Burmese cat. Luckily the outcome had not been totally without merit, and the marriage which had ensued between the socialite and her neighbour had been a very satisfactory conclusion to the whole affair. He had been working towards pairing her off with someone very different, but there you are…

‘Hi there. What are you doing?’

The new recruit grimaced as one of the naughtiest zephyrs blew playfully on his wings.

‘I’m busy,’ he responded loftily. ‘So go away and bother someone else.’

With hindsight he acknowledged that it had probably been the wrong thing to say. It was common knowledge that this particular zephyr positively enjoyed her reputation for boisterous behaviour, and perhaps it was silly of him to have spread out all the head of department’s carefully written notes and instructions, along with the slips on which the names of the humans they related to were written.

‘Go away like this, do you mean?’ she challenged him, taking a deep breath and sending all his precious papers flying as she exhaled noisily over them.

Of course afterwards she was contrite, and helped him to gather everything up. It was surprising just how much power there was in that ethereal frame, and by the time they had finally collected everything he was feeling out of breath himself.

But that was nothing to the feeling of dread filling him as he tried frantically to remember which couples had been paired together.

The zephyr did what she could, and in the end he was as sure as he could be that he knew what he was supposed to do.

‘So, which couple are you going to do first?’ she asked him.

He took a deep breath. ‘This one,’ he told her, showing her their names.

She frowned as she looked at the names and their addresses. ‘But how are they going to meet?’ she asked him.

‘I don’t know,’ he admitted. ‘I’ll think of something.’

‘Can I help?’ she begged eagerly. This was so much more fun than blowing a few leaves off trees, which was all she was ever allowed to do.

‘No,’ he denied firmly, quickly changing his mind when he saw her taking another deep breath.

As a first step in bringing the two ideally matched partners together, his job was to engineer a meeting between them according to the instructions he had been left.

Engineer a meeting…Right…

CHAPTER ONE

MAGGIE stared in disbelief at the downpour which had suddenly appeared out of nowhere, turning the road she had been driving along into a vast puddle and making her head ache with the tension of concentrating. From the moment she had seen the sale advertised she had been determined to buy the house. She was sure that it was exactly what her adored grandmother needed to lift her out of her current unhappiness.

Of course Maggie knew that nothing and no one could ever replace her grandfather in her grandmother’s life, but Maggie was convinced that returning to live in the house where her grandparents had started their married life, a house that was filled with memories of their shared love, would help to take her grandmother’s mind off the sadness of her loss. And Maggie was a woman who, once her mind was made up about anything or anyone, refused to change it. Which was why she was such a successful businesswoman—successful enough to be able to attend the auction being held to sell off the large Shropshire estate on which her grandparents had begun their married lives, in the rented house which was now being auctioned for sale.

Maggie had grown up hearing stores of Shropshire and its rich farmlands, but Maggie was a city girl; farms, rain, mud, animals, farmers—they were not for her. The company she owned and ran as a headhunter, her modern city apartment, her friends—single career woman like her—these were the things she enjoyed and valued. But her love for her grandparents was something else, something special. They had provided her with a secure and loving home when her own parents had split up, they had encouraged and praised her, supported her emotionally, loved her, and it both hurt and frightened her to see her once strong grandmother looking so frail and lost.

Until Maggie had seen the Shopcutte estate advertised for sale—its Georgian mansion, farmlands and estate properties, including the pretty Dower House where her grandparents had spent the first years of their marriage—she had been in despair, not knowing how to lift her grandmother’s spirits and terrified, if she was honest, that she might actually lose her. But now she knew she had found the perfect means of cheering her up. It was imperative that she was successful at the sale auction, that she acquired the house. And she was determined that she would.

But for this appalling and unforecasted torrential rain she would have reached her destination by now—the small country town adjacent to the estate, where the auction was to be held and where she had booked herself a room at the town’s only decent hotel.

When the rain had first started, appearing from nowhere out of a hitherto cloudless sky, she had had to slow her speed down to a crawl. The sky was far from blue now, in fact it was nearly black, and the road was empty of any other traffic as it narrowed and dipped at a perilously acute angle.

Was this really the A-class road she had been following? Impossible, surely, that she might have made a wrong turning. She simply did not do things like that. If there was one thing that Maggie prided herself on it was being in control.

From the top of her glossily groomed, perfectly cut blonde hair to the tips of her equally perfectly pedicured and painted toes Maggie epitomised feminine elegance and self-discipline. Her size eight figure was the envy of her friends—and that flawless skin, that equally flawless personal life, as devoid of the untidiness of emotional entanglements as Maggie’s home was devoid of clutter. Yes, Maggie was a woman to be reckoned with: a woman no man would dare not to respect or would risk tangling antagonistically with. After seeing the havoc and mess caused by her parents’ various sexual and emotional relationships, Maggie had decided that she intended to remain safely and tidily single. And so far none of the many men she had met had done anything to make her change that decision.

‘But you are far too gorgeous to be alone,’ one would-be suitor had told her, only to be given one of her most scathing and dismissive looks.

Perhaps somewhere deep down inside herself she did sometimes secretly wonder just why she should be so immune to the dangerous intensity of emotional and physical desire experienced by other women, but she refused to allow herself to dwell on such thoughts. Why should she? She was happy the way she was. Or at least she would be once she had got this auction out of the way and was the owner of the Dower House.

It was ridiculous that she should have had to come out here at all, she fumed as she began a steep descent. She had tried to buy the house prior to the auction, but the agent had refused to sell it. So here she was, and…

‘Oh, no. I don’t believe it,’ she protested out loud as the road turned sharply and she saw in front of her a sign marked ‘Ford’.

Ford…as in fording a river, as in some archaic means of crossing it surely more suitable to the Middle Ages rather than the current century. But that was what the sign said, and there in front of her was a shallow river, with the road running right through it and up the hill on its opposite side.