The Marriage Demand

The Marriage Demand
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.Suddenly, millionaire Nash Connaught was back in Faith's life, sharing Hatton House with her, only this time, he was also sharing her bed!When Nash discovered he had taken Faith's virginity, his reaction was swift. He arranged their wedding! But was Nash marrying Faith for honour? Or was it part of his vengeance for something that happened ten years ago?

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 Marriage Demand

Penny Jordan

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

CHAPTER ONE

‘DID you really think I wouldn’t recognise you?’

The ice-cold darts of numbing, mind-blitzing shock pierced Faith’s emotions as she stood staring in horrified nauseous disbelief. Nash! How could he be here? Wasn’t he supposed to be living in America, running the multi-billion-pound empire she had read in the financial press he had built up? But, no, he was quite definitely here, all six foot-odd male animal danger of him: the man who had haunted her nightmares both sleeping and waking for the last decade; the man who…

‘Faith, you haven’t met our benefactor yet, have you?’

Their what? So far as Faith had understood, the huge Edwardian mansion so belovedly familiar to her had been handed over to the charity she worked for by the trustees of the estate that owned it. If she had thought—guessed—suspected—for one single moment that Nash…Somehow she managed to repress the shudder tearing through her and threatening to completely destroy her professionalism.

The Ferndown Foundation, begun originally by her boss Robert Ferndown’s late grandfather, provided respite homes for children and their parents who were living in situations of financial hardship. The Foundation owned homes in several different parts of the country, and the moment Faith had seen their advertisement for a qualified architect to work directly under the Chief Executive she had desperately wanted to get the job. Her own background made her empathise immediately and very intensely with the plight of children living in hardship…

She tensed as she heard Nash speaking.

‘Faith and I already know one another.’

A huge wave of anger and fear swamped Faith as she listened, dreading what he might be going to say and knowing that he was enjoying what she was feeling, relishing it, almost gloating over the potential pleasure of hurting her, damaging her. And yet this was a man who, according to Robert, had, along with the other trustees of the estate, deeded the property as an outright gift to their charity—an act of such generosity that Faith could scarcely believe it had come from Nash.

She could feel Robert looking at her, no doubt waiting for her to respond to Nash’s comment. But it wasn’t Robert’s attentive smiling silence that was reducing her to a fear-drenched bundle of raw nerve-endings and anxiety. Grittily she reminded herself of everything she had endured and survived, of what she had achieved and how much she owed to the wonderful people who had supported her.

One of those people had been her late mother and the other…As she looked around the study she could almost see the familiar face of the man who had been such an inspiration to her, and she could almost see too…She closed her eyes as she was flooded with pain and guilt, then opened them but refused to look at Nash; she could almost feel him willing her to turn round and make herself vulnerable to his hostility.

‘It was a long time ago,’ she told Robert huskily, ‘over ten years.’

She could feel her fear sliding sickly through her veins like venom, rendering her incapable of doing anything to protect herself as she waited for the first blow to fall.

She knew Robert had been disappointed by her hesitation and reluctance when he had told her that he was giving her full control of the conversion of Hatton House.

‘It’s absolutely ideal for our purposes,’ he had enthused. ‘Three floors, large grounds, a stable block that can be converted alongside the main house.’

Of course there had been no way she could tell him the real reason for her reluctance, and now there would be no need—no doubt Nash would tell him for her.

The sharp ring of Robert’s mobile phone cut through her thoughts. As he answered the call he smiled warmly at her.

Robert had made no secret of his interest in her, and had made sure that she was included as his partner at several semi-social events he had to attend as the charity’s spokesperson. But so far their relationship was strictly non-sexual, and had not even progressed to the point where they had had a proper date. But Faith knew that that was only a matter of time—or at least it had been.

‘I’m sorry,’ Robert apologised as he ended his call. ‘I’m going to have to go straight back to London. There’s a problem with the Smethwick House conversion. But I’m sure that Nash, here, will look after you, Faith, and show you over the house. I doubt I’ll be able to get back here tonight, but I should be able to make it tomorrow.’

He was gone before Faith could protest, leaving her alone with Nash.

‘What’s wrong?’ Nash demanded harshly. ‘Or can I guess? Guilt can’t be an easy bedmate to live with—although you seem to have found it easy enough—and just as easy to sleep with Ferndown, by the looks of it. But then morals were never something you cared much about, were they, Faith?’

Faith didn’t know which of her emotions was the stronger, her anger or her pain. Instinctively she wanted to defend herself, to refute Nash’s hateful accusations, but she knew from experience what a pointless exercise that would be. In the end all she could manage to say to him was a shaky, proud, ‘I don’t have anything to feel guilty about.’

She knew immediately she’d said the wrong thing. The look he gave her could have split stone.

‘You might have been able to convince a juvenile court of that, Faith, but I’m afraid I’m nowhere as easy to deceive. And they do say, don’t they, that a criminal—a murderer—always returns to the scene of their crime?’

Faith sucked in a sharp breath full of shock and anguish. She could feel her scalp beneath the length of her honey-streaked thick mane of hair beginning to prickle with anxiety. When she had first come to Hatton Nash had teased her about her hair, believing at first that its honey-gold strands had been created by artifice rather than nature. A summer spent at Hatton had soon convinced him of his error. Her hair colouring, like her densely blue eyes, had been inherited from the Danish father she had never met, who had drowned whilst on honeymoon with her mother, trying to save the life of a young child.

Once she was old enough to consider such things, Faith had become convinced that the heart condition which had ultimately killed her mother had begun then, and that it had somehow been caused by her mother’s grief at the loss of her young husband. Faith acknowledged that there was no scientific evidence to back up her feelings, but, as she had good and bitter cause to know, some things in life went beyond logic and science.

‘What are you doing here?’ she challenged Nash fiercely. No matter what he might believe, she was not—she had not—

Automatically she gave a tiny shake of her head as she tried to break free of the dangerous treadmill of her thoughts, and yet, despite her outward rejection of what she knew he was thinking, inwardly she was already being tormented by her memories. It was here, in this room, that she had first met Philip Hatton, Nash’s godfather, and here too that she had last seen him as he lay slumped in his chair, semi-paralysed by the stroke which had ultimately led to his death.

Faith flinched visibly as the nightmare terror of her ten-year-old memories threatened to resurface and swamp her.

‘You heard your boss.’

Faith froze as she listened to the deliberately challenging way in which Nash underlined the word ‘boss’. Whilst she might have the self-control to stop herself from reacting verbally to Nash’s taunt, there was nothing she could do to stop the instinctive and betraying reaction of her body, as her eyes darkened and shadowed with the pain of further remembrances.

At fifteen a girl was supposed to be too young to know the meaning of real love—wasn’t she? Too young to suffer anything other than a painful adolescent crush to be gently laughed over in her adulthood.

‘As a trustee of my late godfather’s estate, it was my decision to gift Hatton to the Ferndown Foundation. After all, I know how beneficial it is for a child—from any background—to be in this kind of environment.’

He started to frown, looking away from Faith as he did so, the hard angry glaze she had been so aware of in his eyes fading to a rare shadowy uncertainty.

He had thought he was prepared for this moment, this meeting, that he would have himself and his reactions totally under control. But the shock of seeing the fifteen-year-old girl he still remembered so vividly transformed into the woman she had become—a woman it was obvious was very much admired and desired, by Robert Ferndown and no doubt many other gullible fools as well—was causing a reaction—a feeling—within him that was threatening the defences he had assured himself were impenetrable.

To have to admit, if only to himself, to suffering such an uncharacteristic attack of uncertainty irritated him, rasping against wounds he had believed were totally healed. He had, he knew, gained a reputation during the last decade, not just for being a formidable business opponent, but also for remaining resolutely unattached.

He closed his eyes momentarily as he fought against the anger flooding over him and drowning out rationality. He had waited a long time for this—for life, for fate, to deliver Faith into his hands. And now that it had…