The Mistress Assignment

The Mistress Assignment
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.Normally so cautious and in control of her life, Kelly Harris feels out of her depth in the role of the sultry femme fatale. But out of loyalty to her best friend, Beth, she is prepared to play the seductress to teach the man who betrayed her a lesson.It's a scheme fraught with danger. Especially when stranger Brough Frobisher gets caught in the cross-fire.He's contemptuous of Kelly's provocative ways, yet intrigued. And his body won't let him ignore her undeniable sensuality.

Kelly puzzled him.

And, yes, if he was honest, intrigued him as well.

Having watched the way she behaved toward Julian, subtly encouraging his advances, it would be easy to assume that she was an extremely sophisticated and worldly young woman who was used to using her undeniable feminine sensuality and attractiveness to get whatever she wanted from life—whomever she wanted.

But Brough had also observed the way she behaved toward her escort, Harry, and to his own sister, and there was no denying that, with them, she displayed a warmth, a consideration, an awareness and respect for their feelings that couldn’t possibly be anything other than genuine.

One woman, two diametrically opposite types of behavior. Which of them revealed the real Kelly, and why should it be so important to him to find 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.

The Mistress Assignment

Penny Jordan

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

CHAPTER ONE

‘WELL, here’s to Beth; let’s hope that this trip to Prague is a success and that it helps her to get over that rat Julian,’ Kelly Harris announced, picking up her glass of wine.

‘Well, she certainly deserves some good luck after all that’s happened,’ Anna Trewayne, Beth’s godmother, sighed, following suit and pausing before drinking her wine to add worriedly, ‘I must admit that I feel partly to blame. If I hadn’t persuaded the two of you to open your shop here in Rye-on-Averton, Beth would never have met Julian Cox in the first place.’

‘There’s only one person to blame for Beth’s unhappiness,’ the third member of the trio, Dee Lawson, Beth and Kelly’s landlady, announced starkly, ‘and that’s Julian Cox. The man is a complete and utter...’

She stopped speaking momentarily, lifting her glass to her lips, her eyes darkening painfully as she quickly hid her expression from the others.

‘We all know what he’s done to Beth, how much he’s hurt and humiliated her, telling her that he wanted to get engaged, encouraging her to make all those plans for their engagement party and then telling her the night before that he’d met someone else, making out that she’d misunderstood him and imagined that he’d proposed. Personally, I think that instead of bemoaning what’s happened what we should be doing is thinking of some way we can punish Julian Cox for what he’s done to her and make sure he can never do it again.’

‘Punish him...?’ Kelly enquired doubtfully. She and Beth had been friends from their first days together at university and Kelly had enthusiastically agreed to her friend’s suggestion that they set up in business together.

‘Rye-on-Averton is the kind of pretty rural English town that artists and tourists dream about, and my godmother was only saying the last time I was there that the town lacked a shop selling good-quality crystal and chinaware.’

‘Us...open a shop...?’ Kelly had protested a little uncertainly.

‘Why not?’ Beth had pressed enthusiastically, ‘You were saying only last week that you weren’t particularly enjoying your job. If we found the right kind of property there’s no reason why you shouldn’t be able to make your own designs to sell in the shop. With my retail experience I could be responsible for the buying and we could share the work in the shop.’

‘It sounds wonderful...’ Kelly had admitted, adding wryly, ‘Too wonderful... We’d need to find the right kind of premises, and it would only be on the strict understanding that we share the finances of the business equally,’ she had warned her friend, knowing that although Beth had no real money of her own her grandparents were rather wealthy and Beth was their adored and adoring only grandchild.

But Beth had swept aside all her objections, and in the end Kelly had been as enthusiastic about their shared project as Beth herself.

Over the last twelve months since the shop had first opened they had gone from strength to strength and then, just over eight months ago, Beth had met Julian Cox.

He had pursued her relentlessly whilst Kelly had stood helplessly to one side and watched as her friend became more and more emotionally dependent on a man whom Kelly had never liked right from the start.

‘Don’t you think you’re letting him rush things a little bit?’ she had suggested gently, just after Beth had announced that they were getting engaged. But Beth’s face had clouded and they had had their first real quarrel when she had responded uncomfortably, ‘Jules said you’d say something like that... He...he thinks that you’re...that you’re jealous of us, Kelly... I told him that just wasn’t possible, of course...’

Jealous of them! With that comment Kelly had been forced to acknowledge that Julian Cox had very skilfully robbed her of the chance to pass on to her friend a piece of information she ought to have given her weeks before. But right now, under the influence of her second glass of the strong Italian wine the three of them had been drinking in the busy Italian wine bar where they had gone for a drink after they had seen Beth off on her buying trip to Prague, the idea of revealing Julian Cox as the unpleasant and untrustworthy character they knew him to be seemed to have taken on the air of something of a crusade, a moral crusade.

‘Why should he be allowed to get away with what he’s done, to walk away from his guilt in the same manner he walked away from Beth?’ Dee had asked the others now.

‘Walk away! What he did was even worse than that,’ Kelly exploded. ‘He practically forced Beth to publicly humiliate herself. I can’t believe how many people seem to have fallen for the lies he’s been spreading about her, implying that not only did she misunderstand his intentions but that she also actively pursued him, to the point where he was supposedly thinking of taking legal action to stop her. Bunkum! I know which one of them was doing the lying and it wasn’t Beth. For goodness’ sake, I even heard him telling her how much he loved her, how much he couldn’t wait for them to be married.’

‘That would have been around the time when Beth’s grandfather was so seriously ill, I expect?’ Dee said grimly.

Kelly looked at her in surprise, but it was Anna who answered her question first, exclaiming, ‘Yes, that’s right! It was when her grandfather was ill that Julian proposed.’

At thirty-seven Anna was the oldest member of the quartet. As Beth’s mother’s younger cousin she had just missed out on being a bridesmaid at the wedding through a serious bout of German measles. In compensation Beth’s mother had asked her several years later to be one of her new baby’s godparents. Only a teenager, Anna had been awed and thrilled to be considered grown-up enough for such a responsibility and it was one she had taken very seriously, her relationship with Beth even more precious to her since she and her husband had not had any children of their own.

‘What’s the connection between Beth’s grandfather’s illness and Julian’s proposal of marriage?’ Kelly asked Dee curiously.

‘Can’t you guess?’ Dee responded. Think about it. The girl Julian dropped Beth for is known to have a substantial personal trust fund.’

Kelly made a small moue of distaste and looked shocked.

‘You mean that Julian proposed to Beth because he thought...’

‘That her grandfather would die and Beth would inherit a lot of money,’ Dee finished for her. ‘Yes. Once he realised that Beth’s grandfather was going to recover he must have really panicked, but, of course, he met this other girl, whose inheritance is far more accessible...’

‘It sounds like something out of a bad melodrama,’ Kelly protested, her forehead puckering as she added, ‘Besides, I thought that Julian was wealthy in his own right. He certainly gives that impression.’

‘He certainly likes to give that impression,’ Dee agreed. ‘Needs to, in fact. That’s the way he draws the innocent and the naive into his web.’

Kelly’s frown deepened as she listened to Dee.

At thirty, Dee was older than Kelly and Beth but younger than Anna, and the two girls had originally met her after their estate agent had suggested that they might want to look at a shop property Dee owned and wanted to let.

They had done so and had both been pleased and impressed with the swift and businesslike way in which Dee had handled the letting of her property to them. She was a woman who, although at first a little reserved and cool, and very choosy about her friends, on later acquaintance revealed a warmth and sense of humour that made her fun to be with.