Valentine's Night

Valentine's Night
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.Sorrel Llewellyn was nothing if not determined. And she'd determined to marry dependable Andrew – despite her parents' strong reservations.Enter Val, a distant relative from Australia, with a will as strong as Sorrel's and designs on her heart. As there was no room for visitors at home, Sorrel and Val ended up sharing a Welsh farmhouse in the midst of renovation. Conditions were a bit primitive, but they'd manage.Or so Sorrel thought, until she found herself snowed in and sharing a bed with an attractive stranger who made thoughts of her fiancé fly out the window!

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.

Valentine’s Night

Penny Jordan

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

CHAPTER ONE

‘WHAT on earth are we going to do? We simply can’t ask her not to come—not when she’s been to such trouble to find us. She’d be hurt. But she can’t stay here … not at the moment. The house is full to bursting point as it is.’

Sympathetically Sorrel watched the anxiety darken her mother’s eyes. It was true that the unscheduled visit could not have come at a worse time. With the twins home from university, and her newly married elder brother and his wife taking up temporary accommodation with her parents, and Uncle Giles more or less a permanent house guest, the farm was already bursting at the seams.

Add to that the fact that her father’s prize ewes were lambing ahead of time and he was consequently a little short-tempered with concern, and it was obvious that now was not precisely an ideal time for the family to receive into its bosom an unknown second cousin, heaven only knew how many times removed, from Australia. A cousin, moreover, whom none of them knew anything about, other than that her typed letter was written with such a breezy, not to say slightly overpowering, bonhomie, that made it very difficult for her mother to write back, and say no, they could not accommodate her as a guest.

‘Normally I’d have loved to have her staying here,’ her mother continued unhappily. ‘But …’

‘Why don’t you write and explain the situation?’ Sorrel suggested practically. They were sitting in the farmhouse kitchen, their conversation interrupted by the increasingly noisy protests of the orphaned lambs her mother was hand-rearing. ‘Suggest that she delays her visit until later in the year.’

‘I can’t,’ came the worried response. ‘The letter went to the old farm, instead of coming here. Val obviously doesn’t realise that we’ve moved and that the old farmhouse has been empty since Uncle Giles moved out. The letter would be lying up there yet if Simon hadn’t driven over to show Fiona the house.’

‘Oh, he’s shown it to her, then,’ Sorrel asked interestedly. ‘What did she think? It’s very remote, I know, and not exactly equipped with all mod cons …’

‘Oh, she came back bubbling over with enthusiasm, and I can understand why. It’s very hard to start off your married life living with your in-laws.’

‘Mum, you’ve bent over backwards to make her feel at home,’ Sorrel protested loyally.

‘Oh, she isn’t complaining—far from it, but I remember how I felt when I had to move in with Gran and Gramps. Of course, it was different for me. Unlike Fiona, I didn’t come from farming stock. She’s adapted marvellously well. She goes out in all weathers helping Simon and your dad with the stock, and she didn’t seem a bit put off by the old farm’s remoteness. I warned her that there are times when the snow closes off the road, and of course there’s no gas or electricity up there at the moment, but your dad was saying it would be worth while having them installed, because if Simon and Fiona did move up there it would mean they could make far more use of the high pastures than he’s been able to do.’

Sorrel was familiar enough with the complex family relationship which had led to her father inheriting not just his parents’ farm, but his maternal uncle’s as well. Since this latter farm was situated in the richer pastures of Shropshire, as opposed to his parents’ farm in the Welsh mountains, he had moved his family down into Shropshire when Sorrel was a little girl, leaving his uncle Giles to take over the running of the Welsh land. Two years ago, following a bad bout of pneumonia, Giles had finally admitted that the rugged life of a hill farmer was getting too much for him, and since then the farmhouse had remained untenanted other than during the summer months when Simon lived up there, watching over their sheep flocks.

They were an odd mixture, her parents: her father came from a long, long line of men who had been Welsh farmers; her mother had been a city girl who had fallen madly and illogically in love with the young countryman while he was visiting the Royal Show at Smithfield one year looking for a new pedigree ram; and their four children mirrored the quixotic blend of their parents. Simon, the eldest, whose feel for the land he had inherited fully from his father and who had never wanted to do anything other than follow in his footsteps. The twins: James the would-be scientist, who had always been irked by the constraining enclosure of the life his father and elder brother lived, who made no bones about his own desire to travel, to experience a wider knowledge of the world. Mark, the younger twin’s expertise with anything mechanical had led to him training for a career in the computer industry, and yet he had retained that same deep love of the land that was so strong in their father and Simon.

And as for herself—well, she loved the land as well, but her mother claimed that the artistic talent which had led to her starting her own small, successful business designing and selling exclusive knitwear came from her side of the family. Like the colouring which had given Sorrel her name—her mane of russet hair was considered a little flamboyant by her father’s family, as was her height and elegance of limb. Sorrel was not a Welsh Llewellyn, and yet—and yet she had a deep awareness of the richness of her heritage, of how lucky she had been born the child of two people each in their own way dedicated to bringing up their family in the kind of emotionally secure background that few of her peers had been privileged to experience.

Did the strength of her parents’ marriage mean that she was more or less well-equipped to deal with the problems that seemed to destroy modern relationships? she wondered—more so since she had become engaged to Andrew.

Andrew did not come from farming stock. His father had been a solicitor in Ludlow. He was now dead, and Andrew’s mother lived alone in their old family home. Andrew had an increasingly successful business in Ludlow buying and selling old books.

They had known one another since their schooldays, and if their relationship lacked a certain sparkle—a certain intensity—Sorrel knew she didn’t mind, and that it wasn’t possible to have everything in life. And besides, she had her own reasons for welcoming Andrew’s calm courtship.

She knew that her family weren’t entirely happy about her engagement to Andrew, but she was twenty-four, after all, and old enough to make up her own mind. If he sometimes niggled her with his pedantic, slightly old-fashioned ways—well, she reminded herself that she was far from perfect. But increasingly recently she had known that there was something vital lacking in their relationship … that their engagement was meandering towards no very certain conclusion, that Andrew’s reserve and surely too old-fashioned decision that they should not be lovers until they were married was not romantic as she had first assumed, but indicative of some very problematic areas within their relationship. As was her own reluctance to pressure him into making love to her.

Surely she ought to feel differently? Surely she ought to want him more on a physical level? Was there something wrong with her that made her different from other young women her age? Did she have a much lower sexual drive than her peers?

She didn’t have enough close female friends to know the answer. Those she had made at art college did not live locally, and the girls she had been at school with were now in the main married with families.

She knew the cause of her present dissatisfaction lay with her brother and his wife. No one seeing them together could doubt how they felt. Those looks they exchanged, those sneaked little touches … that flush that sometimes darkened Fiona’s skin when she looked at Simon. No one could observe them together and not know how they felt. It was not like that with her and Andrew.

She really ought not to be sitting here in the kitchen with her mother, but working in the outbuilding her father had converted for her when she’d first set up in business on her own. However, her mother was still frowning over the problem of this unknown Australian female, who had written to them announcing that she had traced a relationship with their family and that, since she had business in the UK, she was coming over early so that she could spend a few days getting to know her relatives.

‘So what are you going to do about her visit?’ Sorrel asked her mother, who was expertly finishing feeding one lamb and starting on another.

‘Well, it’s too late to put her off. She’s arriving the day after tomorrow. She says in her letter that she’s hiring a car and that she’ll drive straight here. Well, not here, of course, but to the old farmhouse.’

‘We’ll have to arrange to leave a message for her at the airport … explaining the position,’ Sorrel suggested practically, but for some reason her mother didn’t seem to find her suggestion acceptable.

‘Oh, we can’t do that!’ she exclaimed. ‘It would be so—so inhospitable. Think, darling, how you’d feel if you’d travelled all that way—’

‘Uninvited,’ Sorrel interrupted her drily, but her mother made no comment, saying instead,

‘And we can’t let her just arrive at the farm, driving all that way to find the place completely deserted. As you know, it’s barely even furnished. Just that one bedroom that Simon uses, and the kitchen. I wish there was some way we could put her up here, but it’s impossible—what with the twins at home and Uncle Giles and now Simon and Fiona, and it isn’t even as though we could get a spare bed in your room, and I won’t have the poor thing sleeping on a settee. What would she think of us? Of course, your uncle Giles is going to visit cousin Martha in Cardiff next week, and the twins are due back at university in three days, so it won’t be for very long.’

‘What won’t?’ Sorrel asked suspiciously, suddenly alerted to potential danger by the way her mother was deliberately avoiding looking at her.

‘Well, your father and I talked it over, and there’s really no reason why the two of you … Valerie and you … shouldn’t stay up at the hill farm for a few days. Simon could drive up there with plenty of supplies. The house is dry enough. The Aga still works, and there are the oil lamps.’

‘Mother, it’s impossible! There’s only one bed up there …’

‘Yes, but it’s a double bed, not like that tiny thing in your room. And besides, Valerie specifically said how much she was looking forward to seeing the farm. Did you know that her ancestor was born there? Imagine that—and then to travel all the way out to Australia.’

‘Mm. Willingly? Or was he one of the family’s black sheep?’ Sorrel asked wryly. ‘Mother, think, what if we don’t get on? We’ll be stuck up there for three whole days.’

‘Well, you could always come here for your meals.’

‘Mum, it’s a one-and-a-half-hour drive,’ Sorrel pointed out firmly. ‘I understand how you feel, but surely we could arrange for her to stay at one of the hotels in Ludlow for a few days?’

‘Impossible. I’ve already tried that. They’re booked up already with people getting ready for the festival.’