The Youngest Sister

The Youngest Sister
ANNE WEALE

Her Prince Charming?Cressy Vale was the youngest in a family of thin, glamorous, beautiful women. Only, she wasn't thin or glamorous, and only the kindest of souls would ever call her beautiful.Which was why Nicolas Talbot's interest in her was so surprising. Yet since meeting Cressy he had become a regular knight in shining armor…offering her a place to stay and his undivided attention. Cressy was half in love with him already. But did Nicolas regard Cressy as merely a damsel in distress or his modern-day Cinderella?Another classic romance from this popular author

“Already I feel very beholden to you.” (#ue08c8113-85b7-58ef-9f64-746f99d15f4e)Letter to Reader (#u724a8d84-9a2f-5b88-ac24-3f7a038127be)Title Page (#ud06d6ef9-9ef9-5563-8b96-9f29198ba876)CHAPTER ONE (#u612a3bd5-04b0-5ff4-93c3-f13ae1a78fa7)CHAPTER TWO (#ud2b44b7e-48a8-5604-8762-e77cfe5c29a1)CHAPTER THREE (#ud39b8dc1-ec7d-5d36-b9be-c89e88167566)CHAPTER FOUR (#litres_trial_promo)CHAPTER FIVE (#litres_trial_promo)CHAPTER SIX (#litres_trial_promo)CHAPTER SEVEN (#litres_trial_promo)CHAPTER EIGHT (#litres_trial_promo)CHAPTER NINE (#litres_trial_promo)CHAPTER TEN (#litres_trial_promo)Copyright (#litres_trial_promo)

“Already I feel very beholden to you.”

“There’s no need. You’re actually doing me a favor.”

“I don’t understand.”

“It’s been a long time since I had any female companionship. I hadn’t expected to find myself sitting here with a beautiful woman beside me so soon after my arrival.”

The way he talked, Cressy could almost believe she was beautiful. But she knew it had to be a line. She would only ever be a beauty to a man who loved her, and she couldn’t delude herself that someone like Nicolas had fallen in love at first sight. Neither had she—had she?

Dear Reader,

Many readers like to know how a story came to be written. This one was inspired by Ca’n Xenet, an old farmhouse in rural Majorca, which was given new life when it was bought by Shiela Peczenik, an artist, who made it her home and that of her painting school.

Although writers avoid using real people in their stories, for A Touch of the Devil (published 1980), which some of you may have read, I drew on my son’s experiences in the Spanish Foreign Legion to create a hero who had also been a legionnaire. Similarly, much of what I know about men like the hero of this story derives from my husband’s passion for mountains. While I was painting in Majorca, he was walking the Pennine Way and planning a trip with our son to the summit of Aconcagua, the highest peak in the Western Hemisphere.

In creating exciting heroes, it helps to be the wife and mother of men who do adventurous things. Had our first home not been in the wilds of “upcountry” Malaysia, I might never have written any romances, and certainly not Winter is Past, the one that launched me on a long and satisfying career as a storyteller.

Best wishes,

Anne Weale

The Youngest Sister

Anne Weale

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

CHAPTER ONE

USUALLY when Cressy Vale travelled by air it was on the cheapest charter flight available.

Today she was flying business class on Centennial’s scheduled service because the journey was urgent and all the ordinary seats on airlines serving the island of Majorca were fully booked.

It was late June, a popular month with people who wanted to avoid the crowds of the high season as well as the more intense heat of the Mediterranean in July and August. This was the perfect time to go to the beautiful island off the east coast of Spain where the Spanish royal family spent their summer holidays.

Cressy was not going for pleasure, but to answer an SOS message that an elderly member of her father’s family, who had retired to Majorca, was in trouble.

Her flight to Palma, the island’s capital, took off at nine-thirty. By twelve-forty, Spanish time, she would be in golden sunshine instead of the cold, wet weather which had persisted since Easter in England.

Cressy lived and worked in London. On the train from Victoria station to Gatwick airport, she was one of a number of young people travelling in casual clothes with their belongings in rucksacks and roll-bags. But she wondered if, at the airline’s business class check-in desk, she would be conspicuously out of place in her jeans and faded indigo cotton sweater.

Her jeans were freshly laundered and the sweater had been expensive when her sister Anna had bought it. But now it was three years old and had undergone several repairs. Even her dark blue deck shoes had once been in Anna’s wardrobe. Both her sisters spent a lot of money on clothes, but they earned more than she did and needed to dress well for their jobs and their non-stop social lives. Cressy was saving for an expensive group trip to the Galápagos Islands, a sanctuary for rare wildlife in the Pacific. She felt lucky to have a family who supplied her with top-quality hand-me-downs.

However, when she reached the check-in any fears that she might be made to feel like a bag lady at a gala ball were driven out of her mind by the sight of the person being checked in ahead of her. When her questing glance dropped from the sign above and behind the desk to the tall figure standing in front of it, she stopped dead in her tracks.

Never in her life had she seen such a gorgeous male back-view.

For a moment her heart stood still, the way it had the first time she saw the soaring white summit of the Jungfrau on a family holiday in Switzerland.

The Jungfrau was there for ever. In a hundred years’ time it would still be stopping the hearts of impressionable schoolgirls. But any minute now the man she was looking at would finish his business at the desk and she would see his face. The probability was that his front wouldn’t match his scrumptious rear.

Bracing herself for the inevitable let-down, she savoured the brief illusion that here was the kind of man she had always dreamed of meeting—and not merely a fellow traveller in the same teeming airport, but actually going where she was going.

He was tall, the top of his head at least six inches above her own, with shoulders to match, and long, powerful but shapely brown legs exposed by very short shorts. But they weren’t the beach shorts of someone going on a sand, sun and sangria holiday. These were the serviceable shorts worn by trekkers, and this particular pair had seen a lot of service. As had his leather boots.

Above the waist he was wearing a dark blue cotton shirt with the sleeves rolled up high over deeply tanned elbows and the kind of biceps and forearms that could hoist their owner up a rock face more easily than most people climbed stairs.

His black curly hair was long and would have flowed over those impressively wide shoulders if it hadn’t been neatly bound by a length of black tape. Midway down the rim of one ear there was a glint of silver.

Cressy knew what it was because she had one herself, at home, in the miniature chest of drawers where she kept her few bits of jewellery. It was a little silver climbing figure. Hers had come from a market stall selling strings of turquoise beads and earrings of lapis lazuli. She wore it as an open-backed ring, but if the man in front of her was a rock climber he would regard rings as a hazard. Curled round the rim of his ear, the silver climber was less likely to catch on something.

For some moments she feasted her eyes on every visible detail of him, from the upright muscular shoulders, lean hips and hard male backside to the strong but elegant legs which, for a man with black hair, were not as furry as dark men’s legs usually were.

She was jolted out of her trance by being jabbed on the backs of her own legs. Before she turned round she knew what had caused the painful thrust—the front bar of the baggage trolley of someone behind her.

The woman in charge of the trolley was an ash-blonde, forty-something, in a pastel suit with a lot of gold jewellery and a matched set of expensive suitcases. Without a word of apology, she said, ‘This is the business class queue.’

‘I know. I’m in it,’ said Cressy

‘Then why are you hanging back here? The desk’s free,’ the woman said abruptly.

Had Cressy’s mother or either of her sisters been addressed in that tone, they would have made a cutting retort about bad manners. But Cressy had a high threshold of tolerance. If people were rude, she assumed they were under stress. It might be that the woman was secretly terrified of flying. Surprisingly many people were.

As Cressy turned back towards the desk, no longer blocked by the tall man, she glanced in the direction she would be going in after check-in. She was just in time to catch a glimpse of him loping gracefully out of sight, leaving her with an impression of a long, elastic stride and a body in peak physical condition.

But she still didn’t know what his face was like.

Nicolas settled his tall frame in one of the comfortable chairs in the business class departure lounge and downed half a glass of chilled orange juice from the courtesy bar in one long, refreshing swallow.

He had taken a copy of The New York Herald Tribune from a selection of newspapers on a table near the door, but he didn’t start reading it. After months in the back of beyond he had long since broken the habit of following world events and was in no hurry to resume it.

Instead he glanced round the lounge at his fellow passengers, but none held his eye for more than a second. They were the usual mixed bag of pallid-faced businessmen travelling on expense accounts and well-to-do middle-aged to elderly couples returning to their retirement villas in the expatriate colonies that were dotted round most of Majorca’s coastline.

Not that everyone in the lounge was bound for the same destination. Centennial didn’t have its own lounge, but shared it with various other small airlines.

He was about to turn his attention to the front-page headlines when someone unexpected made an uncertain entrance.

At first he thought she must have come in by mistake and would be redirected by the stewardess on duty at the desk. But after a brief conversation the newcomer nodded and smiled, and came towards the non-smoking end of the lounge where he was sitting. Having chosen a seat, she divested herself of her backpack, which was small enough to be stowed in an overhead locker on whichever plane she was catching. Then she went to the self-service bar, where coffee was waiting on a hotplate alongside a comprehensive range of alcoholic drinks, the appropriate mixers being stored in two glass-fronted fridges under the counter.

Although she carried herself well, Nicolas had the impression that the girl was inwardly self-conscious, feeling herself out of place in this quiet and softly lit enclave of cosseted comfort so different from the hurly-burly endured by tight budget travellers.

She looked to be about nineteen and, in an era when teenagers’ role models were either as thin as starved cats or built like greyhounds with implanted breasts, her figure was unfashionably Amazonian.