Back In The Marriage Bed

Back In The Marriage Bed
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.Annie can't believe Dominic Carlyle's claim. How can he be her husband? Why would she have walked out on him and forgotten all about their marriage?To jog Annie's memory, Dominic insists they move in together. Annie is strangely compelled to say yes – haunted by the memory of a dream in which a man makes love to her… a man who looks just like Dominic.

“You’re a cool one,” Dominic said.

“Walking back into my life…crawling into my bed just as though the last five years have never happened.”

Annie felt as though a huge weight was crushing down inside her.

“Please,” she croaked. “I don’t understand.”

“Do you think I understood when you walked out on me…on our marriage?”

Their marriage…!

“We can’t be married,” she whispered painfully. “I don’t know you….”

“Now I have heard everything. Tell me, Annie, do you make a habit of going to bed with men you don’t know? Is that another part of your personality I never knew existed? Just like your propensity for disappearing without explanation?”

Twice now he had mentioned her walking out on him…disappearing. What kind of relationship must they have had for her to do that?

“I can’t stay here. I have to go,” she began unsteadily.

“No way! Not until you’ve told me why you did it, Annie. Why you walked out on me.”

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.

Back in the Marriage Bed

Penny Jordan

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

CHAPTER ONE

ANNIE paused halfway up the stairs of her pretty Victorian cottage, a softly tantalising smile curling her mouth in secret appreciation, a dreamy, distant look hazing the normal clarity of her widely spaced intelligent grey eyes. She had had the dream again last night, the one that featured ‘him’. And this time, last night, he had been even more deliciously real than ever before. So real, in fact…

As her cheeks pinkened betrayingly and her eyelashes modestly swept down to conceal the expression her eyes might inadvertently betray, Annie could feel the sharp thrill of remembered pleasure running hotly through her body. Last night when he had held her, touched her…A fierce shiver openly tensed her body and a little guiltily she hurried the rest of the way upstairs.

She only had an hour to get ready before leaving to collect Helena and her husband. The three of them were going out for a special celebratory meal, and by rights it was that she ought to be thinking about, not some impossibly wonderful and totally unreal man she had created out of her own imagination, her own dreams…her own need…

Her frown deepened a little. For a woman of twenty-three without a man in her life, without a lover in her life, the sheer intensity of the sensuality of the periodic dreams she had about the fantasy male she had mentally labelled her perfect lover, her soul mate and other half, were becoming increasingly explicit. A sign of her loveless, manless state, or an indication of the power of her imagination? Annie didn’t know. What she did know, though, was that since she had first started dreaming about him none of the real men she had met had had the power to compare with him, nor to touch her emotions.

She was looking forward to the evening ahead. Helena was not, after all, just her closest friend and a substitute mother figure to her; she was also the woman, the surgeon, who was responsible for saving her life. No, Annie corrected herself quickly, what Helena was responsible for in many ways was giving her life, giving it back to her after others, less determined, less compassionate, less seeing, had said that…

Tensely Annie swallowed. Even now, nearly five years after the event, after the accident which had so nearly cost her her life, the mere thought of how close she had come to death had the power to strike an icy chill of terror right through her.

Perhaps illogically, the fact that she had no memory, either of the events leading up to the accident itself nor the weeks when she had been in a coma, made her fear of how easily she might not have survived all the more intense.

As she pushed at her bedroom door the slight awkwardness of her arm, which was the sole physical legacy she now had left of the accident, showed itself in the way she had to open it. Her arm had been so badly crushed, so badly damaged, that the senior registrar on duty when she had been rushed into the accident unit had been on the point of having her prepared for an amputation when Helena, who had only dropped in at the hospital to see another patient, had happened to walk through the unit and had been called over by him for a second opinion.

As the hospital’s senior microsurgeon Helena had immediately taken charge, deciding it might be possible to save Annie’s arm.

Her face had been the first one Annie had seen when she had first regained consciousness, but it hadn’t been for many, many weeks after that that she had learned, not from Helena herself but from one of the nurses, how lucky she was that Helena had chanced to be in the hospital when she had been brought in.

It had been Helena who had spent hour after hour at her bedside talking to her whilst she lay in a coma, dragging her with the strength of her will and her love back to the world of the living, and Annie knew that she would never, never cease to revere and love her for all that she had done.

‘You aren’t the only one who has gained,’ Helena often teased her gently. ‘You have no idea how much higher my professional stock has grown since it’s become publicly known that my personal surgical procedure saved your arm. Your arm is worth more than its weight in gold to me, Annie…’ And then her face would soften as she’d add, far more tenderly, ‘And you, my dear, are more special to me than I can find the words to say. The daughter I never thought I would have…’

Both of them had cried a little the first time Helena had made this loving claim, the moment and the words especially meaningful to them both. Helena, the highly qualified and skilled surgeon who had lost her own womb and her chances of motherhood at a very young age, and Annie, the girl who had been abandoned as a baby and then grown up in a children’s home, always treated well but never loved in that special one-to-one way she had so often yearned for.

Two years ago, when Helena had finally accepted the proposal of marriage from her long-term partner Bob Lever, Annie had been more pleased for both of them than she had been able to find the words to say.

Previously Helena had always refused to marry Bob, claiming that one day he might meet a woman who could give him the children she couldn’t and that when that day came she wanted him to feel free to go to her, and it had taken the combined efforts of both Annie and Bob to persuade her to think differently.

In the end it had been Annie’s gentle reminder that since Helena had unofficially adopted her as her ‘daughter’ she no longer had any reason for refusing Bob’s proposals.

‘Very well. I give in,’ Helena had laughed, waiting until they had finished toasting her acceptance of Bob’s proposal before adding, tongue in cheek to Annie, ‘Of course, you know what this means, don’t you? As your “mother”, and at my time of life, Annie, I shall soon be urging you to find yourself a mate and produce some grandchildren for me.’

It had been after that, and relaxed by the excellence of the Christmas dinner she and Helena had cooked together and the wine that had accompanied it, that Annie had been able to tell Helena the extraordinary intensity of the dreams she had been having.

‘When did they first start?’ Helena had questioned her, immediately very professional.

‘I’m not sure…I think I must have been having them for a while before I actually knew I was,’ Annie had told her, shaking her head and laughing at her own confusing statement.

‘You see, when I did start to realise I was having them they seemed so familiar, as though he had been a part of my life for always…It was as though somehow…I…I knew him…’ She had stopped speaking to frown and shake her head as she tried to grapple for the right words to describe the extraordinary complexity of the feelings within her dreams, to convey to her friend the reality of the man who featured in them.

Now, though, as she headed for her wardrobe to remove the new dress she and Helena had bought especially for this occasion the previous month, she caught sight of her reflection and gave another small smile. She had been so lucky that her face hadn’t been damaged at all in the accident. Small and heart-shaped, it still looked pretty much as it did in the few photographs she had of her childhood. Her hair was still the same blonde colour—an inheritance from her unknown parent, along with the elegance of her bone structure. Maturity, and the much stronger sense of self she had developed, meant that she no longer agonised over who and what her parents had been. It was enough that they had given the most precious gift there was—the gift of life itself.

All she knew of the accident was what she had been told, what had been said during the court case, which had resulted in the driver who had knocked her down on the pedestrian crossing she had been halfway over being convicted of dangerous driving and his insurance company being compelled to make a very large payment to her indeed.

Annie knew there were those who thought enviously that a weakened right arm and being out of action for almost a year were only minor inconveniences to have to put up with. Certainly the driver’s insurance company’s legal team had thought so, and Annie was the first to agree that because of the accident she had gained enormously—not because of the insurance company pay-out but because it had brought Helena and Bob into her life.