Bitter Betrayal

Bitter Betrayal
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.It happened all the time… Jenneth told herself she wasn't the only woman in the world to have been let down by the man she loved and expected to marry. She knew people went on to rebuild their lives and find lasting relationships. So why couldn't she put the past behind her?The fact that she still loved him was totally irrelevant now. But Luke Rathby wasn't the sort of man who was easily forgotten.And when he came back into Jenneth's life, he created havoc all over again…

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.

Bitter Betrayal

Penny Jordan

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

CHAPTER ONE

‘YOU’RE doing what?’ Jenneth asked her oldest and closest friend in astonishment, almost unable to believe what she was hearing, despite the crystal clarity of Louise’s excited voice.

‘Married. You know…to have and to hold, et cetera et cetera…A mortgage…kids…the whole bit,’ Louise repeated obligingly, while Jenneth’s astonishment almost hummed along the telephone wire from York to London.

Jenneth clutched the receiver and said protestingly, ‘But you’ve always sworn you’d never marry! You wanted to be independent. You…’

‘That was before I met George,’ Louise told her unrepentantly.

George! Jenneth almost boggled, not just at the thought of her high-flying, career-orientated girlfriend getting married, but at the thought of her marrying a man called George…Had she ever been asked to stretch her imagination to the almost impossible lengths of visualising Louise getting married, she would have believed it would be to someone with a far more exotic name than George…

Sighing faintly, she ignored her cooling cup of coffee and the fact that unless she terminated her telephone call right now she was never going to get the preliminary sketches for the McGrath mural finished by lunchtime, and said severely, ‘You never said anything two months ago when we met for lunch.’

‘I hadn’t met him then,’ said Louise simply, and then added quickly, ‘Look, Jen, I want you to be there…on the day, I mean. We’re getting married in three weeks’ time, at home, in the village church. We’re having the whole bit…George says we might as well, since neither of us will get the chance again. I can’t wait for you to meet him. I wish we could get together before the wedding, but George is going to be away in Japan on business…’

She chuckled richly as she heard Jenneth saying in a faint voice, ‘I don’t believe I’m hearing any of this.’

They had virtually grown up together and had been close friends all their lives, living in the same small village, going to the same school, and even later on to the same university, and then Jenneth’s parents had moved further north and she had gone with them, eventually setting up her existing small studio in the barn attached to her parents’ house outside York, while Louise had found herself a job in London in the frenetic world of advertising.

That had been seven years ago. Now Louise had her own agency, while Jenneth had developed her artistic talents to the point where she was greatly in demand locally for the murals which had become her speciality. In addition she had a half-share in a small private gallery in York itself. She and Louise had never totally lost touch, but these days it was impossible for them to meet as often as both of them would have wished.

Jenneth’s parents had been killed just after their move to the north, leaving Jenneth solely responsible for the welfare of her then pre-teenage twin brothers…

There had been times when they had been a heavy responsibility indeed, but the knowledge that her parents would have wanted them all to stay together, coupled with her own deep-rooted sense of duty and responsibility, had helped her through the worst of the bad times.

The twins had now just finished their last year at school, two tall fair-haired males who towered over her and at times almost swamped her with their fierce protectiveness towards her…

Well knowing why Jenneth hadn’t given her an instantaneous response, Louise coaxed, ‘Promise me you’re going to be there. It’s three weeks on Saturday. I’m not having any bridesmaids or anything like that, but I need you there, Jenneth…Seriously…’

There was just enough emotion in her voice for Jenneth to check the automatic refusal hovering on her lips, and Louise took advantage of her silence to add, ‘I’ve booked you a room at the Feathers. Can’t put you up at home, I’m afraid, the place will be brimming over with aged aunts and the like, although Mum and Dad are both looking forward to seeing you…’

‘I don’t know if I can make it, Louise,’ Jenneth told her, staring unseeingly out of her studio window and into the verdant jungle of the house’s back garden.

The house had a very large garden, far too large for her to manage, but she and the twins loved their home. The barn which she had had converted into her studio was ideal for her work, and none of them had wanted to move after the accident, although once the boys were at university…They had been arguing about it ever since Christmas, Kit and Nick both determined to persuade her not to put the house up for sale, even though she had pointed out to them that once they were at university it would be far too large for her, and that the money from the sale would realise lump-sum nest-eggs for them when they set out into the world.

Her hand clenched around the receiver, her palm suddenly sticky with tension, with all that she wanted to say and could not—partly because the words simply refused to be spoken, clogging her throat, and partly because of the old habit of ingrained reticence. So unlike Louise’s outgoing, frank inability to do anything other than say what she was thinking and feeling.

She did it now, taking a deep breath that Jenneth could actually hear, and then, while a bird soared and sang overhead outside, she heard her friend saying softly, ‘Luke won’t be there, if that’s what’s worrying you. He’s away in the States on business. Please say you’ll be there.’

Although she hadn’t moved, Jenneth experienced a familiar dizzying, frightening sensation of fear-induced panic. She hesitated, wanting to find the right words to preserve her dignity…to deny the importance of what Louise was saying, to break through her own reserve and pour out from her heart the feelings which she herself had made taboo between them, eight years ago, by refusing to discuss them with anyone…especially not with Luke’s cousin, even if she was also her own best friend.

‘Jenneth, please…’ Louise wheedled, and as the spectre of Luke rose mockingly to taunt her with her own cowardice she took a deep breath and said huskily,

‘Yes, of course I will…’

They talked for another few minutes, or rather Louise talked and Jenneth listened, while she waited for her agitated heartbeat to slow down to normal and the tension to leave her body. As she listened, she wondered what she would have said had Luke been attending the wedding…and then, a little cynically, asked herself silently if Louise would have invited her had that been the case.

Of course she would, she told herself after they had said their goodbyes and she had replaced the receiver.

Although she had never been able to hide from her friend how much she dreaded the thought of being brought face to face with Luke, thankfully Louise had spent the six-month span of Jenneth’s engagement to him studying abroad, and, being Louise, had sought no other explanation for the ending of that engagement other than the one Jenneth gave her, which was simply that they had both realised it was a mistake.

In the early days, when self-hatred had burned her like acid, she had privately blamed herself for her parents’ death, knowing that their move to York had in part been prompted by their concern for her, but the years had eased that particular torment a little. There were other torments, though, that would never go away. It was useless telling herself that she was far too sensitive. The anguish of hearing from Luke’s own lips that, while professing to love her, he had been seeing someone else and that that someone else was now carrying his child, was something she could never eradicate.

It was burned into her as though by torture; and, like any victim of such cruelty, she carried the brand of Luke’s rejection of her in her soul—deep within her. Behind the calm, pleasant mask she wore for the world there lived a very different person indeed. Some people thought of her as aloof, claiming that her manner matched the coolness of her Nordic fall of wheat-blonde hair and the unfathomable greyness of her dark-lashed eyes.

In response she possessed an aura of calm which had been hard won and which she had learned to project to protect herself. When she moved it was with contained, controlled movements that made those who were baffled and infuriated by the distance at which she held them condemn her as withdrawn and emotionless, not realising that the reverse was the truth, and that it was to protect herself from her own acute vulnerability that she had had to learn the savagely painful lesson of concealing her real feelings.

Now what had at first been a disguise she had assumed for the sake of her pride had become an intrinsic part of her, to such an extent that it was only Louise and the twins who were still able to penetrate the façade of remoteness.

Over the years she had learned to temper her own feelings of rejection and grief with the received wisdom of experience and age, telling herself that the relationship between her and Luke would never have worked; that at twenty-one she had been far too immature, and that the engagement would have petered out anyway, given time.

What still did have the power to confuse her was why Luke had got engaged to her in the first place. Eight years her and Louise’s senior, he had seemed to her a god-like creature set on the heights, way, way above her touch. All through her teens she was in turn giddy, shy, self-conscious and finally spellbound in his presence, whenever school holidays threw the three of them together and Luke, who was away first at boarding-school, then at university, and finally lecturing abroad, came home.

His family, unlike hers, had been part of the village for several generations. His father was the local GP, and his mother, despite the fact that the crippling multiple sclerosis from which she suffered had weakened her health appallingly, took as active a role as she could in village affairs. Tender-hearted, and popular with everyone who knew her, she had gently approved of Luke’s engagement to Jenneth.

Luke had loved his mother very deeply, treating her with the same protective concern with which the twins were now trying to suffocate Jenneth, although in Luke’s mother’s case she had far more need of that protectiveness than Jenneth.

In looks, however, Luke took after his father; he had his tall, very male leanness, and his thick, dark hair.

Louise had once shocked her by telling her that her mother’s brother, Luke’s father, had had something of a reputation with their sex, before he’d met and married Luke’s mother. She had been a local heiress, and Luke’s father had fallen in love with her and married her despite the opposition of her family. Jenneth had always thought it a very romantic story.