Fantasy For Two

Fantasy For Two
PENNY JORDAN

Opposites attract!Just what did impulsive Mollie Barnes and powerful landowner Alex Villiers, Earl of St. Otel, have in common? Mollie always championed the underdog, while Alex represented the privileged classes. He declared she was stubborn and willfully determined to believe the worst of him, while she thought he was simply amusing himself with her.So why had she confessed her secret fantasy to him? It soon became clear that they shared the same dream and Alex was perfectly happy to make it come true.

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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.

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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.

Fantasy for Two

Penny Jordan

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

CHAPTER ONE

MOLLIE’S pretty heart-shaped face was screwed up into a despairing glower, her topaz-flecked sherry brown eyes minus their usual sparkle as she studied the contents of her office diary. ‘2.30 p.m. drive to Edgehill Farm to interview the farmer’s wife, Pat Lawson, re her special preserves recipe’. It wasn’t exactly adrenalin-pumping, heartbeat-raising stuff, and working on a small-town local newspaper deep in the heart of rural England certainly wasn’t what she had had in mind when she had been studying for her media degree, but realistically she knew that she was fortunate in having found a job at all. A good many of her peers had not done so and at least it was a start—a toe-hold on the career ladder which she hoped ultimately would lead to a much higher profile post, hopefully as either a newspaper or television journalist, covering all the important events of the day both at home and abroad.

It had been her parents, both of them careful and realistic in their outlook on life, and as different from Mollie with her vibrant and sometimes turbulent personality as it was possible to be, who had urged her to accept the job offer which had come up via one of her tutors at university.

‘Dad, writing up weddings and country fairs for the local rag in some old-fashioned country market town isn’t what I want,’ Mollie had protested to her father when they had originally discussed the job.

‘Maybe not,’ her father had returned equably, giving her a small smile before adding dryly, ‘You have to learn to walk before you can run, though, Mollie.’

‘At least it’s a job, darling,’ her mother had chimed in. ‘Although I wish you could have found something closer to home.’

Her parents lived in a comfortable London suburb and Mollie’s new job was going to take her deep into a remote part of the West Country, a small country town on the coast which looked as though it would be more at home featuring in some TV historical drama than being the kind of place which could produce anything remotely newsworthy.

And Mollie, if she was honest about herself, had the kind of personality that dearly loved, even needed some kind of challenge, some kind of cause or person to champion, something or someone into which she could pour all the strong energy of her femininely fiery nature.

And she very much doubted that she was going to get that kind of stimulation writing about Mrs Lawson’s family chutney recipes, even though she knew that it was the kind of thing that her mother, a very keen and skilled cook, would have fallen on with real pleasure.

She had only been in her new job—her first job—for just under a week, having spent her first weekend in Fordcaster settling into the small rented cottage which was to be her new home, and then her first three working days at the Fordcaster Gazette’s offices studying back copies of the paper and, as she had been instructed by the paper’s owner and chief executive-cum-editor, ‘absorbing the ethos’ of his paper.

‘You’ll find Bob Fleury interesting to work for,’ her tutor had told her when she had confirmed to him that she had accepted the job. ‘He’s a bit of an individualist, someone out of the common run—not entirely unlike yourself,’ he had added wryly, watching as Mollie had struggled to suppress the desire to defend herself hotly against his subtle dig.

They had had several run-ins during her time at university. She was too impulsive, too inclined to react with her emotions and not her brain, he had often told her.

‘Fleury—that’s an unusual name,’ she had managed to content herself with.

‘Mmm...’ he’d commented. ‘He’s got French blood. That part of the coast was heavily involved with smuggling during the years of the French Revolution, and the contraband they landed wasn’t always merely inanimate objects.

‘Bob’s a traditionalist who, alongside seeing life in a very individual manner, can also be very set in his ways,’ he had further told her. ‘He believes there’s a certain order to things and to people. Fordcaster is very much an archetypical English market town, and Bob represents its views and its determination to preserve the status quo.’

Mollie had listened ominously. The job was the absolute antithesis of everything she had hoped for when she had been studying for her degree, but she was realistic enough to know that it took more than a firstclass degree to land the kind of plum job she had yearned for. She simply didn’t have the kind of influence that would get her an entree into the world she wanted to inhabit—at least not at this early stage in her career—and she suspected that her mischievous tutor was deriving great satisfaction from having persuaded her to accept a job which they both knew would demand far more of her emotional self-control and patience than it ever would of her degree skills.

‘You can learn a lot from Bob, Mollie,’ her tutor had told her more seriously before she’d left. ‘Before he took over the paper—which, incidentally, has been in his family for several generations—he worked for a TV channel as one of their foremost foreign correspondents. What Bob doesn’t know about that kind of reporting isn’t worth knowing.

‘Furthermore, many of the people he worked with in the field have gone on to fill very high-ranking posts within the corporation and the media in general.’

The smile he had given her then had done much to restore Mollie’s faith, not just in him, but more importantly in herself. The job itself might not seem to offer much, he had subtly been telling her, but there were quite obviously potential opportunities that went with it that could promise a great deal.

Even so, she suspected that it was not going to be easy for her, working with Bob Fleury, and that she was going to have to do a good deal of biting on her tongue to keep her conflicting and often fiery independent views to herself.

They had already clashed once on the subject of hunting and Mollie suspected that there were going to be many other points of contention between them.

He must have some saving grace, though, because his wife, Eileen, to whom he had introduced Mollie, was a surprisingly modern-minded woman with a decided twinkle in her eye and a warm smile that belied her quite formal country woman appearance.

Both Bob and Eileen were in their late fifties, but Eileen had some very up-to-the-minute ideas and their home, with its elegant simplicity, like Eileen herself, had impressed Mollie considerably.

It wasn’t of Eileen, though, that she was thinking as she drove up a track which hopefully would lead to the farm.

She had already taken a couple of wrong turnings, the reason being that virtually all the land that surrounded the town was privately owned and subsequently its narrow lanes were bereft of any kind of sensible signposts.

Now, finally, she hoped she had found the right lane, but she was already running late for her appointment and Bob, as she knew, was a stickler for the old-fashioned kind of good manners which included being very strict about good timekeeping.

The sharp wind blowing across the Atlantic, up the English Channel and over the cliffs had tousled Mollie’s hair when she had got out of the car earlier to check on her bearings, and now she pushed it irritably out of her eyes—a dark rich red heavy mass of glossy curls which, together with her small-boned frame, gave her an air of feminine fragility which she privately thoroughly resented.

She was a modern woman, strong-minded and independent, and she wanted to be treated as such. Her spirit and her personality more than made up for what she lacked in terms of physical strength and size.

She put her foot down a little harder on the accelerator. The lane was single track only, and not tarmacked, and she winced as her small car bumped uncomfortably over the deeper ruts.

Her mind on the coming interview, she neglected to hear or see anything of the battered Land Rover coming round the bend towards her, but fortunately its driver saw her and he brought his vehicle to an immediate brake-protesting stop which caused Mollie to realise her own danger and likewise apply her own brakes.

Her car stopped just inches short of the mud-spattered nose of his. Cursing under her breath at the delay, she saw the Land Rover’s driver swinging open his door.

The last thing she needed now was to waste any more time. Angrily she pushed open her own door and got out. Whoever was driving the Land Rover wasn’t the farmer. Bob had described him to her as a man in his sixties, and this man was nowhere near that. Nowhere near, she acknowledged, sucking in a sharp breath as she took a good look at him.

Tall—taller even than her father, who was just exactly six feet—and broad, extremely broadshouldered, in the worn checked shirt he was wearing open at the throat to reveal a male vee of flesh disconcertingly shadowed by a soft sprinkling of very male-looking body hair.

His hair was black and very thick, his eyes an extraordinarily piercing shade of crystal-clear blue. They also possessed a certain steely look that for some obscure reason made her heart beat just a little bit faster and her chin go up as she fought down the odd mixture of nervousness and excitement that shot hotly through her veins.

She estimated that he was around thirty-two or three, almost a decade older than she was herself. But although his skin looked warmly tanned, suggesting that he spent a good deal of his time out of doors, and despite the fact that he was driving an extremely battered and shabby-looking Land Rover, and in defiance of the casual and well-worn clothes he was wearing, he had about him an air if not exactly of some dangerously good-looking predator, then certainly not one that fitted her mental image of a farmer.

He was far too sure of himself for one thing, far too arrogant and dominant in the way he approached her car and her, holding the door open for her in a gesture which, at face value, might seem courtly and polite but which Mollie assessed more darkly as a demeaning male act of aggression, an unspoken command to her to get out of her car.

If she hadn’t already been doing so she would have firmly refused and remained where she was, but as it was she was already halfway out, and had very little option other than to complete the manoeuvre.