Fight For Love

Fight For Love
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.She had come to take his inheritance. Natasha Ames wasn't surprised that Jay Travers resented her presence on his family's Texas ranch. Not after she learned that his grandfather, who had met Natasha on a trip to England, had left her half of his property in his will.Natasha didn't know why the shrewd old Texan had made such a bequest to a virtual stranger, but she was determined not to leave until she found out.It wasn't easy living with Jay's hostility - especially when Natasha found herself falling in love with the harsh rancher.

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.

Fight For Love

Penny Jordan

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

CHAPTER ONE

THE letter came on a grey, wet morning in mid-June; just the sort of cold, damp summer day that made one’s thoughts turn lustfully to sun and heat, Natasha thought enviously as she studied the unfamiliar American postmark.

Texas—how many names could exercise such a powerful effect on the diverse imaginations of the Western world? But she knew no one from the Lone Star State, unless … Her forehead pleated in a faint frown as she flicked through her memory.

There had been that American last year. A faint smile curled round the corners of her mouth as she remembered the male in question. Tough and weathered like the Texas plain, he had displayed all the stubborn grittiness a dedicated television soap watcher could have wanted. She had rescued him from the wheels of a London taxi, closing her ears to the string of swear words turning the air blue, and her eyes to the sight of his stetson worn with an immaculate dark pin-striped business suit.

He was, she discovered, on his way to a business appointment at the Connaught, and she had helped him on his way, but not before he had insisted on taking a note of her name and address. She had judged it safe enough; after all, he looked as though he was well into his seventies.

She had been surprised, though, when he had invited her to dinner, and her boss at the prestigious Bond Street art gallery where she worked had cautioned her against accepting.

Maybe that was why she had. There was a wide vein of stubbornness in her own character—a legacy from a far-off Russian ancestress, whose unlikely blood still ran in the veins of an otherwise phlegmatic Cheshire farming family.

She put down the letter and stared out of her flat window at the dull grey vista of rooftops and television aerials. It was on days like this when she longed most to exchange the stifling claustrophobia of London for the open fields and gentle skyline of the Cheshire plain.

She had been brought up there on the farm that had been in her father’s family for generations, but after her parents’ tragic death in a multiple motorway pile-up, the farm had had to be sold off. She had been sixteen at the time, and it would have been impossible for her to run it herself; her father’s main love had been the developing and breeding of a new strain of cattle—an expensive programme that called for a far greater degree of knowledge than any sixteen-year-old could have.

Even so, after nine years she still missed it, still ached whenever she drove past well tended fields. Deep down inside, part of her would always feel this deep empathy for the land that went with being a farmer’s daughter.

She sighed faintly, imagining Adam’s shock if he were ever to look into her mind. Her boss was the epitome of a sophisticated man-about-town. Natasha knew that he would be more than willing to take their relationship beyond its present status of boss and employee were she to indicate to him that she wished him to do so.

She also knew that most of her friends would consider him a good catch—excellent husband material. He was independently comfortably off. He owned a pleasant house in a Chelsea mews, and it was being rumoured that within the next five years, he would be invited on to the board of the gallery which he now managed. So why did she continue to hold him at arm’s length? He was the right age for her, and good-looking in a blond, languid fashion, but if she was ever to tell him of this deep need inside her to live on the land, to be part of it and its cycle, she knew that he just wouldn’t understand.

Perhaps her looks were to blame for that. She just didn’t look the way men visualised a farmer’s daughter should look.

She was just over average height and willow-slim, her cloud of dark red hair curling lavishly on to her shoulders when it wasn’t constrained into the chic chignon she wore for work. Her eyes were long and slightly slanting, a deep tawny-gold, like those of a jungle cat. Her face had the sort of bone structure loved by the modelling world. As a teenager it had been suggested, in fact, that she should model, but she hadn’t been interested. She had been in love then. She smiled a little wryly for her teenage self. The object of her affections had been the son of another local farmer, but Rob, a sturdy Cheshire lad with his head set firmly on his shoulders, had not been interested in her. However, by the time her teenage crush on him had faded, her parents were dead, and she was living away from Cheshire in the care of the aunt and uncle who had taken her into their London home.

They had retired now to Spain, and to all intents and purposes she was on her own.

So why didn’t she give Adam the encouragement he was waiting for? He would make a good husband and father, and she wanted children … a family … Maybe it was because he didn’t represent enough challenge … She smiled wryly to herself and turned to study her letter again.

Fortunately, this morning she was not due into the gallery until mid-morning, since they never did much business so early in the week.

The letter must be from Tip Travers, although why on earth the old Texan should be writing to her …

At his behest she had acted as his guide while he was in London, showing him most of the more famous sights. Once she got used to his abrasive manner she had enjoyed his company, although always firmly refusing the money he offered her in exchange for her time.

By the end of his week’s stay, a mutual respect had built up between them. She had told him about her parents’ death, and about her longing to return to the land, and he had told her about the massive ranch he owned near the Rio Grande; about the oil that had been found on it, and about the feud that had broken out between his sons because of it.

One of them had become president of the oil company and one of them had remained on the ranch, and as she listened to him, Natasha had known that, like her, Tip’s first love had been the land and his cattle.

Now both his sons were dead, and the oil company had passed into other hands. His grandson ran the ranch and, although nothing had been said, Natasha had noticed the way the old man’s face tightened with pain when he mentioned his family and she guessed that there were still many unresolved conflicts within it.

She had enjoyed his company and never once regretted giving up the week’s holiday she had intended to spend in Spain with her aunt and uncle to show him around, but she had certainly never expected to hear from him again. He had been a tough, gritty individual with no room for sentimentality in his make-up.

She opened the letter, the words blurring as she trembled in sudden shock.

It wasn’t from Tip, but from his lawyers, informing her that she was a beneficiary under the terms of his will, and requesting her to fly out to Texas to the family ranch where the full position would be explained to her.

She sat down, stricken with shock and sadness. Somehow she found it hard to accept that Tip was dead. He had seemed such a vital man, despite his heart condition. He had confided to her in a rare moment of weakness that he had no intentions of dying yet, because he still had too much to do …

‘There’s that grandson of mine …’

He had shaken his head, and again Natasha had sensed some sort of conflict between the two men. She wasn’t a fool. It was easy to see how hard Tip must be to live with. He had his own decided views on everything—many of them uncompromisingly harsh—but then he had lived a harsh life, fighting for most of it to hang on to what he considered to be rightfully his. His grandfather had carved the ranch out of nothing, sometimes quite literally fighting with his bare hands to hold on to it and pass it down through his family.

Allowances had to be made for such men, although she was the first to admit that living with him on a day-to-day basis could never be easy. She had winced sometimes to see and hear how he had treated the staff at his hotel. The American credo might stipulate that all men were equal, but those with money, it appeared, were more equal than those without.

And yet, despite it all, she had liked him. In many ways he had reminded her of her own grandfather, who had died when she was six years old. They had both possessed that same brand of toughness, of hardiness, and of love for their land.

Her sadness at his death increased the greyness of the cold summer’s day. She picked the letter up again, studying it idly. Texas … Even the word was exciting … punchy … She couldn’t imagine what he had left her, or why. He had not struck her as the overly sentimental type.

Initially, when she had rescued him from the taxi, he had tried to tip her, but the cool hauteur with which she refused his money had made him eye her with speculative interest.

Later, she had suspected that he had deliberately overplayed his weakness on that first occasion, because during the latter part of the week, he never once displayed any of the feebleness that had made it necessary for him to request her support back to his hotel.

Quite how she had come to agree to act as his guide while he was in London she had no real idea. He had told her that originally it had been the intention that his grandson would accompany him, but some last-minute hitch at the ranch had made this impossible, so he had come on alone, and despite his bravado and his loudness he had been lonely.

Yes, that was what had drawn her to him, she recognised. His loneliness. It was a state she had experienced too much to be able to turn her back on it in anyone else.

But to leave her something … It didn’t ring true somehow; it was too out of character … No, he had been too shrewd, too deeply enmeshed in his own sense of family and history to leave something to an outsider. That smacked too much of a sentimentality she knew he hadn’t possessed.