Game Of Love

Game Of 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.His game, her rules. Tasha couldn't refuse to help – not when her favourite cousin's happiness was at stake! But pretending to be someone she wasn't was risky business… Especially when it involved trying to fool Luke Templecombe.And Luke was fooled.In fact, he found Tasha's act so convincing he expected to become her lover. What he couldn't believe was that she turned him down. Tasha wasn't interested in just an affair. With Luke, she wanted more.But was this too much to ask of a man who only played games of love?

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.

Game of Love

Penny Jordan

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

CHAPTER ONE

‘TASHA, I think I’m going to need your help.’

‘What, again?’ Natasha Lacey queried humorously, looking up from her work to smile at her cousin. ‘What is it this time? Another crisis over the bridesmaids’ dresses? If you want my honest opinion, my love, you’re never going to make your Richard’s sister look anything other than the little dumpling she is. Poor girl. I can well remember what it feels like to be fourteen, chubby and detesting every female in the world who isn’t.’

‘When you add to that the fact that she virtually worships Richard, it’s no wonder that she isn’t exactly overjoyed about your marriage.’

‘No, it isn’t Sara…not this time,’ Emma Lacey interrupted hastily. ‘Nothing so simple. I only wish it were.’

Natasha’s frown deepened. Three years her own junior, Emma had always been more like her sister than her cousin. They had lived in the same small cathedral city all their lives, their parents close friends as well as relatives, both of them glad to have a peer with whom to share the burdens of growing up.

Perhaps because she was the elder, she had always been the calmer, the more logical of the two of them, her emotions and moods controlled and predictable where Emma’s were subject to wild variations and swings.

In the family it was tacitly acknowledged that the death of Emma’s father when she was fifteen years old had to have been the cause of the sudden wild streak which had then developed in her behaviour—a wild streak which had led her into scrape after scrape, some of them so serious that they had led to a rift developing between the two cousins. Emma, bored and rebellious, had insisted on leaving school at sixteen, while Natasha had gone on to university, calmly and determinedly working her way towards the qualifications she needed while Emma had played her way around the world.

However, if Emma had been a little wild, that part of her life was behind her now, and no one could be more pleased than she was herself that she had fallen in love with Richard Templecombe.

It was true that the Templecombes were not perhaps as happy with the match as Emma’s family. For one thing, the Laceys were not and never had been part of the ecclesiastical life of the city, and even though both families had lived there for several generations they inhabited two very different worlds. The Laceys represented commerce and worldliness, the business which the first Jasper Lacey had established on the outskirts of the city over seventy years before being, after the church, the largest employer in the area. The Templecombes, on the other hand, prided themselves on being above such materialistic things as commerce. Their connections with the cathedral and the church went back even further than the Laceys’ connection with the city. Richard’s father was dean of the cathedral, he and Richard’s mother acknowledged leaders of local ecclesiastical society, and it was generally accepted that, one day, hopefully Richard would follow in his father’s footsteps.

A thought struck Natasha and her heart sank. The wedding was less than a week away now, but her sudden fear had to be expressed. ‘You haven’t…you’re not having second thoughts, are you?’ she asked.

Emma shook her head and gulped. ‘No, I’m not…but Richard probably will, once Luke tells him what I’ve done.’

‘Luke?’ Natasha questioned her, snapping off a thread with expert care, and frowning over the repair she had just completed. It seemed ironic that, having spent all those years qualifying and then travelling the world as an embryo news reporter, she should suddenly discover when she was twenty-five years old that the place she really wanted to be was here in this quiet cathedral town, and the thing she really wanted to do was to work with the rich fabrics and embroideries of that world.

She was establishing quite a name for herself now. A couple of prestigious magazines mentioning the quality of her stock, and the sudden demand for fabrics more suitable for the refurbishment of the ancient piles now being acquired by the migrant tide escaping from London, had helped—as had the fact that she had been able to bully her father into expanding the range of ecclesiastical fabrics the company produced so that they had a more general appeal.

‘Luke?’ she repeated encouragingly. ‘I don’t think…’

‘He’s Richard’s father’s cousin.You won’t know him, but he’s a typical Templecombe,’Emma told her tearfully. ‘Narrow-minded, bigoted, just waiting for me to do something wrong so that Richard will break our engagement.’

Being used to her cousin’s emotional highs and lows, Natasha merely said calmly, ‘Emma, Richard is twenty-seven years old, and quite plainly besotted with you. I can’t imagine what this Luke—’

‘You don’t understand,’ Emma interrupted, and then told her dramatically, ‘Luke saw me leaving Jake Pendraggon’s house.’

Now Natasha did begin to understand and her heart sank a little, although she didn’t allow Emma to see it.

Jake Pendraggon had arrived in the city just over a year ago, as colourful a figure as his name suggested, Cornish by self-adoption rather than actual birth, or so Natasha suspected. Certainly he had cleverly, if not too subtly played up the effect of tanned skin, wildly curling black hair and eyes so blue that she thought he must wear contact lenses.

Certainly anyone knowing Emma as Natasha knew her must have realised immediately that Emma would be drawn to Jake Pendraggon like a lemming to a cliff. Certainly it came as no surprise to Natasha to learn that the acquaintanceship between the two of them had obviously developed into something far more intimate.

She herself had been travelling to Italy, Portugal and Spain for much of the time Jake Pendraggon had been living in Sutton Minster, looking for samples of the kind of cloth she wanted her father’s factory to reproduce for her, suitably adapted for a non-ecclesiastical market. Her travels had produced some marvellous fabrics, so rich, so mouth-wateringly desirable that her eyes grew dreamy as she remembered the pleasure of discovering them, of—

‘Tasha, you must help me. It was all a mistake—I’d only gone to see Jake to tell him that everything was over between us, that I loved Richard. But he was right in the middle of one of the most important parts of his novel. He begged me to stay and type up his notes for him and we worked all night on them. Nothing else happened. But of course Luke would have to be walking down the close just as I opened Jake’s door to leave, and, of course, I would have to be wearing the evening dress I’d had on for our engagement party.’ She pulled a face. ‘I loved that dress…Richard’s mother hated it, of course.’

Natasha brushed aside this incidental chatter and demanded fatalistically, ‘You don’t mean you went straight from your own engagement party to Jake Pendraggon’s house, and were then seen leaving it first thing in the morning by Richard’s cousin?’

‘He’s Richard’s father’s cousin, but in essence…yes.’

‘And you never said a word to Richard…never explained.’ Natasha frowned. ‘But, Emma, if this Luke didn’t say anything to Richard at the time, what on earth makes you think he’s going to do so now?’

‘I heard Richard’s mother talking to him. I’d gone round there to see Sara, and the sittingroom door was open. Neither of them knew I was there. Richard’s mother was saying how much she wished Richard were marrying someone more suitable.’ Emma pulled a face. ‘Well, I already knew she doesn’t approve of me, and I’m not bothered about that, but then I heard him—Luke—saying in a sort of sinister way, “Well, you don’t know—they aren’t married yet. Maybe Richard will have a change of heart,” and I knew instantly…’

She paused dramatically while Natasha wrinkled her forehead and asked patiently, ‘You knew what?’

‘That Luke had been waiting until the last possible minute to tell Richard what I’d done, and I know when he’s going to do it—tonight at the pre-wedding party. The one your parents are giving for us.’

‘Oh, I’m sure you’re wrong,’ Natasha tried to comfort her. ‘I haven’t met this Luke, but I’m sure if he had wanted to tell Richard he would have done so months ago—as you should have done yourself,’ she added forthrightly. ‘It’s still not too late,’she continued more gently, knowing her cousin’s stubbornness of old. ‘Why don’t you simply explain to Richard what happened? After all, if it was as innocent as you say—’

‘What do you mean “if”?’ Emma demanded belligerently. ‘Don’t you believe me?’

Natasha sighed faintly. ‘Yes, I do,’ she confirmed. ‘But—’

‘Exactly!’ Emma pounced. ‘And it’s that “but” that stops me from telling Richard. Everyone knows that Jake and I went out together a few times that time when Richard and I broke up.’ She ignored the ironic look Natasha gave her at her deceptive description of the ragingly public and passionate affair Emma had had with the writer while he was supposedly researching his latest blockbuster. ‘But I explained to Richard that if he hadn’t got cold feet about loving me I’d never have even looked at Jake.’ She ignored the look Natasha gave her and added miserably, ‘I know he’d want to believe me, but given my reputation and the fact that Luke saw me leaving Jake’s house…’

‘I can see the difficulties,’ Natasha admitted. ‘You know, you should have explained to Richard right away.’

‘I should have but I didn’t,’ Emma said morosely, ‘and now, because of that, Luke is going to tell Richard, and then Richard will break our engagement, and my life will be ruined, unless…you must help me, Tasha. Please…’

‘I think the best person to help you is yourself, by confiding in Richard,’ Natasha told her severely. ‘He is an adult, Emma, and I’m sure this Luke whoever he is won’t be able to stop Richard from loving and marrying you.’