Levelling The Score

Levelling The Score
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.Simon Townsend's cool rejection of Jenna's teenage adoration had left her smarting, and determined to get her own back one day. Then, at long last, the time came for her to wreak her swift and effective revenge…She didn't realize that her little scheme was playing right into Simon's hands. He had told himself that Jenna was too young for love all those years ago. But he had decided to be patient.And now he was going to teach her that grown-up games were dangerous, and they were played for keeps!

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.

Levelling the Score

Penny Jordan

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

CHAPTER ONE

‘JENNA, please … you’ve got to help me, there just isn’t anyone else. God, if only I’d listened to you years ago … You warned me what sort of brother I’ve got, but—’

‘Susie, come on, you’re exaggerating,’ Jenna interrupted her volatile friend. ‘Simon can’t stop you from marrying whoever you wish—nor force you into marrying someone against your will. You’re twenty-four, for God’s sake, and he is only your elder brother …’

‘He’s no brother of mine. Not any more,’ Susie responded theatrically. ‘Machiavelli would be a better name for him. God, to think I never guessed what he was up to, all the time he was shovelling that gross friend of his down my throat … go to the theatre … All the time I thought I was doing it to help Simon out with an old friend suffering from loneliness, and now I find out that Simon has been trying to marry me off to the guy.’

‘What’s he like?’ Jenna asked curiously.

Susie frowned, her blonde hair with its soft pink streaks standing up on end all round her small head. No matter how outlandish her clothes and hair-style might be, there was an unmistakable soft femininity about Susie that simply couldn’t be hidden. She had been having man trouble of one sort or another for as long as Jenna had known her, and that had been since they had both started senior school together when they were eleven years old.

‘Who, Simon? Come on, it isn’t that long since you last saw him … My twenty-first, wasn’t it? And he hasn’t changed that much … Men don’t, do they, not once they get over thirty … He still looks deliciously distinguished … especially when he’s wearing his court gear. He hasn’t gone grey, though, or anything like that. Odd, isn’t it, that he should have such dark hair, black as a crow’s wing really, and mine should be so fair … Ma reckons he inherited his colouring from a Cornish great-grandmother …’

Jenna subdued a faint sigh at her friend’s ramblings, and then interrupted firmly, ‘No, Susie, not Simon! What’s his friend like, the one he wants you to marry?’

‘You mean you will help me? Oh, my God, Jenna, I knew you would! I know it will work, the minute he sets eyes on you he’s bound to fall for you … It’s not fair … why couldn’t I be tall and slim, instead of small and round? And your hair, I’ve always yearned for dark red hair … it’s so … so …’

‘Red?’ Jenna supplied challengingly, with a gleam in her eyes, quite forgetting for the moment that as yet she had most definitely not made any commitment to help her friend rid herself of her unwanted suitor, no matter what Susie might choose to believe.

Her red hair was a constant source of irritation to her. People who didn’t know her constantly made reference to the temper they suspected must go with it. Others, normally women, asked her if it was dyed … It was a rather spectacular shade of dense, dark red. It went well with her creamy skin, although untypically her eyes were not gold or green, but a dark, true sapphire-blue.

All her life she had had pinned on her the label of a redhead’s infamous temper, and because of it she had cultivated a cool remoteness that outwardly at least she allowed nothing to shake.

The temper was there all right, but she hated being predictable. And if there was one person above all others who had the knack of arousing that temper it was Simon Townsend.

They had first met when she was twelve and he was nineteen. Susie had taken her home with her after school. An only child herself, she had been inclined to stand in awe of the elder brother Susie talked so much about, even before she had met him.

It had a been a summer’s afternoon, and they had arrived from school, hot and sticky. Simon, home from university, had been playing tennis, but he had come in looking cool and unflappable in his tennis whites, his dark hair slicked smoothly to his masculine skull, his eyes cool and unfathomable, making Jenna feel as though he was looking right into her mind and reading every single little thing that was hidden there.

So powerful was the memory of that meeting that she actually squirmed uncomfortably in her chair.

Susie, at last realising the whole of her best friend’s attention was not focused upon her, broke off in mid-sentence and stared at her, her brown eyes rounded and filling with tears.

‘Jenna, please … please help me. You don’t know what it’s like to be in love, the way Peter and I are …’

‘No, I don’t,’ Jenna agreed firmly. ‘Nor can I see why you don’t simply tell dear brother Simon to forget his empire-building plans and say you’re in love with someone else! Come on, Susie, he can’t force you into marriage with this friend of his … Your parents wouldn’t let him.’

‘You don’t know Simon,’ Susie responded darkly. ‘It’s becoming a barrister that’s done it—all that power, it’s gone to his head. You know how persuasive he can be, Jenna, once he starts talking to me …’ She gave a tiny, but effective shiver, making Jenna remember rather wryly the fact that she had been one of the leading lights in their theatrical group when they were at school.

‘It’s all right for you,’ Susie continued miserably. ‘You’re so strong-willed, so firm in what you want to do. I’m not, and once Simon gets to work on me, I’m terrified that he’ll get me to agree to doing something I don’t really want to do … The problem is that he detests poor Peter, even though he’s only met him once … And just because Peter forgot to put his handbrake on and ran into the back of Simon’s car … Such a fuss about a piece of tin! Of course, that made Simon take against him right from the start, but I didn’t realise then just what he’d got in mind for me. Ma let it drop the other weekend when I went to see them. I told her that Peter and I were planning to go away on holiday together this year, and Ma said that she thought I would have been going to Canada with John … She got all flustered and het up about it, so I guessed there was something going on, and I got her to admit to me that Simon thinks I should marry John …’

‘I still can’t see why you need my help.’

‘You know me, I’m hopeless at confrontation scenes. You know how weak I am.’

Visions of the many disappointed young men she had had to send away from their front door in the days when they had shared university digs together came to Jenna’s mind …

‘Please, Jen! All I’m asking you to do is to cover for me while Peter and I go away … We need time to be alone … time together without Simon interfering. We’re going down to Cornwall. The folks still have the house down there … Remember it?’

Jenna did. Many years ago when she and Susie had both been in their early teens, she, and her grandmother who had brought her up after her parents’ death in an avalanche while they were on a skiing holiday, had spent several happy summer holidays with Susie and her parents at their holiday home in Cornwall, holidays made all the more pleasant because Simon had not shared them—he had been away at university, and then later undertaking his training for the bar.

It was a long time since she and Susie had holidayed together; the last time had been the summer they had left university, when they had travelled all through Europe together. On that occasion, too, she remembered Simon raising objections about their plans. Her mouth compressed slightly as she remembered this and other things …

Simon Townsend could sometimes be too sure of himself and the rightness of his own judgement for his own good. She had few fears that scatty, pretty Susie could ever be inveigled into marriage with anyone—she liked to play the field—but Susie was right about one thing. Simon was a very effective verbal opponent, and Susie, who disliked any kind of conversation that did not focus around fashion, was all too likely to give in to him, simply to keep him quiet.

‘What exactly is it you want me to do?’ she asked, disentangling herself from Susie’s fiercely jubilant hug.

‘I’m going to tell Simon that I’m staying here with you … He’s bound to ring you to check up on me. All I want you to do is to confirm that I’m here!’

‘And if my verbal confirmation isn’t enough?’ Jenna pressed.

It took Susie several seconds to work it out. ‘Oh, you mean if he wants to speak to me?’ A grin curled her mouth. ‘I’ve thought of the most delicious plan. It will completely fool him … I’ve made a tape.’

She delved into her huge shoulder-bag and fished out a small recorder complete with tape. ‘Look, I’ll play it for you. You pretend to be Simon, and then listen …’

Dutifully, Jenna did as she was instructed. When the tape ended she surveyed her friend with mixed feelings and a certain amount of wry resignation.

The tape was an ingenious idea, and Susie knew her brother well enough to be able to anticipate what line his conversation would take. The answers she had dictated on to the tape were vague and Susie-ish enough to be quite convincing.

‘See, you’ll have no problems,’ Susie told her proudly, pressing a button to rewind the machine. ‘I’ve thought of everything!’