The Marriage Resolution

The Marriage Resolution
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.Her husband-to-be? Dee had thought a career was enough to keep her happy and fulfilled. But now she regrets giving up her chance of marriage, babies and family life… Especially when Hugo Montpelier, the man she once passionately loved, returns.Their sexual hunger for one another is as strong as ever. Maybe marriage and motherhood can still be hers – but first she must dare to reveal the scandal she has kept secret for so long…

“It was a present. From a friend.”

“A friend….” Hugo’s eyebrows rose. “A friend and not your husband?”

“I don’t have a husband,” Dee gritted furiously.

“No husband!”

Something hot and dangerous flared in his eyes and Dee started to panic, but it was too late. The damage had already been done, the tinder lit.

“No husband,” Hugo repeated thickly. “What did he do, Dee? Refuse to play the game your way…just like I did…?”

Dee gave a gasp and then made a small shocked sound as the pressure of Hugo’s mouth on her own prevented her from saying anything else.

It had been so long since she had been kissed like this. So long since she had been kissed at all. Hungrily her mouth opened under Hugo’s, and equally hungrily her hands reached for him.

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.

The Marriage Resolution

Penny Jordan

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

CHAPTER ONE

DEE LAWSON paused in mid-step to admire the pink and yellow stripes of the flowers in their massed corporation bed in Rye-on-Averton’s town square.

She had just been to have coffee with her friend Kelly. Beth, Kelly’s friend and business partner in the pretty crystal and china gift shop the two girls ran in the town—a property which they rented from Dee herself—had also been there, along with Anna, Beth’s godmother. Anna’s pregnancy was very well advanced, and she had laughed a little breathlessly as her baby kicked when his or her mother reached for another biscuit.

With Beth’s wedding to Alex only weeks away Dee suspected that it wouldn’t be very long before Beth too was blissfully anticipating the prospect of becoming a mother.

Strange to think that so little time ago motherhood had been the last thing on any of their minds.

Dee’s eyes clouded a little. But, no, that wasn’t quite true, was it. Motherhood, babies, children, a family were subjects which had always been close to her own heart, even if those feelings, that yearning, had in recent years become something of a closet desire for her, a sadness for what might have been had things been different.

She wasn’t too old for motherhood, though, not at thirty-one—Anna was older than her—and plenty of women in their thirties, conscious of the urgent tick of their biological clocks, were making the decision not to waste any more time but to commit themselves to motherhood even without a committed relationship with their baby’s father.

Had she wanted to do so, Dee knew she could have quite easily and clinically arranged to conceive, even to the point of choosing the biological details of the male donor who would be the father of her child. But, strong though her maternal instincts were, Dee’s own experience of losing her mother shortly after she was born meant that, despite the caring love she had received from her father, for her own child she wanted the extra-special sense of security and belonging that came from being a child surrounded by and brought up with the love of both its parents, for it and for each other. And that was something that was just not possible…not for her…not any more…Once, a long time ago, she had believed…dreamed…

But that had been before Julian Cox had wormed his way into her life, corrupting her happiness, destroying her security.

Julian Cox!

Her full lips twisted distastefully.

It was typical of the man that he had cunningly managed to escape the legal retribution which must surely have been his had he remained within the reach of European law. Where was he now? Dee wondered. She had tried through the considerable network of contacts at her disposal to find him. The last time there had been a firm sighting of him had been last year, in Singapore.

Julian Cox.

He had caused so much destruction, so much unhappiness in other people’s lives, those people he had deceived and cheated via his fraudulent investment scams, people like Beth, and Kelly’s husband Brough’s sister Eve, vulnerable women whom he’d tried to convince that he loved purely so that he could benefit financially. Luckily both of them had ultimately seen through him and had found happiness elsewhere. For her things were not so simple. For her…

Dee stopped and glanced towards the elegant three-storey Georgian building from which the builders’ scaffolding had just been removed, revealing it in all its refurbished splendour.

When she had originally bought it, the building had been in danger of having to be demolished, and it had taken every bit of Dee’s considerable skill to persuade not just the planners but the architect and the builders she had hired that it could be saved, and not just saved but returned to its original splendour.

All the time and effort she had put into achieving its restoration had been well worthwhile, just for that wonderful moment when at a special ceremony the county’s Lord Lieutenant had declared it officially ‘open’ and she had seen the name she had had recarved and gilded above the doorway illuminated by the strategically placed lighting she had had installed.

‘Lawson House’.

And on the wall there was an elegant and discreet scrolled plaque, explaining to those who read it that the money to purchase and renovate the house had been provided posthumously by her father in his memory. And it was in his memory that its upper storey was going to be employed as office accommodation for the special charities which Dee maintained and headed, whilst the lower ground floor was to be used as a specially equipped social area for people of all ages with special needs, a meeting place, a café, a reading room—all those things and more.

And above its handsome marble fireplace she had placed a specially commissioned portrait of her father, which the artist had created from Dee’s own photographs.

‘I wish I could have known him. He must have been the most wonderful man,’ Kelly had once commented warmly when Dee had been talking to her about her father.

‘He was,’ Dee had confirmed.

Her father had had the kind of analytical brain that had enabled him to make a fortune out of trading stocks and shares. With that fortune he had philanthropically set about discreetly helping his fellow men. It was from him that Dee had inherited her own desire to help others, and it was in his name that she continued the uniquely personal local charity which he had established.

And it wasn’t just his desire to help his fellow men that Dee had inherited from her father. She had also inherited his shrewd financial acumen. Her father’s wealth had made her financially independent and secure for the rest of her life. Dee did not need to earn a living, and so, instead, she had turned her attention and her skills to the thing that had been closest to her father’s heart after his love for her.

As the financial brain behind all the charities her father had established, as well as their chairperson, Dee had made sure that the charities’ assets were secure and profitable—and, just as important, that their money was invested not just profitably but sensitively so far as not taking advantage of other people was concerned.

All in all, Dee knew that she had a lot to be grateful for. The friendship which had sprung up between her and the two younger women, Beth and Kelly, who rented the shop premises from her, and Anna, too, had added a very welcome and heart-warming extra strand to her life. Dee was part of a large extended family that had its roots in the area’s farming community and which went back for many generations; she had the pleasure of knowing that she had faithfully adhered to all the principles her father had taught her, and that her father himself was remembered and lauded by his fellow citizens.

A lot to be grateful for, yes, but she still couldn’t help thinking about when…But, no, she wasn’t going to dwell on that—not today—not any day, she informed herself firmly. Just because seeing Anna’s pregnant state and Beth and Kelly’s happiness had made her so sharply conscious of the void which existed in her own life that did not mean…

Above her head the sky was a vivid spring blue decorated with fluffy white clouds whipped along by the breeze. The Easter eggs which had filled shop windows in recent weeks had been removed to make way for flowers and posters advertising the town’s special May Day celebration, which had its roots in the ancient May Day Fair which had originally been held in the town in medieval times.