Tug Of Love

Tug Of Love
PENNY JORDAN

Had He Returned for Her…Or Their Son?Life wasn't easy as a single mom, but somehow Win had managed to raise a son that any mother could be proud of. Now Charlie's father was back on the scene and demanding as share in his child. But was a share all James wanted? Could it be that her seductive ex-husband meant to take Charlie away from her?All Win knew was that in the space of a few days James had managed to turn her calm, self-assured world upside down. But was her concern more about Charlie's future or her own?

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.

Tug of Love

Penny Jordan

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

CHAPTER ONE

‘WIN, what’s wrong?’

Winter looked up guiltily from the mug of coffee she was nursing, well aware that she had not been concentrating on her friend’s chatter.

She and Heather had known each other for almost ten years now. They had met when they both started taking their toddler sons to the same playgroup, and it was this initial meeting which Heather was discussing now, suggesting that they make arrangements to celebrate the tenth anniversary of the day they had first met.

‘We’ll go somewhere really special,’ Heather had been saying. ‘Not the hotel—not with you working there.’

And Winter had known from the way Heather’s voice had changed that she had not only been thinking of Winter’s work at the hotel where she was in charge of the reception and office staff, but also of her relationship with Tom Longton, its owner.

This was confirmed when Heather asked her uncertainly, ‘It’s not Tom, is it? I thought you and he…’

‘No, it’s not Tom,’ Winter confirmed. There was no point in not telling Heather what had happened, she admitted. After all, she knew that her son Charlie wouldn’t lose any time in telling Heather’s son Danny about his wonderful news. Wonderful to Charlie, that was. She thought it was far from wonderful. In fact, she thought it was just about the worst possible news she had heard in a long time.

‘James is coming back,’ she said bleakly, then added when Heather looked questioningly at her, ‘Charlie’s father.’

Heather’s face registered her shock, and Winter smiled grimly to herself. Heather’s shock was nothing to that which she herself had experienced when Charlie had made his announcement at breakfast four days ago. The words had been delivered in the truculent-cum-defiant tone he seemed to adopt so often these days when he spoke to her.

Perhaps she should have expected this sudden sharp change in him. After all, he was thirteen years old now, not a child really any longer, but it still hurt her that the closeness they had shared when he was a baby and then when he was young was something he now seemed to want to reject.

It hadn’t been easy, bringing him up by herself after the divorce, but she had thought that he was happy with her; that she had more than compensated for his lack of a father, especially a father like James, who had shown more resentment and irritation to his baby son than love.

‘But I thought he was in Australia,’ Heather commented. ‘Charlie’s been the envy of every other child in his class since he spent that holiday over there with him the year before last.’

Winter sighed.

‘Yes…well, it seems he’s decided to leave. I’ve no idea why, nor do I know why he should choose to come back here.’ She gave a tiny shrug. ‘He always was ambitious, and he’s been very successful. The computer software business he started in Australia seems to have done very well, and I can’t deny that financially he’s certainly been very generous.’ She gave another tiny, unhappy shrug. ‘According to Charlie, he’s now decided to uproot himself completely from Sydney and to come back over here.’

‘Permanently?’ Heather asked her.

Win shrugged again.

‘I’ve really no idea,’ she admitted. ‘He and I… we don’t keep in touch on any personal level. After all, there’s no reason why we should.’

‘Apart from Charlie,’ Heather pointed out. ‘He worships his dad, doesn’t he?’

Win winced inwardly at her friend’s comment. Heather had never met James. Win had only started attending the mother and toddler group after the divorce, on the advice of her doctor, who was concerned that she was becoming too introverted, too isolated in her fiercely protective love of her little boy.

‘He seems to,’ she agreed, and then, perhaps because the bombshell of news that Charlie had dropped on her was still upsetting her so much, breaking through the normal constraints and self-control, she burst out angrily. ‘Although I’ve no idea why. After all, for the first six years of his life, James totally ignored the fact that Charlie existed.’

Heather gave her a sympathetic look. Although Winter was not the kind of woman to open her heart casually or easily, they had known one another for too long for Heather not to be aware of the circumstances surrounding Winter’s divorce, and slowly, over the long painful months when Winter had first been on her own, she had gradually disclosed to Heather the bare facts of her marriage and its subsequent breakdown.

It must, Heather had thought then and still thought now, be one of the most traumatic things a woman could ever have to deal with; to discover that your husband was being unfaithful to you was bad enough, but to discover it at a time when you were still recovering from a difficult birth, when you were exhausted from constantly nursing and worrying about a very frail and sickly baby, and when on top of that you were barely twenty years old and your parents had been totally opposed to your marrying so young in the first place, must have been very hard indeed.

Not that Winter had been sympathy-seeking or looking for other people’s pity. She wasn’t that sort. Fiercely independent, and in some ways almost too determined to stand on her own two feet without asking others for anything, she had given her confidences as painfully and reluctantly as a miser giving away his gold.

Winter was an extremely private person, a little remote, in some ways, her manner slightly guarded—but then after the way she had been hurt it was no wonder.

Knowing her so well, Heather was not really surprised she had not married again, despite the fact that she was so attractive. Plenty of men had been interested in her, but she had never reciprocated that interest, until she had taken that course at college and then got her present job with Tom Longton.

No one had been more surprised than Heather when Winter first started accepting Tom’s dates. She had been going out with him for several months now, almost a year, in fact.

At first when Tom had bought the dilapidated Georgian house on the outskirts of town and announced that he intended turning it into a first-class small country hotel, complete with leisure club facilities, everyone had laughed at him, claiming that there was simply not the call locally for that sort of thing.

But they had reckoned without Tom’s determination, and without the new spur of the motorway which brought so much traffic and so many potential and discerning clients within easy reach of the hotel, and now Tom was talking about expanding, adding on extra bedrooms and buying up land for the creation of a championship golf course.

Winter rarely discussed Tom’s plans, even with her, her closest friend, but Heather knew that she must be aware of them. Would she marry Tom? They made a good couple, and Tom, although inclined to be slightly aggressive and perhaps a little more volatile and enthusiastic and perhaps even a little thoughtlessly arrogant in the way he compared himself and his achievements with those who were less successful, did genuinely care about Winter.

But not Charlie?

Heather often wondered if Winter was aware of the resentment and dislike that existed between her son and her employer-cum-boyfriend. If she was, she never mentioned it, and Heather had hardly liked to raise the subject with her. At first when she had seen the worried, drawn look on her friend’s face and had realised that she wasn’t really concentrating on what she was saying, she had been afraid that some problem had developed between Tom and Charlie.

Sometimes Heather had wondered if any man could ever be as important to Winter as her son. Perhaps because she had only the one child as opposed to Heather’s three, or perhaps because Charlie had been so frail as a baby and then so dependent on her once James had gone, Win had always seemed to be much more emotionally close to Charlie than Heather had been able to be to her own three.

She had sometimes envied her that, but, as Win had once ruefully confessed to her, she worried that she might be smothering Charlie with too much love; that she might as a single parent become guilty of over-protecting him, or not allowing him the freedom he needed to develop properly as an individual, and it was for that reason that she had tried to step back a little once Charlie was properly at school and to allow him the space to form other relationships.

In Heather’s eyes, Win was a wonderful mother, but she knew Win had always felt guilty about the resentment she had felt when, totally out of the blue when Charlie was six years old, his father had got in touch with her and asked her permission to make contact with his son.

‘For Charlie’s sake, I suppose I shall have to agree,’ she had told Heather bitterly at the time.