Unspoken Desire

Unspoken Desire
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."You never did want to face reality, did you?" Frazer accused. "You always were a daydreamer… living more in your imagination than in real life. "Frazer Aysgarth had never forgiven Rebecca for what she'd done those many years ago – despite the fact she'd sacrificed herself for his sake.Now that they would be sharing the same house, Rebecca wondered if there was any hope that he'd see her as the woman she really was…

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.

Unspoken Desire

Penny Jordan

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

CHAPTER ONE

‘REBECCA my dear…such a relief! For one moment when you didn’t answer the phone straight away I thought perhaps you’d decided to fly out to Australia to see your parents and brother. How is dear Robert, by the way, and Ailsa and the girls? They must be getting quite big now. How old are they? Four and two, isn’t it? It’s…’

‘Aunt Maud,’ Rebecca interrupted firmly, tucking the receiver under her chin, and trying to concentrate on the essays she was marking while at the same time following the convoluted drift of her great-aunt’s vague conversation.

‘Ah, yes…The reason I’m ringing you, my dear, is that I desperately need your help.’

Her help? Rebecca’s frown wasn’t caused entirely by the essay of a pupil who was destined to follow his father into the latter’s merchant bank, and yet at ten years old still seemed to think the word instalment possessed a double ‘l’.

‘My help?’ She couldn’t resist the faintly ironic underlining of the possessive pronoun. At the other end of the line in faraway Cumbria there was the kind of humming silence that told her that her point had been made.

‘Well, my dear, there was simply no one else I could turn to,’ came the dramatic response. Aunt Maud at her thespian best, Rebecca reflected ruefully, catching the note of pathos that had been added to her great-aunt’s original vagueness. ‘I would have got in touch with your mother, but since she’s in Australia…’

A slight suspicion of aggrieved irritation there, Rebecca suspected, and no wonder. She could well imagine that, whatever kind of help it was she needed, Maud Aysgarth would rather have approached her soft-hearted and far too put-upon mother than herself.

Her mind was more on her marking than her aunt’s conversation. Those people who believed that schoolteachers did nothing during the long school holidays really ought to see her desk right now, loaded down as it was, not only with the end-of-term essays from the pupils she taught at an exclusive co-educational private prep school, but also the uncompleted work schedules and plans for the coming autumn and winter terms, she reflected grimly. She loved teaching and always had, and counted herself privileged to have a job teaching in a school as well equipped and well run as the one she did…a private London prep school whose pupils were on the whole well-behaved and keen to learn.

Thinking of her work caused her to lose the thread of her aunt’s conversation; after all, what could there possibly be to worry about at Aysgarth with Frazer in charge?

Aysgarth was Frazer’s private kingdom, a kingdom in which nothing was allowed to go wrong, nothing allowed to intrude which Frazer did not want intruding, as she knew to her cost.

Aysgarth was a granite-hard house owned by a granite-hard man. And yet she loved the house, and once she had thought…

‘So you see, my dear, with Frazer away and myself in charge, there was really no one else I could turn to. I don’t know how long it will take you to get up here, but…’

Get up there? Had Aunt Maud gone mad or had she? She must know quite well that if Frazer hadn’t actually forbidden Rebecca to put as much as a fingertip on Aysgarth property, then he had certainly made it quite plain that her presence was not one he wanted or welcomed, and why. Rebecca laughed mirthlessly and soundlessly to herself. Why? Because once she had been idiotic enough to want to protect him from hurt. For that she had been condemned and ostracised, made to feel as though she were a Judas and worse.

Dear God, the last thing she needed right now was to start walking down that painful path again. It was over, in the past…totally without relevance to her life. A good life—a life filled with a job she enjoyed, friends who shared her interests and tastes, men who took her out, flattered her, flirted with her and, above all, did not look at her with cold grey eyes, the colour of ice, so dark with contempt and bitterness that they shrivelled her very soul.

She was happy, content; her life was rich and full. There was no room in it for useless daydreams, for might-have-beens. She was twenty-six years old, mature, well adjusted, self-sufficient.

Or she had been until Great-Aunt Maud had started interfering in her life, reminding her of things best forgotten. And then something her aunt had said hit her.

‘Frazer isn’t at Aysgarth? But he must be! Rory and Lillian left the children there because…’

‘That’s just what I’m trying to tell you, my dear. Frazer was here, but at the very last minute he had to take over from one of his colleagues, who was due to give a lecture tour in the States. Frazer had no option but to go in his place, as Head of the Institute. He’ll be gone for nearly three months.’

‘Three months?’ Rebecca was appalled. ‘What about the children?’ From what her mother had told her, Frazer’s niece and nephew, his brother’s children, were a pretty unruly pair, who required a very firm hand on the reins. Eight-year-old twins whose easygoing father had never made any real attempt to discipline them, and who with their mother had calmly dumped them on Frazer eight months ago, so that he could take up a new job in Hong Kong.

‘Well, Frazer did make proper arrangements for them,’ Aunt Maud was saying defensively. She had always hated anyone criticising Frazer. After his and Rory’s parents had been killed in an air crash she had moved into Aysgarth House at Frazer’s request. He had been eighteen then and Rory a much younger twelve. ‘He hired a young woman to take charge of them.’

A sniff accompanied the almost scathing words ‘a young woman’, and Rebecca, who had heard all about the twins’ exploits from her mother who regularly kept in touch with Frazer, her much younger cousin, repressed a faint sigh of sympathy for the girl concerned.

‘What’s happened to her?’Rebecca asked drily.

‘She’s left—handed in her notice and said that there was no way she was going to be responsible for the twins. Undisciplined brats, was how she referred to them.’

In her mind’s eye, Rebecca pictured her great-aunt’s magnificently Edwardian bosom heaving in righteous indignation at this slur on the Aysgarth line, but she was long past being intimidated by the long shadow that name had once cast across her life—a long, long time ago when she had been awed and impressed by the stories her mother had told her about her ancestors’ long-ago deeds of valour.

Holidays spent at Aysgarth had not helped to dispel the awe—not with Frazer there, ten years her senior. Darkly if rather grimly handsome even in those days, a silent spectator of hers and Rory’s games, a dark-visaged god who had walked casually into her life and her heart.

‘Well, aren’t they?’ she said wryly now, groaningly dismissing her own ridiculous vulnerabilities.

There was a moment’s silence and then her great-aunt admitted with obvious difficulty, ‘Perhaps they are a little high-spirited, but at their age…’

‘They’re out of control,’ Rebecca interrupted crisply, ‘and I suspect that one of the reasons Rory has dumped them on Frazer is that he hopes that Frazer will apply some of that famous discipline of his on them. What they really need is to go to a good school where their energies and high spirits will be channelled properly.’

‘Exactly!’Maud pounced eagerly. ‘That’s just why I’m ringing you…with your teaching experience.’Much, much too late Rebecca saw the trap closing fast around her. ‘Of course, if your dear mother were here…However, I remember how much you enjoyed staying at Aysgarth as a child…all those long summer holidays…’

Rebecca silently and grimly acknowledged the application of a generous amount of emotional pressure to her aunt’s argument. Without actually putting it into so many words, her aunt was implying that it was her duty to drop everything and go haring off to Cumbria in order to take charge of Rory’s twins…that she owed it to the family to do so.

A dozen good reasons why she ought to refuse came readily and easily to mind; not the least of them the fact that she had already made tentative plans to spend at least part of her summer break touring Greece with some friends, but even as the words formed she found herself being relentlessly and determinedly dragged into her great-aunt’s carefully woven net.

She made one last bid for freedom, saying desperately, ‘Aunt Maud, you know that Frazer won’t like it!’

There was a telling silence and then her aunt’s voice, vague and faintly ominously tired, saying plaintively, ‘Oh, dear…but, Rebecca, that was all so long ago. I’m sure Frazer has forgotten all about it. He never was one to hold a grudge…such a silly quarrel anyway.’

Silly or not, it had been important enough to keep her away from Aysgarth for the eight years, and to keep Frazer from inviting her there.

They had met twice in all that time; once briefly at the twins’ christening…an appearance which pride alone had demanded she put in when, as she remembered all too well, Frazer had treated her with grim and very determined silence, as though she had physically ceased to exist.