You Owe Me

You Owe Me
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.Seeing Slater again would cause Chris pain. Natalie had always known how desperately in love with Slater Chris had been, and she'd arranged things so that Chris would have to return to England and face the man who'd rejected her. For as a final malevolent gesture she'd entrusted her daughter to Chris's care.It would be hard facing Slater again, knowing that he'd shared Natalie's bed and given her everything Chris had dreamed of – marriage and his child. Chris was torn between her response to a little girl's suffering and her fear of resurrecting her own foolish dreams.

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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

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published one hundred and eighty-seven novels

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About the Author

PENNY JORDAN is one of Mills & Boon’s most popular authors. Sadly, Penny died from cancer on 31st December 2011, aged sixtyfive. 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-bepublished authors. Her significant contribution to women’s fiction was recognised in 2011, when the Romantic Novelists’ Association presented Penny with a Lifetime Achievement Award.

You Owe Me

Penny Jordan

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

CHAPTER ONE

THE letter caught up with Chris in New York. She had been working there for a month—one of her longest spells in one place in nearly six months—modelling clothes for one of New York’s top designers and sandwiching between the shows photographic sessions under her five year contract with a large cosmetics house.

That was the trouble with getting to the top of the modelling profession, she thought wryly, as she let herself into the apartment she had “borrowed” from an American model, for the duration of her assignments in New York—the work came thick and fast, but there wasn’t enough time to do it all. She was twenty-six now; and she had promised herself when she took up modelling she would only stay in it four years. She had been twenty then. Grimacing faintly she bent automatically to retrieve the mail that had slipped from her fingers on to the floor. Her needs were not extravagant, but her aunt’s final illness had been extremely expensive financially. The illness from which her aunt had suffered had been progressive and terminal involving mental as well as physical destruction, and Chris was only thankful that during those final few years her aunt had retreated into a world of her own where the true nature of her own decline was concealed from her. Two months ago her aunt had died, and although now there was no reason for her to continue earning large sums of money, Chris admitted mentally that it was too late for her to change her career. She could model for possibly another four years if she was lucky, and during that time she should earn enough to keep her in comparative comfort for the rest of her life—if she was careful. But what was she going to do with the rest of that life? Seven years ago she thought she had known exactly what course her life would take. Marriage to Slater; children. The smile curving her mouth was totally humourless. So much for dreams. Reality was a far cry from her late teenage hopes.

The midsummer heat of New York had darkened her honey-blonde hair slightly with perspiration. Thank God for air conditioning she reflected as she dropped the mail on the small coffee table and headed for the shower. Being able to lease Kelly Reading’s apartment had been a welcome bonus on this assignment, she was tired of living out of suitcases; of moving from city to city, always the traveller. That was never how she had envisaged her life. It was strange really that she, the stay-at-home one, should have a career that made her travel so widely, whilst Natalie, her restless, will o’ the wisp cousin should have been the one to marry, to have a child.

Frowning Chris stripped the silk suit from her body, the firm curving lines of it too familiar to her to warrant undue attention. In all her years of modelling she had always refused topless and nude shots. And received a good deal of heat from her first agent for it, she remembered wryly. Things were different now. As one of the world’s top models she could pick and choose her assignments and Hedi, her agent, had clear instructions about what she would and would not accept.

As she stepped into the shower stall she swept her hair up into a loose knot. Long and honey-blonde, it was thick and resilient enough to adapt to the different styles she had to adopt. She showered quickly and then stepped out, wrapping her body in a towel before starting to remove her make-up. As always when she had been wearing it for several hours she itched to be free of it. A model girl who hated make-up. She laughed derisively, cleaning eyeshadow from the lid of one sea-green eye. Her beauty lay in her bone structure and her eyes, and was ageless.

Her looks had always been a source of contention between them when she and Natalie were young. Orphaned at five she had been brought up by her aunt and uncle alongside their only child, Natalie, who was two years younger than Chris. Tiny, dainty Natalie, who she had soon learned possessed a cruelly vindictive streak, which she used unmercifully to protect what she considered to be hers, and that had included her parents and all her friends. Chris had not found it easy to accept her unwanted role as “orphan”, and many times during those early days she had retreated to her bedroom to indulge in secret tears when Natalie had taunted her about her orphaned status. “You would have had to go in a home if you hadn’t come here,” had been one of Natalie’s favourite taunts, often with the threat tagged on of “…and if I don’t like you, you will still have to go there.”

Under that threat Chris had weakly, hating herself for her weakness, given in to many forms of blackmail, which ranged from the subtle never-expressed pressure from Natalie that she would always keep herself in the background, to open demands for “loans” from Chris’s pocket money.

Sighing Chris moisturised her skin. She could see now that Nat had just been insecure. There had been a bond between aunt and niece that had never truly existed between mother and daughter. Even in looks she had resembled her aunt, Chris acknowledged, and Natalie with the perception that most children possessed had sensed her mother’s leaning towards her sister’s child and had bitterly resented Chris for it.

Nat, on the other hand had always been her father’s favourite. Uncle Roger had adored his small, dark-haired daughter, “his little pixie fairy” as he had called her. His death in a road accident when Nat was fourteen had severely affected her. Funnily enough she herself had never shared Nat’s deep resentment of their relationship, and as she had grown older she had adopted a protective instinct towards her younger cousin, knowing without anything being said that she was entering a conspiracy with her aunt which involved a constant feeding of Nat’s ego; a never-ending soothing of her insecurities. As a child Nat had grown used to her father describing her as the “prettier” of the two cousins, and with her dark curls and smaller, frail frame she had possessed a pretty delicacy that Chris lacked. When, as a teenager, Chris had started to blossom Natalie had been bitterly resentful.

“Boys hate tall girls,” she had told Chris spitefully. And Chris could still remember the occasion when, one very hot summer, she had been sent for by the Headmistress, because Nat had told her teacher that her cousin bleached her hair, strictly against the rules of the school. In point of fact, its extreme fairness that summer had been the result of more sunshine than usual, and when pressed for an explanation as to why her younger cousin should try to get her into trouble deliberately, Chris had leapt immediately to Natalie’s defence. She could still remember her headmistress’s words on that occasion.

“Chris, my dear,” she had told her firmly, “your desire to protect Natalie is very natural and praiseworthy, but in the long run you would be helping her more if you allowed her to take responsibility for her actions. That’s the only way we learn to think carefully before we commit them.”

Would life have been any different if she had heeded that advice? Grimacing, Chris extracted fresh underwear from the drawer. It took two to commit treachery; Natalie alone could not be blamed for the destruction of all her bright—and foolish—dreams.

It was another half-an-hour before she discovered the letter. She had just mixed herself a cooling fruit drink and sat down, when she caught sight of it, protruding ominously from among a stack of mail, the solicitor’s name and address in one corner, the airmail sticker in the centre.

She had grown used to correspondence with Messrs Smith & Turner during the weeks following her aunt’s death. On her marriage Natalie had deliberately, and to Chris’s mind, quite heartlessly cut off all ties with her mother. “She always loved you best,” she had told Chris spitefully, when she tried to talk to her about it. “I never want to see her again.”

It had been a couple of years after that that Chris had actually noticed the oddness of her aunt’s behaviour and another harrowing seven months before her condition had been correctly diagnosed. The specialist, sympathetic and understanding had told Chris of an excellent nursing home which specialised in such cases, and where her aunt would receive every kindness and the very best of care.

The fees had been astronomical. Chris had written to Natalie, believing that she would want to make her peace with her mother in view of her failing health, but Natalie had never even replied, and it had been more than Chris could have endured to go down to Little Martin and talk to her. In order to pay the nursing home fees she had committed herself to a gruelling number of assignments, and for the last four years she had barely had time to take a breath.

Now it was over, and she presumed the letter from Smith & Turner related to the final details surrounding her aunt’s estate, if her few belongings and the house in Little Martin could be classed as that.

It had come as no surprise to Chris to discover that her aunt had left her the house. She had bought it after Uncle Roger’s death, selling the larger property and investing the difference. Chris had always loved the thatched cottage, despite its many inconveniences, but Nat had hated it. She had never forgave her mother for selling the larger property, and constantly complained about their drop in living standards. In anyone else Chris would have denounced her cousin’s behaviour as brutally selfish, but because of her childhood conditioning Chris was constantly finding mental excuses for her. Although there was one sin she could never forgive her…Idly sliding her nail under the sealed flap she extracted the sheets of paper inside.

Her heart thumped as she read the first line, barely taking in its message, her eyes racing back to the beginning and tracing the words once again. “…regret to inform you of the death of your cousin, Natalie James ne´e Bolton, and would inform you that…”

Without reading any further Chris lifted her eyes from the paper. Natalie dead! She couldn’t believe it. She was only twenty-four. What had happened?

She glanced at the date on the letter and her heart dropped sickeningly. Natalie had been dead for six weeks! Six weeks, during which she had travelled from Nassau to Rio, then on to Cannes and finally to New York.

She dropped the letter on the floor, filled with a mixture of nausea and guilt. How often during the last seven years had she wished Natalie out of existence? How often had she prayed that she might wake up and discover that what had happened was all just a nightmare? Only now could she admit to herself the frequency of such thoughts, generally after she had just had to point out to yet another male that being a model did not mean that she was also available as a bed mate. She had never wanted her present life; it had been thrust upon her in a manner of speaking; a means of salvaging her pride and her dignity, and also a means of…of what? Escaping her own pain?

No. Not entirely. Deep inside her had been the unacknowledged thought that by leaving somehow she was giving something to Natalie’s unborn child—Slater’s child. The child that should have been hers.

The doorbell rang and she slipped the intercom switch automatically, shocked out of her involvement with the past when she heard Danny’s familiar New York accent.

“Danny, I’m not ready yet,” she apologised. In point of fact she had lost what little desire she had possessed to go out with the brash New Yorker, who had forced his way into her life three weeks ago. Tall, fair, good looking, and well aware of his attractions Danny had been chasing her from the moment of her arrival, and was, Chris was certain, supremely confident that in the end he would catch her. She, however, had other ideas. Charming though Danny was he couldn’t touch the deep inner core she had learned to protect from the world. No man had touched that since Slater.

Ten minutes later she was down in the lobby with Danny, the poise she had learned over the years covering the innate inner turmoil.