A Treacherous Seduction. PENNY JORDAN

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      “Why is it you’re so determined to suspect my motives?” Alex asked.

      “You’re a man,” Beth told him acidly, “and my experience of men is that…” She looked away from him. Something about the tight white line around Alex’s mouth was hurting her. Without knowing how it had happened she had strayed onto some very treacherous and uncertain ground indeed.

      “So, I’m to be condemned without a hearing, is that it? Who was he, Beth?” he asked her grimly. “A friend? A lover?”

      “Actually he was neither,” she told him. Frantically she got up, but she had taken only a few steps before he caught up with her and swung her around to face him.

      Beneath her fingertips Beth could feel the fabric of his shirt, soft and warm, but the body that lay beneath it felt deliciously firm…hard, masculine, an unfamiliar and even forbidden territory that her fingers were suddenly dangerously eager to explore.

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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 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.

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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 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.

      A Treacherous Seduction

      Penny Jordan

       www.millsandboon.co.uk

      In memory of Dagmar Digrinová

       whose enthusiasm and love for her country inspired this book.

      CHAPTER ONE

      BETH gave an involuntary gasp of horrified disbelief as she stared white-faced at the contents of the crate she had just opened.

      ‘Oh, no! No!’ she protested in despair as she picked up the wine glass she had just removed from its packaging, one of a suite of matching stemware she had ordered on her buying trip to Prague.

      Beth closed her eyes; her face had gone deathly pale and she felt rather sick.

      She had invested so much in this Czech order, and not just in terms of money.

      Her fingers trembling, she opened another box, biting her bottom lip hard as the decorative water jug she had in her hand confirmed all her growing anxiety.

      Three hours later, with the storeroom at the back of the small shop she ran in partnership with her best friend Kelly Frobisher strewn with packages and stemware, all Beth’s worst fears were realised.

      These…these abominations against good taste and style were most certainly not the deliciously pretty reproduction antique items she had ordered with such excitement and pleasure all those months ago in the Czech Republic. No way. This order, the order she had received but most certainly never placed, might equate in terms of numbers and suites to what she had bought, but in every other way it was horrendous, horrible, a parody of the beautiful, elegant, covetable top-quality stemware she had seen and paid for.

      No, there was no way she would ever have ordered anything like this, and no way could she ever sell it either. Her customers were very discriminating, and Beth’s stomach churned as she recalled how enthusiastically and confidently she had titillated their interest by describing her order to them and promising them that it would turn their Christmas dinner tables into wonderful facsimiles of a bygone age, an age of Venetian baroque, Byzantine beauty.

      Sickly she stared at the glass she was holding, a glass she remembered as being a richly gorgeous Christmassy cranberry-red with a depth of colour one could almost eat.

      Was it really for this that she had put the small shop, her reputation and her personal finances into jeopardy? Was it for this that she had telephoned her bank manager from Prague to persuade him to extend her credit facilities? No, of course it wasn’t. The glassware she had been shown had been nothing like this. Nothing at all!

      Feverishly she examined another piece, and then another, hoping against hope that what she had already seen had simply been a slight mistake. But there was no mistake. Everything she unpacked possessed the same hallmarks of poor workmanship, inferior glass and crude colouring. The blue she remembered as being the same deep, wonderful colour as a Renaissance painter’s Madonna’s robes, as having the same depth when held up to the light as the most beautiful of antique stained-glass windows, the green she recalled as possessing the depth and fire of a high-quality emerald, and the gold which had had gilding as subtle as anything to come out of an expert gilder’s workshop were, in reality, like comparing the colours in a child’s paintbox to those used by a true artist.

      There had to have been a mistake. Beth stood up. She would have to ring the suppliers and advise them of their error.

      Her brain went into frantic overdrive as she tried to grapple with the enormity of the problem now confronting her. After being delayed well beyond its original delivery date, the order had just barely arrived in time for their Christmas market.

      In fact, she had planned this very afternoon to clear the shelves of their current stock and restock them with the Czech stemware.

      What on earth was she going to do?

      Normally this would have been a problem she would immediately have shared with her partner, Kelly, but these were not normal circumstances. For one thing, she had been in Prague on her own when she had taken the initiative to order the stemware. For a second, Kelly was quite rightly far more preoccupied with her new husband and the life they were establishing together than she was with the shop at the moment, and they had mutually agreed that for the time being Kelly would take a back seat in the business they had started up together in the small town of Rye-on-Averton, where the girls had originally been encouraged to come by Beth’s godmother, Anna Trewayne.

      And for a third…

      Beth