Unwanted Wedding. PENNY JORDAN

      “Come on, Rosy, don’t start playing games. I’m not in the mood for it.”

      The verbal warning was accompanied by a forbidding, hooded look that reminded her of former peccadilloes and his merciless punishment of them.

      She swallowed nervously. It was too late to back out now.

      Screwing up her courage, she took a deep breath.

      “Guard, I want you to marry me….”

       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.

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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.

      Unwanted Wedding

      Penny Jordan

       www.millsandboon.co.uk

      CHAPTER ONE

      ‘GUARD, will you marry me?’

      Rosy paced the floor of her bedroom, a fixed, strained expression on her face, her hands gripped into two small fists at her side and her normally clear, guileless dark blue eyes shadowed as she repeated the same four words over and over again under her breath. Even now she still wasn’t sure she was actually going to be able to say them out loud.

      ‘Will you marry me? Will you marry me? Will you marry me? Will you marry me?’ There, she had said it and, even if the words hadn’t sounded quite as firm and assured as she would have liked, at least they had been spoken. She was over the first hurdle, she told herself bravely, and if she could manage that one, then she could surely manage the other.

      She swallowed hard and looked at the telephone beside her bed. There was no point in shilly-shallying; she might as well get the whole thing over and done with.

      But not up here. Not sitting here on her bed in the privacy of her bedroom while she…

      Quickly, she averted her eyes from the pretty girlishness of her flower-sprigged bedcover, virginal white with a scattering of flower posies. She had been fourteen the year she had chosen it; she was almost twenty-two now.

      Twenty-two, but as naïve and unworldly as a girl still—or so she had been told.

      Her throat closed nervously. She didn’t need to remind herself exactly who it was who had said those words to her.

      Quickly, she opened her bedroom door and hurried downstairs. She would use the phone in the room which had been her father’s study and, before that, her grandfather’s. To say those words in that room would be appropriate somehow, would lend them weight and dignity.

      She picked up the receiver and punched in the numbers jerkily, her body tensing as she heard the ringing tone.

      ‘Guard Jamieson, please,’ she told the girl on the other end of the line. ‘It’s Rosy Wyndham.’

      As she waited to be connected to Guard she nibbled nervously at her bottom lip—a childhood habit she had thought she had outgrown.

      ‘Only children do that,’ Guard had warned her the year she was eighteen. ‘Women…’

      He had paused then and looked at her mockingly, causing her to ask him unthinkingly, ‘Women do what?’

      ‘Don’t you really know?’ he had quizzed her mockingly. ‘Women, my dear, innocent Rosy, only carry these kind of scars—’he had leaned forward then and slowly run the tip of his finger along her swollen bottom lip, with its two small tooth indentations, pausing to touch them in such a way that the sharp frisson of sensation that had run through her had actually become an open physical convulsion of her whole body ‘—when they’ve been left there by a lover… A very ardent lover…’

      Of course he had laughed at the scorching colour that had stained her skin. Guard was like that. In the old days he would have been a freebooter, a pirate—a man who cared for no one and made his own laws, his own rules, so her grandfather had always claimed. Her grandfather, although he would never admit it, had always had something of a soft spot for Guard, Rosy suspected.

      ‘Rosy, what is it? What’s wrong?’

      The sound of his voice reverberating roughly in her ear caused her to tighten her grip on the receiver as her body rebelled against the knowledge of how unsettling she still sometimes found him—even though, with maturity, she had learned to ignore the taunting, loaded comments with which he still sometimes liked to torment her.

      He wasn’t like that with other women; with other women he was all sensual charm and warmth, but then, of course, he didn’t see her as a woman, only as—

      ‘Rosy are you still there?’

      The irritation in his voice jerked her back to reality.

      She took a deep breath. ‘Yes, I’m still here, Guard… Guard, there’s something I want to ask you. I…’

      ‘I can’t talk now, Rosy. I’ve got an important call waiting. Look, I’ll call round tonight and we can discuss whatever it is then.’

      ‘No.’ Rosy started to panic. What she had to ask him was something it would be far easier for her to say at a safe distance; she thought of asking him to marry her, of proposing to him face to face— She gave a small, worried gulp, but Guard had already replaced the receiver and it was too late for her to tell him now that she didn’t want to see him.

      As she replaced her own receiver she stared sadly around the room.

      Four hundred years of history were encapsulated in this room, this house. It had stood here since Elizabeth I had bestowed the land on Piers Wyndham, a gift, so the official story ran, for courtly services; a gift, so the unofficial one went, for something far more