The Italian Duke's Wife. Penny Jordan

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       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.

      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.

      The Italian Duke’s Wife

      Penny Jordan

       www.millsandboon.co.uk

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      CHAPTER ONE

      SHE was not going to do the girly thing and burst into tears, Jodie told herself, gritting her teeth. It might be growing dark; she might be feeling sick with that familiar stomach-churning fear that she had made a big mistake—and about more than just the direction she had taken in that last village she had passed through what seemed like for ever ago; tonight might be the night she and John should have been spending at their romantic honeymoon hotel—their first night as husband and wife…but she was not going to cry. Not now, and in fact not ever, ever again over any man. Not ever. Love was out of her life and out of her vocabulary and it was going to stay out.

      She winced as her small hire car lurched into a deep rut in the road—a road which was definitely climbing towards the mountains when it should have been dropping down towards the sea.

      Her cousin and his wife, her only close family since her parents’ death in a car accident when Jodie was nineteen, had tried to dissuade her from coming to Italy.

      ‘But everything’s paid for,’ she had reminded them. ‘And besides…’

      Besides, she wanted to be out of the country, and she wanted to stay out of it for the next few weeks during the build-up to John’s marriage to his new fiancée, Louise, who had taken Jodie’s place in his heart, in his life, and in his future.

      Not that she’d told her cousin David or Andrea, his wife, about that part of her decision as yet. She knew they would have tried to persuade her to stay at home. But when home was a very small Cotswold market town, where everyone knew you and knew that you had been dumped by your fiancé less than a month before your wedding because he had fallen in love with someone else, it was not somewhere anyone with any pride could possibly want to be. And Jodie had as much pride as the next woman, if not more. So much more that she longed to be able to prove to everyone, but most especially to John and Louise themselves, how little John’s treachery mattered to her. Of course the most effective way to do that would be to turn up at their wedding with another man—a man who was better-looking and richer than John, and who adored her. Oh, if only…

      In your dreams, she scoffed mentally at herself. There was no way that that scenario was likely to happen.

      ‘Jodie, you can’t possibly go to Italy on your own,’ David had protested, whilst he and Andrea had exchanged meaningful looks she hadn’t been supposed to see. It was probably just as well they were now in Australia on an extended visit to Andrea’s parents.

      ‘Why not?’ she had demanded with brittle emphasis. ‘After all, that’s the way I’m going to be spending the rest of my life.’

      ‘Jodie, we both understand how hurt and shocked you are,’ Andrea had added gently. ‘Don’t think that David and I don’t feel for you, but behaving like this isn’t going to help.’

      ‘It will help me,’ Jodie had answered stubbornly.

      It had been John’s idea that they spend their honeymoon exploring Italy’s beautiful Amalfi coast.

      Jodie winced as the hire car hit another pothole in the road, which was so badly maintained that it was becoming increasingly uncomfortable to drive.

      Her leg was aching badly, and she was beginning to regret not having chosen to spend her first night closer to Naples. Where on earth was she? Nowhere near where she was supposed to be, she suspected. The directions for the small village set back from the coast had been almost impossible to follow, detailing roads she had not been able to find on her tourist map. If John had been here with her none of this would have happened. But John was not with her, and he was never going to be with her again.

      She must not think of her now ex-fiancé, or the fact that he had fallen out of love with her and in love with someone else, or that he had been seeing that someone else behind her back, or that virtually everyone in her home village had apparently known about it apart from Jodie herself. Louise, so Jodie’s friends had now told her, had made it obvious that she wanted and intended to have John from the moment they had been introduced, following her parents’ move to the area. And Jodie, fool that she was, had been oblivious to all of this, simply thinking that Louise, as a newcomer, an outsider, was eager to make friends. Now she was the outsider, Jodie reflected bitterly. She should have realised how shallow John was when he had told her that he loved her ‘in spite of her leg’. She winced as the pain in it intensified.

      She was never going to make the kind of mistake she had made with John again. From now on her heart was going to be impervious to ‘love’—yes, even though that meant at twenty-six