Research Into Marriage. Penny Jordan

       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.

      Research into Marriage

      Penny Jordan

       www.millsandboon.co.uk

      MILLS & BOON

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      CHAPTER ONE

      JESSICA GRIMACED with exasperation as her phone rang, disturbing her train of thought. This was the fifth time it had rung this morning. How on earth was she going to get even the research done for this new book, with all these interruptions?

      As she reached for the receiver she remembered that her sister had told her she ought to employ a secretary: with two definitive books in her particular field published already she was regularly in demand to speak at seminars and universities. Initially she had quite enjoyed these opportunities to lecture on her work, but now she was finding she was having to cut down on these activities. There was only three months to go before the draft of her third book was due at her publishers and as yet she was only half way there.

      Rather abruptly she spoke into the receiver, her frown deepening as she heard her sister’s anxious voice on the other end of the line.

      ‘Jess … please … you’ve got to help me … I just can’t cope any longer. David’s behaving so oddly. I’m sure there’s someone else …. He’s so … so indifferent towards me …’

      The mixture of pity and irritation churning inside her was not an unfamiliar one. Jessica had never wanted her elder sister to marry David Chalmers; right from the start she had recognised him as a weak, vain man who would soon grow tired of her sister’s open adoration and start to stray.

      But what she had not bargained for, was that David would want to stray in her direction! Listening to her sister’s outpourings with one ear, she started to doodle absently on the pad in front of her, her frown deepening when she realised that what she had drawn was a caricature of her brother-in-law’s boyishly handsome features. Angrily she stroked through the sketch. The desire that David insisted he had for her was not something she returned. On the contrary she loathed the man; found him vain and shallow to the point where her irritation often threatened to boil over, but so far she had always managed to keep her temper under control, more for her sister’s sake than her own. Andrea had fallen head over ears in love with David during her university days when she had been one of his students. Delicate, blonde and rather fragile as Andrea had been in those days it was easy for Jessica to see why her sister had appealed to David, especially when one took into account the rather substantial amount of money both she and Andrea had inherited from their father on his death. Oh yes, David had always had a healthy respect for money and for all the comfort it could provide.

      It was Andrea who had bought the large five-bedroomed house they lived in, on the better side of town; and it was Andrea’s investments that provided the money for the new BMW every two years, and private school for their son William. But the most damnable thing of all, at least as far as Jessica was concerned, was that when it came to revealing to her sister her husband’s inadequacies, her hands were tied.

      From the moment her first book had started to be acclaimed a success David had been a nuisance. At first she had found his over-attentiveness in public, his constant claims to being what he termed ‘her only real male relative’, and his equally unacceptable physical overtures towards her whenever they met, more of an irritation than a threat.

      She had presumed that Andrea, having gone ahead and married the man, was well aware of her husband’s weaknesses; and where better for a man with David’s taste for a succession of adoring, nubile young women in his life to be employed than at a university as a lecturer?

      But as Jessica had discovered over Christmas, her sister seemed to have a facility for blinding herself to her husband’s true nature.

      When she had come upon Jessica struggling in David’s arms, in the study, where she had gone to borrow some books, Andrea had immediately leapt to the conclusion that Jessica had been the one doing the inviting. For weeks afterwards there had been a coolness between the sisters, which Jessica suspected had affected her more than it did Andrea. Although Andrea was the elder, in many ways it had always been she, Jessica, who had been the stronger of the pair for all the three years’ difference in their ages.

      It had been Andrea who almost collapsed following the death of their father from a heart-attack, her grief driving her to the edge of a nervous breakdown, even though neither of them had seen him since his divorce from their mother ten years previously.

      Jessica had been stunned to discover that they had been included in their father’s will along with the two children from his second marriage. Following the break-up of their parents’ marriage her father had emigrated to Australia, where he had done very well for himself financially.