The Perfect Father. PENNY JORDAN

      

       Should she go to bed with Liam? Conceive his child?

      No, she couldn’t. It was just a mad thought conjured up by the loneliness of the night. Tears filled Samantha’s eyes. She so much wanted to be a mother.

      As she walked unsteadily toward his bedroom door, Samantha felt her breathing become fast and uneven. As she saw Liam’s sleeping form on the bed, a quick, hot tug of excitement pulled at her heart, accompanied by a sharp sense of the awesomeness of what she was contemplating.

      At her husky, slightly tremulous “Liam,” he woke up instantly, his body tensing.

      “Sam, what is it…? What do you want?”

      He had fed her the perfect line, Samantha recognized. All she needed now was the courage to take it…use it….

      “What I want, Liam, is you….” Then she placed her mouth very delicately over his.

      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 a 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 Crightons

      A Perfect Family

      The Perfect Seduction

      Perfect Marriage Material

      Figgy Pudding

      The Perfect Lover

      The Perfect Sinner

      The Perfect Father

      A Perfect Night

      Coming Home

      Starting Over

       The Perfect Father

       Penny Jordan

       www.millsandboon.co.uk

      CONTENTS

       Cover

       Excerpt

       About the Author

The Crightons

       Title Page

       CHAPTER ONE

       CHAPTER TWO

       CHAPTER THREE

       CHAPTER FOUR

       CHAPTER FIVE

       CHAPTER SIX

       CHAPTER SEVEN

       CHAPTER EIGHT

       CHAPTER NINE

       CHAPTER TEN

       Copyright

       CHAPTER ONE

       ‘T HAT was some game you played over the weekend, Sam. I certainly never expected to see the Corporation’s gold trophy go to a woman…’

      ‘Sam isn’t a woman, women are small and cute and cuddly, they stay at home and make babies…. Sam…even her name isn’t womanly…’

      Samantha Miller drew herself up to her full height—an inch over six feet—which was an impressive four inches above the man who had just so publicly and cruelly criticised her.

      ‘You know your trouble don’t you, Cliff,’ she drawled affably. ‘ You just don’t know a real woman when you see one. Seems to me that a man isn’t so very much of a man if the only kind of woman he can handle is the kind you’ve just described, and as for making babies…’ She paused for emphasis, well aware of the fact that she had the attention of their fellow employees who had happened to be in the large airy open-plan office with them, ‘I’m woman enough to have a baby any time I want one.’

      Only now was she revealing the true extent of her anger at the way Cliff had insulted her; her eyes flashing challenging sparks, her voice trembling a little with the force of her feelings.

      ‘ You have a baby…’ her antagonist jeered angrily before she could continue. ‘Who the hell would want to impregnate a woman like you? No way. Your only chance of having a child would be via some med student’s sperm and a syringe…’

      Enough of the people standing around broke into laughter for Samantha to recognise that no matter how publicly she might be accepted by her colleagues, an uncomfortable proportion of them seemed to share Cliff Marlin’s views.

      Faced with the same situation another woman might have burst into tears or lost her temper but not Sam. You learned young when you were as tall as she was that crying didn’t look cute, and besides…

      Looking down from the advantage of her extra inches Samantha bared her teeth in a totally false smile and gave a dismissive shrug.

      ‘You’re entitled to your opinion, Cliff, but gee, it’s a shame that you’re such a sore loser. Mind, if I played golf as badly as you do, I guess I might be a tad sore about it, too. And as for making babies… how many times did you miss that putt on the eighth…’

      Now it was Samantha’s gibe that earned a responsive titter of amusement from around her.

      Without giving Cliff the opportunity to retaliate she turned on her heel and walked quickly away, her head held high.

      What did it matter that she knew the moment she was out of sight and earshot that the others would be talking about her, gossiping about her, the six foot Amazon of a woman who, in all the time she had been with the Corporation, had never attended any of its social events with an escort; the only one of her admittedly relatively small group of female peers in what was essentially a very male-biased industry who had not, at one point or another, confided the details of her private life to the others.