The Perfect Sinner. PENNY JORDAN
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She knew that Max had been badly injured; she knew he was close to death
But somehow, Maddy simply could not make her brain accept the fact that she might never see him again, that he might never walk arrogantly and irritably through the front door of Queensmead, bringing with him that highly charged atmosphere that always seemed to be so much a part of him.
She closed her eyes. Max was far too alive to be dying. Her throat suddenly closed and her body started to tremble.
“Oh, God, please let him live,” Maddy prayed. Max wouldn’t want to die. She tried to picture him, her husband, lying white and still in his hospital bed, but she couldn’t. All she could visualize was the way he had looked the first time they had gone to bed together, when she had woken up to watch him with the eyes and the emotions of a woman deeply and bemusedly in love.
The smell of him on her skin, the taste of him on her mouth—these were sensations she would remember forever.
As she raised her cup to her lips, Maddy suddenly realized that her face was wet with tears.
Penny Jordan’s novels “… touch every emotion.” —Romantic Times
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.
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 Sinner
Penny Jordan
Table of Contents
The Crightons
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14
Max Crighton, thirty years old, married, successful, sexy and the father of two healthy, energetic play school age children, and right now thoroughly disenchanted and bored with his lot, surveyed the other occupants of the ballroom of Chester’s Grosvenor Hotel—presently the scene of his sister’s wedding reception—with cynical contempt.
Louise, the bride and the most dominant of his two younger twin sisters, was laughing up into the handsome face of her new husband, Gareth Simmonds, while various members of the collective Crighton and Simmonds clans looked on in what to Max was grotesquely irritating sentimentality. Louise’s twin sister Katie stood to one side of the bride, and slightly in her shadow.
Twins!
Twins ran through the genealogical history of the Crighton family. His own father was the younger one of one pair and his grandfather, Ben Crighton, the lone survivor of another.
Twins!
Max was eternally grateful to his parents for the fact that his life had not been overshadowed; that he had not been overshadowed by another half, another self, threatening his position of sole supremacy, and it was about the only thing he was grateful to them for.
As he glanced around the large room, Max was coolly amused to observe the way so many of his relatives failed to meet his gaze. They didn’t like him very much, but he didn’t care. Why should he? Having people like him had never been one of Max’s ambitions.
The brand new Bentley Turbo convertible car he was currently driving, his position as a partner in one of London’s most prestigious sets of legal chambers; they hadn’t been acquired because people liked him. To be one of London’s foremost barristers had been Max’s driving goal in life, ever since he had been old enough to learn from his grandfather just what the word barrister meant.
Max’s uncle David, his father’s twin brother, had once been destined for that same golden future, but Uncle David had failed to make it. There had been a time, too, when Max had feared that he also might fail, when despite all the promises he had made himself, all the promises he had made to his grandfather, he might, through no fault of his own, have the prize he so desperately wanted snatched from him at the last minute. But he had found a way to turn the situation to his own advantage, to show those who had tried to bring him down just how foolish they had been.
He glanced across the room to where his wife, Madeleine, was sitting with his mother and his grandfather’s sister, his great aunt Ruth.