Passionate Protection. PENNY JORDAN

       www.millsandboon.co.uk

      CHAPTER ONE

      ‘HONESTLY, JESS, I don’t know what that family of yours would do without you,’ Colin Weaver told his assistant with a wry smile. ‘Well, what is it this time? Has your aunt locked herself out again, or your uncle forgotten to collect his new cheque book?’

      ‘Neither,’ Jessica Forbes told him, hiding her own smile. It was true that her aunt and uncle did tend to ring her at work for assistance every time there was a family crisis, but they weren’t really used to the hectic pace of the modern-day commercial world—Uncle Frank, for instance, still lived in a pre-war daydream fostered by the leisurely pace of life in the small market town legal practice he had inherited from his father, and Aunt Alice wasn’t much better; nervous, dithery, she was given to complaining in bewilderment that life had changed so much, she barely recognised it anymore, and as for Isabel! Jessica sighed; the problems dumped on her by her eighteen-year-old cousin made those of her aunt and uncle seem mere nothings.

      ‘Okay, okay, I’m sorry for criticising your beloved family,’ Colin apologised with a wry smile. ‘I suppose I’m just jealous really,’ he admitted plaintively. ‘Would you drop everything and come running for me if I locked myself out?’

      ‘It wouldn’t do any good if I did,’ Jessica pointed out with a grin. ‘You live in a penthouse apartment, my aunt and uncle live in a rambling old vicarage with a pantry window that simply won’t close, but which neither of them can fit through, whereas yours truly …’

      ‘Umm, I’m beginning to get the point,’ Colin agreed, glancing appreciatively over her slender five-foot-eight frame, ‘but that doesn’t stop me from wishing they would stop depriving me of your valuable assistance.’

      ‘I have to go this time—it’s Isabel.’ Jessica frowned, chewing the soft fullness of her bottom lip, dark eyebrows drawn together in a worried frown. The problem was that her aunt and uncle had been slipping gently into middle age when Isabel had arrived unexpectedly on the scene and neither of them had ever totally recovered from the shock.

      ‘Oh, Isabel,’ Colin said grimly. ‘That girl’s lethal,’ he added with a grimace. ‘I remember when you brought her here …’

      ‘Here’ was his exclusive London salon where he showed the alluring ranges of separates that bore his name. Jessica had worked for him ever since she left art school. She loved her job as his assistant, and if he needed mollycoddling occasionally, he more than made up for his lapses when they were over. In Jessica’s view there was no one to match him in the design of separates. His secret, he had told her on more than one occasion, lay as much in the careful choice of fabric as the style the materials were eventually made up in. ‘Couture Classics’ were how Vogue described them, and Jessica reckoned there could be few wealthy women in Britain aspiring to the well-dressed lists who didn’t have something of his in their wardrobe. For some clients he designed individual ranges, but it was, as Jessica knew, his great dream to take his designs and elegance into the high streets at prices every woman could afford.

      ‘She is a little immature,’ Jessica agreed, repressing a sigh at the thought of her cousin—pretty, headstrong Isabel, who reminded her of a frisky lamb, throwing herself headlong into whatever came her way on a momentary whim.

      ‘She’s exactly two years younger than you were when you first came to work for me,’ Colin reminded her a little grimly. ‘You all keep that girl wrapped up in too much cotton wool, Jess, you spoil her, and she laps it up. What were you doing at eighteen? I bet you weren’t still living at home, financed by Mummy and Daddy?’

      ‘No,’ Jessica agreed sombrely. Her parents had died three months before her eighteenth birthday. They had been killed in a car crash on their way home from visiting friends. She could still remember Uncle Frank trying to break the news; Aunt Alice’s white face. They had offered her a home, of course, but by then she had her career planned, first art school and then, she hoped, a job in fashion design, and so instead she had used some of the money left to her by her parents and had bought herself a small flat in London, but she had stayed in close contact with her aunt and uncle; after all, they were the only family she had left, and as she grew older the ties between them had strengthened. Family came to mean a lot when there was so little of it left.

      Isabel had been a little girl of ten at the time of the accident, too young to remember very much about Jessica’s parents, and somehow Jessica had found that as the years went by she was called upon to mediate between impatient youth and dismayed late middle age in the storms that swept the household as Isabel grew into her teens, Isabel urging her to support her on the one hand, while her parents were pleading with Jessica to ‘make Isabel realise’ on the other.

      The plan was that Isabel would go on to university after leaving school, but in the sixth form she had suddenly decided that she was tired of studying, that she didn’t want a career at all, and so at eighteen she was working in her father’s office, and complaining bitterly to Jessica about it whenever they met.

      ‘I wanted to talk to you about our visit to Spain as well,’ Colin said sulkily, interrupting her train of thought. Jessica gave him a teasing smile. At forty-eight he could sometimes display all the very worst characteristics of a little boy in the middle of a tantrum, and he was not above doing so to make her feel guilty or get her attention when he felt the need arise. Jessica excused him on the grounds that he was a first-rate designer and an excellent employer, flexible and with