Lover By Deception. PENNY JORDAN

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      CHAPTER ONE

      PAIN, anger and guilt—right now, looking at his twenty-two-year-old half-brother, Ritchie, Ward felt them all.

      ‘Why on earth didn’t you come to me if you needed money?’ he demanded tersely.

      The sunlight through the narrow, almost monastic window of Ward’s study touched Ritchie’s hair, turning it to bright gold.

      Ward already knew that when Ritchie raised his head to look at him his blue eyes would be full of remorse.

      ‘You’ve already done so much, given me so much,’ Ritchie told him in the quiet, well-modulated voice that was so very much his own father’s, Ward’s stepfather’s.

      ‘I didn’t want to bother you, to ask you for any more, but this postgraduate year in America would just be so valuable,’ he told Ward earnestly, and then he was off, completely absorbed as his enthusiasm for his subject, his studies, overwhelmed his earlier guilt.

      As he listened to him Ward looked at him steadily, his eyes not blue like Ritchie’s and his stepfather’s, but instead a dark iron-grey, the same colour as those of the tough young apprentice who had fathered him forty-two years ago and who had then lost his life before he, Ward, was out of nappies. He’d been killed in an industrial accident which had had more to do with him being the victim of a greedy employer’s refusal to make sure that he was operating proper safety standards for his workforce than any genuine ‘accident.’ That had been in the days before such incidents were fully monitored, when any compensation for the loss of a life, a husband, a father, was at the discretion of the employer rather than a matter for the law.

      Ward’s mother had received nothing—less than nothing since; following her young husband’s death she had had to leave the company-owned terraced property they had lived in and she and her baby son had had to move to another part of the northern town where they lived to make their home with her own parents. Baby Ward had been left with his grandmother whilst his mother earned what little she could cleaning.

      It had been through her job cleaning the local school where Ward went that she had ultimately met her second husband, Ritchie’s father.

      She had spent a long time discussing with Ward her hopes and plans and the changes they would make to both their lives before she had accepted the proposal of the gentle English teacher who had fallen in love with her.

      Neither of them had expected that their marriage would result in the birth of their own child and Ward could well understand why both of them should have been so besotted with their unexpected and precious son.

      Ritchie was his father all over again. Gentle, mild-mannered, a scholar, unworldly and easily duped by others, not through any lack of intelligence but more because neither of them could conceive of the extent of other people’s greed and selfishness, since these were vices they simply did not possess.

      It had been thanks to his stepfather and his care, his love, his fatherliness, that Ward had been persuaded to stay on at school and then, later, to start out and found his own business.

      He was, as others were very fond of saying, very much a self-made man. A millionaire now, able to command whatever luxuries he wished since the communications business he had built up had been bought out by a large American corporation, but Ward preferred to live simply, almost monastically.

      A big lion of a man, with broad shoulders and the tough-hewn body and bone structure he had inherited from his own father and through him from generations of working men, gave him a physical appearance of commanding strength and presence. Other men feared him—and their women...

      His dark eyebrows snapped together angrily, causing his silently watching half-brother to wince inwardly and wish that he had not been so foolish.

      Only the other week Ward had had to make it sharply plain to the wife of a business colleague that despite her obvious sensuality and availability he was not interested in what she had to offer.

      Ward had grown up with a mother who was everything that a woman should be—tender, loving, gentle, loyal and trustworthy.

      It had come as an unpleasant awakening to discover how rare her type of woman actually was.

      His wife, the girl he had fallen in love with and married at twenty-two, had shown him that. She had left him before their marriage was a year old, declaring that she preferred a man who knew how to have fun, a man who had time and money to spend on her.

      By that time Ward had been as disillusioned by marriage as she, tired of coming home to an empty house, tired of having to search through empty cupboards to throw himself a meal together, but tired most of all of a woman who gave nothing to their relationship or to him but who took everything.

      Even so, it had given him very little pleasure five years later to have her feckless husband come begging him for a job.

      More out of disgust than anything else he had not just given him one but had made the couple a private, non-repayable ‘loan.’ He could still remember the avaricious look he had seen in his ex-wife’s eyes as she’d looked around the new house he had just moved into, assessing the worth of the property, of the man who could have been hers.

      Small wonder, perhaps, that she had had the gall to dare to come on to Ward behind her new husband’s back, claiming that she had loved him all along and that their divorce,