Without Trust. PENNY JORDAN
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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.
Without Trust
Penny Jordan
CHAPTER ONE
‘IT SHOULDN’T be long now.’ Did he realise how unreassuring he sounded? Lark wondered as she listened to the hesitant, slightly tense voice of her solicitor’s clerk. He probably wasn’t much older than she was herself, a young trainee whose work for a solicitor comprised, in the main, Legal Aid cases, which had probably never brought him into contact with a case of the notoriety and severity of this one. No wonder he was looking at her as though he half expected her to bare her teeth and then sink them into him. That was what predators did, wasn’t it?
Predators! She shuddered and wondered if she would ever fully be able to put behind her the events of the last ten months. She would never be able to forget them, that was for sure. The newspapers had had a field day with the story, giving it intense coverage, and why not? It was the sort of sordid tale that was almost guaranteed to sell newspapers.
Would this affect her chances? Her solicitor had not been able to reassure her that it would not, and perhaps, after all, that was what she deserved for being trusting and naïve. It amazed her that she still had the power to feel such indignation after the tremendous battering her self-confidence had received; and it had all started so innocently. But who was going to believe that now? The jury waiting outside to judge her? The ‘other side’ had engaged one of the country’s best-known prosecuting counsels. She herself had never met him, of course, but she had heard enough from her own solicitor to fear him. If he could see to it that the jury condemned her, he would. After all, that was his job.
That did not stop her feeling an almost irrational fear and hatred of him, though. Irrational because the person she really ought to hate was Gary, but somehow she couldn’t do that. Perhaps it was the memory of the childhood years they had shared that stopped her from doing so, or perhaps it was the blood bond between them. She had no idea. She only knew that all her fear, all her hatred, all her anxiety, was focused on the inquisition she knew was to come; an inquisition that would be conducted by James Wolfe himself. She couldn’t help shivering at the thought, her face pale and strained as she instinctively dipped her head forward in a defensive gesture so that it was shadowed by the curtain of her hair.
Only the previous week, her solicitor had begged her to give him the names of at least two character witnesses, who would strengthen their position, but how could she? Her aunt and uncle had refused to have anything to do with her. As far as they were concerned, she had ceased to exist, and in a way who could blame them? Her lips compressed and her companion, watching out of the corner of his eye, wondered if he dared tell her that her very obvious anger and resentment could only weigh against her.
Perhaps if she had looked different, pale and blonde maybe, instead of well tanned, her dark red hair curling riotously around her vivid face … Lark would have told him that her tan came from helping out on the allotments alongside the railway lines. The work was therapeutic and helped to pass the time. Perhaps she ought to have tried to get a proper job instead, but how could she? She had no references, nothing. Only the odd sound penetrated through the thick doors shutting her off from whatever was going on inside the court room.
Even though she had been expecting it, had been tensely waiting for it in fact, when the door eventually opened and her name was called, it made her jump.
The walk to the witness box was a long one. Lark was burningly conscious of other people’s curiosity. She refused to look anywhere other than at a spot somewhere above the judge’s head. Because of the amount of money involved, this was a High Court action. The sight of so many gowned and bewigged officials was intensely intimidating.
Even so, she lifted her chin a little higher—a tall, slender girl whose face held the promise of mature beauty, but which at the moment was marred by tension and pride.
‘Just look at her,’ she heard someone whisper behind her, ‘nose up in the air. You wouldn’t think she’d be that brazen, would you? Not after what she’s done.’
As she stepped into the witness box, Lark froze, her glance clashing with one of the bewigged lawyers. She had expected him to withdraw from the challenge under the hard stare of her dismissive eyes, something she had perfected over the long, hauntingly unhappy months, but instead she was the one to back down, to look away, a dark cloud of colour sweeping her skin as she did so.
He was tall, with dark hair showing under his wig, his skin almost as tanned as her own. His eyes were grey, a cool, unreadable grey that suggested that they knew a great many secrets. Who was he? Because she was so engrossed in him, she missed a few words the judge said, and therefore it was a shock to realise that he was coming towards her, although even then she didn’t realise the truth until he addressed her in a cool, well-modulated voice, his words telling her exactly who he was.
James Wolfe, the prosecuting counsel, whom her solicitor had told her had been hired at an enormous fee by Crichton International to make sure she was seen to be punished for her crime. Counsel for the prosecution—counsel—she knew exactly what that meant now, just exactly how far up the legal ladder that title indicated this man was. Yet he couldn’t be much over thirty—thirty-two or -three at the very most.
Her own counsel was much older, a dry, unsympathetic man, who had listened to her story as though he had found it boring and unbelievable. She remembered how frightened she had been then, realising for the first time just how alone she was, just how little anyone really cared. Certainly not enough to believe her, to understand.
The