Taken Over. 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.
Taken Over
Penny Jordan
MILLS & BOON
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CHAPTER ONE
‘CASSIETRONIC Enterprises.’ As always Cassie couldn’t quite prevent the excited leap of her heart as she glanced at the name of her company, newly engraved on the brass name plate just inside the prestige office block she had moved in to.
Had anyone told her three years ago that this was where her passion for computer games would lead her she would have scoffed at them. Then, nineteen years old, orphaned and very, very lonely she had entered the competition which had started her on her present road to success, in a mood of lonely defiance.
She hadn’t won that competition; she had come second, but looking back she was glad to be the loser because all the winner had to show for his skill was a job with Howard Electronics whilst she … She glanced again at the nameplate, her heart swelling with pride. If it hadn’t been for that chance meeting with David Bennett as she was collecting her prize … but why dwell on might-have-beens today of all days. She had met David, and he with his accountancy and financial skill had encouraged her to start her own business. This was her third year in business and she had more than rewarded David’s faith in her. Only last week a prestigious financial paper had run an article on Cassietronics, praising her flair for designing innovative new games and adaptations. Unwittingly Cassie frowned. All the publicity she had been receiving lately had had its adverse side too. She glanced down at her left hand and smiled as she caught the cold flash of her diamond engagement ring. One more month and Cassietronic would be safely installed under the umbrella of Peter’s father’s larger company, and safe from any further takeover approaches by Howard Electronics.
As she thought about Howard Electronics she frowned again, remembering how exasperated David had been by her point blank refusal to even discuss their terms. ‘But Cassie, they’re the best in the field,’ he had argued, ‘way, way ahead of Pentaton.’
In her heart of hearts Cassie knew that he was right. Joel Howard the brains behind Howard Electronics had a world wide reputation as a computer genius, whereas Peter, skilled though he was, was merely a good technician. Cassie knew that David couldn’t understand her preference for Pentatons; ‘a second class company, fast losing ground’ was how he had scathingly described them, but as Peter had enthusiastically pointed out, with her skill they could soon rebuild and expand their reputation; as his wife and the originator of Cassietronics she would be given a free hand with the future of her own company, and she would also be protected from any more takeover bids such as the one she had just been forced to endure from Joel Howard.
She knew that David would find it difficult to understand her antipathy towards Joel Howard. In David’s eyes Howard Electronics was everything Cassie could wish for—a safe harbour for her small company; a chance to expand and extend her range with the security of Howard Electronics’ financial backing behind her.
But nothing comes from nothing, Cassie had learned that lesson young, from an embittered father who had spent the best years of his life, standing helplessly by while an incompetent brother-in-law ran down, and eventually destroyed the company his father had handed down to him as his son, rather than into the hands of his far more competent but not related by blood, son-in-law. Cassie had never known if her father had married her mother purely because he wanted the company—she hoped not—but what she did know was that by the time she was ten years old her father, the brilliant maths lecturer, who had married one of his students and given up a promising career in order to help run his father-in-law’s company, had been reduced to the status of a cipher within that company, his pride destroyed; embittered by the wasteland that his life had become.
The year Cassie was ten the company had gone bankrupt; her mother had had a nervous breakdown and her father had had to return to teaching, but not this time as a respected university lecturer with all the privileges and power that entailed. The only post he had been able to obtain had been at the same huge comprehensive school Cassie attended and she had watched the disillusionment of what he had become slowly destroy her father.
Her mother had died when she was thirteen, slowly fading away until one day she simply released her hold on life, and with her father as her sole parent Cassie had learned from him the bitter lessons of his life. In his daughter he had discovered the same aptitude for maths that he had, and this skill had been honed and polished until Cassie far outstripped her fellow pupils. This had carried its own penance. It wasn’t ‘done’ for a girl to be even moderately good at maths, never mind brilliant enough to outstrip even the more senior pupils, and torn between pleasing her father and gaining the acceptance of her peers Cassie had gradually taught herself to accept that