Breaking Away. 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.
Breaking Away
Penny Jordan
MILLS & BOON
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CHAPTER ONE
HARRIET grimaced to herself as she realised she was not going to make it to the village before dark.
It was her own fault; she had been later leaving London than she had planned, and then she had made that motorway stop midafternoon. Already it was dusk, and it would be a good half-hour yet before she reached the village and her new home.
Louise had told her she thought she was mad when she had announced her plans.
‘Leave London for a small remote village lost in the Scottish Borders?’ She had shuddered, even at the end of the telephone, but then she and her sister had never had similar tastes.
Thinking of her sister made Harriet feel uncomfortable and anxious, a legacy from those early years after their parents’ deaths when she had first started to shoulder the burden of her sister’s irresponsibility.
There were four years between them, and it had surely only been natural that when their parents died she should have immediately abandoned her own plans for teaching abroad, and instead taken a job in London, so that she could take care of her younger sister and provide a home base for her.
She had been twenty-two then and Louise eighteen. Louise had always been rebellious and self-willed, and when, after a few months, Harriet used her own half of their shared inheritance from their parents’ estate to buy a small house, albeit in a then unfashionable area of London, so that she could provide a home for her sister, Louise had announced that she was going to use part of her own inheritance to pay for an expensive modelling course.
Louise was a beautiful girl—Harriet had not been able to deny that—but she had still tried to dissuade her sister, knowing full well that Louise was attracted to modelling because she thought it a glamorous life. Privately Harriet had believed Louise lacked the application and dedication necessary for success in such a very competitive world.
Louise had refused to listen to her. She had flown into a temper and run out of the house, and despite all her attempts to find her Harriet had neither seen nor heard from her for six months. Six months of incredible anxiety and concern, coloured by guilt that she had not handled matters better.
And then, just as she was beginning to pick up the pieces of her own life—just beginning to settle down and find her way in the very large and busy comprehensive where she was teaching English, just beginning to make one or two friends, and to accept dates from a fellow teacher, Paul Thorby—totally out of the blue Louise had returned to announce that she had been living in Italy, modelling there.
There was not a word of contrition for the concern she had caused, or for the anxiety and anguish she had put her sister through; all she could talk about was herself and her own plans, but Harriet was too relieved to chastise her.
She was getting married, she told Harriet, to a wealthy Italian she had met in Turin, adding airily and thoughtlessly that the only real reason she was back in London was to buy her wedding dress.
When Harriet learned that Louise had only known Guido for six weeks, she pleaded with her to wait a little longer, but Louise, as always, refused to listen.
They were married in Turin, two months after they had met, and, while Harriet quite liked her new brother-in-law, she was very uneasy about her sister’s ability to adapt to living with her in-laws and the rest of Guido’s large family.
Paul Thorby reminded her that Louise was an adult and perfectly capable of making her own decisions. He was a nice man, but pedantic, and inclined to be petulant if he didn’t have her full attention. He was an only child, and when he took Harriet home to meet his mother her heart sank as she recognised that she and Sarah Thorby were never likely to get on well.
She was then just twenty-four years old and aware of a vague feeling of dissatisfaction with her life: what had happened to all her bright dreams of travelling or exploring a little of the world, before settling down to her career?
Her parents’ deaths had brought a halt to those plans but there was no reason why she shouldn’t fulfil them now. Louise was married. She had no one to account to but herself. Perhaps at the end of the school year…
Six months later she was just nerving herself to tell Paul that their relationship was by no means as permanent as he seemed to think, and to explain to him her dreams of being able to travel, when without warning Louise suddenly returned home, announcing that her marriage was over and that she was divorcing Guido.
Dismayed,