A Perfect Family

‘Of course you can,’ he replied, turning Jenny into his arms and beginning to move. ‘Mmm … you feel good.’ Helplessly Jenny realised that David wasn’t going to let her go and that it would cause less fuss to give in and dance with him than to go on protesting.

Unlike Jon, David had always been a good dancer, a natural dancer, and her face grew hot in the darkness of the subtly lit dance floor as she remembered what was said about men who were naturally good dancers. Too good, she decided shakily as he ignored her efforts to keep a respectable distance between them and pulled her closer to him.

‘What’s wrong?’ he whispered against her hair. ‘You used to enjoy dancing with me like this once.’ Jon was standing on the opposite side of the dance floor talking to Ruth. He didn’t appear to have seen them.

‘You look wonderful tonight,’ David told her softly, his hands sliding up to caress her back. ‘You look wonderful, you feel wonderful … you are wonderful, Jenny, and I wish to hell I’d never been stupid enough to let you go.’

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 a hundred and eighty-seven novels for Mills & Boon, including the phenomenally successful A Perfect Family, To Love, Honour & Betray, The PerfectSinner 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.

A Perfect Family

The Perfect Seduction

Perfect Marriage Material

Figgy Pudding

The Perfect Lover

The Perfect Sinner

The Perfect Father

A Perfect Night

Coming Home

Starting Over

www.millsandboon.co.uk

Cover

Excerpt

About the Author

The Crightons

Title Page

Prologue

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Copyright

1917

It had been a cold, wet spring followed by an even wetter summer, and the crops lay flattened and battered beneath the relentlessly driving rain.

As Josiah Crighton wiped the condensation away from the railway carriage window to look outside he paused, turning instead to study the pale, set face of the girl seated beside him.

The girl … his wife, soon to be the mother of his child. His jaw tightened as he remembered his father’s fury when he learned what had happened.

‘For God’s sake, if you had to behave so … so stupidly, why the hell didn’t you do it outside your own backyard? Oxford … or the Inns of Court … surely you had ample opportunity there to—’

His father had broken off, drumming angrily on his desk whilst he surveyed him.

‘Well, there’s no help for it now. The girl will have to be found a suitable husband and as for you—’

‘She already has a husband,’ he had told his father quietly.

Just for a moment he saw that his father had misunderstood him, noting the relief expelling the impatient anger from his eyes as he exclaimed, ‘She’s married … then why the hell didn’t you say so …?’

His expression began changing as Josiah continued to look steadily at him and quietly explained, ‘We’re married, Father … Bethany and I …’

He had of course already anticipated the uproar that would follow his announcement and their mutual banishment from the lives of both their families. Hers had been no more pleased than his had been. Bethany was a yeoman farmer’s daughter who had been working up at the big house. He had bumped into her when he had gone there with some papers his father had instructed him to take to Lord Haver. They had recognised each other immediately from shared summer childhoods playing forbidden games on the muddy banks of the Dee.

One thing had led to another and the inevitable had happened. As soon as she had come to him with her news, ashen-faced and frightened, he had done what he had convinced himself was the only honourable thing he could do; never mind the fact that it was virtually an accepted thing within his family that one day he would cement the ties that kept the family together and, following its long-established tradition, marry his second cousin.