A Perfect Night

“Indeed there is, but I think you’ll find most men—and women—want the pleasure of enjoying and arousing their chosen partner’s sexual desires. You must have experienced that for yourself.”

She made no response other than tensing in Sebastian’s grasp.

“You have experienced it, haven’t you, Katie?” he asked her softly.

“What I have or have not experienced is no concern of yours.”

“Perhaps not,” Seb agreed, but instead of releasing her and turning away as she had expected, he suddenly moved closer to her, causing her stomach to turn in anxious protest. He bent his head and his mouth came down expertly and inescapably over hers.

“No…” she managed to protest sharply.

“You’re a liar, Katie, if what you say you want is a gentle, passive lover,” she heard him telling her savagely. “You want a man whose passion matches your own.”

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

Cover

Excerpt

About the Author

The Crightons

Title Page

CHAPTER ONE

CHAPTER TWO

CHAPTER THREE

CHAPTER FOUR

CHAPTER FIVE

CHAPTER SIX

CHAPTER SEVEN

CHAPTER EIGHT

CHAPTER NINE

EPILOGUE

Copyright

AS SEB drove past the sign that read, Haslewich—Please Drive Carefully, he was aware of a dispiriting grey cloud of self-criticism and disappointment dulling what, if life mirrored fiction, by rights should be his triumphal return to the place of his birth.

He was thirty-eight years old, virtually at the top of his career ladder having just been headhunted by the international drug company Aarlston-Becker to head their research team. No small feat surely for man who, as a boy, had been sneeringly dismissed by one of his teachers as ‘just another hopeless by-product of the Cooke clan.’

He had money in the bank accumulated by hard work and shrewd investment, a family who even if he hadn’t seen much of them in recent years were by all accounts more than willing to do the modern equivalent of roasting a fatted calf to welcome him home, and he was about to take a kind of professional post that many among his colleagues would have given their eye-teeth for; all of which surely must be pretty heavyweight pluses on anyone’s balance sheet of life.

But then he needed some heavyweight assets to balance out the equally, to him at least, heavyweight negative aspects of his life.

‘What negative aspects?’ his second or was it third cousin Guy Cooke had asked him drily when they had been discussing the subject of his impending return.

‘How about an ill-judged early marriage followed predictably, I suppose, by a divorce.’

Guy’s eyebrows had lifted as he shrugged dismissively, ‘Divorce isn’t exactly a social sin any longer Seb, and from what you’ve told us your ex-wife has remarried very happily and the two of you are on relatively comfortable terms.’

‘Oh yes, from Sandra’s and my own point of view the divorce was the best thing we could have done other than not to have married in the first place.

‘No, it’s not the fact that we married far too young and for all the wrong reasons that I feel bad. It’s…’ He had paused, grimacing before continuing, ‘Sandy always used to complain that I was a selfish bastard not really fit to be either a husband or a father, too wrapped up in my career and my own professional goals. I thought at the time that she was being ridiculous. After all, I was working to provide a decent standard of living for her, or so I used to tell her and myself, but of course that was just the excuse I used to conceal the fact that she was right that I was being selfish, and that the rush I got from knowing I was right in there at the cutting edge of discovering new drugs that were going to provide the kind of breakthrough that would change the world was far more important to me, far more compelling and addictive than any pleasure I got from being with her.’