is one of Mills & Boonâs most popular and bestselling novelists. Her writing was an instant success with readers worldwide. Since her first book, Bittersweet Passion, was published in 1987, she has gone from strength to strength and now has over ninety titles, which have sold more than thirty-five million copies, to her name.
In this special collection, we offer readers a chance to revisit favourite books or enjoy that rare treasureâa book by a favourite writerâthey may have missed. In every case, seduction and passion with a gorgeous, irresistible man are guaranteed!
CRUSH barriers held back the baying media horde brandishing cameras and microphones outside the Royal Courts of Justice.
As Luciano da Valenza emerged, surrounded by his triumphant legal team, his new security men rushed to block those climbing the barriers in an effort to reach him. Standing six feet four tall with the lithe, powerful build of an athlete, Luciano dwarved his companions. For a split-second he stilled, stunning golden eyes brilliant in his lean, bronzed face, the only outward sign of the strong emotions gripping him.
He was free: no handcuffs on his wrists, no guards by his side, no prison van waiting to return him to a cell eight feet wide by ten feet deep. For the first time in five hellish years, the right to liberty and dignity was his again. But the moment was soured by the reality that nothing could bring those years back, or alter the harsh fact that the English legal system might have set aside his conviction as unsafe but had stopped short of declaring him innocent.
âWhat will you do now?â an Italian journalist shouted above the general mêlée.
âI will fight on.â Responding by instinct to a fellow countryman, Luciano was none-the-less amazed at the naivety of that question, for it was unthinkable to him that he might rest before his name was cleared and his enemies had paid the price for what he had endured.
âYour immediate plans?â The same paparazzo was quick to press his advantage.
A dangerous smile slashed Lucianoâs lean, darkly handsome features. âA glass of 1925 Brunello Riserva and a woman.â
That declaration was met by a burst of appreciative laughter from those who understood enough Italian to translate that audacious declaration of intent.
On the sidelines, Lucianoâs lawyer, Felix Carrington, wondered which of the many women who appeared to find his dynamic client irresistible would qualify for that ultimate accolade. Costanza, the sleek Italian brunette, who was surely the most devoted and discreet personal assistant in existence? Rochelle, the sexy blonde beauty, who had withdrawn her evidence on the grounds that she had been drunk and distraught when she had made her original statement? Or even Lesley Jennings, the fiercely intelligent and attractive solicitor in Felixâs own legal firm, whose determination to win Lucianoâs release had become a crusade? More probably, Felix decided, a fresh face would capture the younger manâs interest: one of the glossy media or society females who had taken up his cause with such vigour.
Yet five years earlier, when Luciano da Valenza had been tried, found guilty and imprisoned, only a few lines in a local newspaper had reported the event. A foreign troubleshooter headhunted from Rome by the Linwoods, he had been better known in Italy as the up-and-coming aggressive young business blood that he was. But by slow degrees, Lucianoâs plight had assumed a much more colourful guise.
In the aftermath of the original trial, Count Roberto Tessari, an Italian nobleman of enormous wealth and unblemished integrity, had come out of nowhere to engage Carrington and Carrington to supply a top-flight defence team on Lucianoâs behalf. The older man had also secured Lucianoâs assets against the fines imposed by his conviction by paying them out of his own pocket before pledging his bottomless bank account to the long, tough battle of appealing Lucianoâs conviction and gaining his release.
In spite of Tessariâs painfully embarrassing efforts to keep his involvement a matter of total blanket confidentiality, someone somewhere had talked. When the rumours had begun, a prominent newspaper had printed a double-page spread on Luciano da Valenza. Their investigation of his background had helpfully delivered those elements beloved of the popular Press: secrecy, illegitimacy, suffering and poverty. At that timely moment, Luciano had then proved that he was indeed an unusual criminal. While recovering from a savage beating by fellow inmates, who resented the attention he was receiving, he had risked his own life to rescue an officer from a fire in the prison hospital. A television documentary questioning his guilt had followed and, if it had lingered a little too lovingly and often on the lady producerâs clear admiration for Lucianoâs dark-angel good looks and heroic stature, certainly the programme had generated an amount of interest in his cause which had done him no harm.