Injured Innocent
Penny Jordan needs no introduction as arguably the most recognisable name writing for Mills & Boon. We have celebrated her wonderful writing with a special collection, many of which for the first time in eBook format and all available right now."The choice is yours," Joel was saying.Joel's biting contempt of her over a teenage episode that he had wrongly interpreted had permanently scarred Lissa – left her unable to respond to any man. Now, years later, they were at loggerheads over their joint guardianship of her sister's little girls.No way would Lissa give them up.But Joel's proposal of marriage came as a shock. She'd learned to live without Joel. How could she possibly learn to live with him? Knowing his contempt for her was still there, knowing that she loved him.
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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.
CHAPTER ONE
SHE WAS IN a very dark, very smoky, very crowded room, crammed with unfamiliar faces, most of them contorted into frighteningly threatening grimaces. Panic surged through her in waves. She wanted to turn and run and yet for some reason her feet remained locked to the floor. Alien sounds and scents filled the air; she was overwhelmed by the despairing conviction that she could never, ever escape from the place of torment her inner consciousness told her her surroundings were, and then miraculously a door opened; light flooded the room and a man stood there his arms open wide to encourage her to run to him, his face in the shadows, but she knew without seeing his features who he was, and his name was torn from her lips on a glad cry as she ran for the haven of his arms.
‘Daddy …’ She cried his name again, her relief suddenly, horrifyingly turning to terror as he stepped into the light and she saw that he was not her father at all but someone else—a stranger—dark and forbidding, unknown to her and yet somehow recognised by her inner senses … recognised and feared. She screamed, and screamed again, and it was the sound of her own pain and fear that eventually jolted her out of the fantasy world of her nightmare and back to reality.
The nightmare. Lissa shuddered deeply, touching her damp skin with trembling fingers. It was years since she had been tormented by it—well three years at least, she amended mentally … since she had made the break from home and come to live in London. Sighing faintly she glanced at her watch. Six-thirty … There was no point in trying to get back to sleep now. She would have to get up in another hour anyway.
She padded through the bedroom of her small flat and into the kitchen busying herself making a mug of coffee. The fragrant scent of the beans soothed her sensitive nerve endings, the warmth of the drink stealing into her chilled fingers as they closed round the mug. It was still only January and the central heating hadn’t come on yet. She shivered violently in her nightdress and pattered back to her room, sliding under the duvet; snuggling its comforting warmth all around her. Amanda would have laughed and said something silly, like the best way to keep warm in bed was to share it with a man. When Amanda said things like that everyone laughed. Her sister had a way of saying the most outrageously suggestive things with an innocence that robbed them of their sting. Even after three years of marriage and two children Amanda still looked like a little girl, with her mop of blonde curls and her large blue eyes. Or at least she had done. Deep shudders of mingled guilt and pain racked her as she sat huddled beneath the bedclothes. Dear God even now she could hardly believe it was true; that that midnight call three days ago had actually happened … That her sister, her brother-in-law and both sets of parents had been killed outright when a freak thunder-storm had struck the light aircraft her brother-in-law had been piloting.
