Passionate Protection

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.

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.

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‘HONESTLY, JESS, I don’t know what that family of yours would do without you,’ Colin Weaver told his assistant with a wry smile. ‘Well, what is it this time? Has your aunt locked herself out again, or your uncle forgotten to collect his new cheque book?’

‘Neither,’ Jessica Forbes told him, hiding her own smile. It was true that her aunt and uncle did tend to ring her at work for assistance every time there was a family crisis, but they weren’t really used to the hectic pace of the modern-day commercial world—Uncle Frank, for instance, still lived in a pre-war daydream fostered by the leisurely pace of life in the small market town legal practice he had inherited from his father, and Aunt Alice wasn’t much better; nervous, dithery, she was given to complaining in bewilderment that life had changed so much, she barely recognised it anymore, and as for Isabel! Jessica sighed; the problems dumped on her by her eighteen-year-old cousin made those of her aunt and uncle seem mere nothings.

‘Okay, okay, I’m sorry for criticising your beloved family,’ Colin apologised with a wry smile. ‘I suppose I’m just jealous really,’ he admitted plaintively. ‘Would you drop everything and come running for me if I locked myself out?’

‘It wouldn’t do any good if I did,’ Jessica pointed out with a grin. ‘You live in a penthouse apartment, my aunt and uncle live in a rambling old vicarage with a pantry window that simply won’t close, but which neither of them can fit through, whereas yours truly …’

‘Umm, I’m beginning to get the point,’ Colin agreed, glancing appreciatively over her slender five-foot-eight frame, ‘but that doesn’t stop me from wishing they would stop depriving me of your valuable assistance.’

‘I have to go this time—it’s Isabel.’ Jessica frowned, chewing the soft fullness of her bottom lip, dark eyebrows drawn together in a worried frown. The problem was that her aunt and uncle had been slipping gently into middle age when Isabel had arrived unexpectedly on the scene and neither of them had ever totally recovered from the shock.

‘Oh, Isabel,’ Colin said grimly. ‘That girl’s lethal,’ he added with a grimace. ‘I remember when you brought her here …’

‘Here’ was his exclusive London salon where he showed the alluring ranges of separates that bore his name. Jessica had worked for him ever since she left art school. She loved her job as his assistant, and if he needed mollycoddling occasionally, he more than made up for his lapses when they were over. In Jessica’s view there was no one to match him in the design of separates. His secret, he had told her on more than one occasion, lay as much in the careful choice of fabric as the style the materials were eventually made up in. ‘Couture Classics’ were how Vogue described them, and Jessica reckoned there could be few wealthy women in Britain aspiring to the well-dressed lists who didn’t have something of his in their wardrobe. For some clients he designed individual ranges, but it was, as Jessica knew, his great dream to take his designs and elegance into the high streets at prices every woman could afford.