Second Time Loving

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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NOT far now. Angelica had just driven through the last village on Tom’s list, and, according to the route he had worked out for her, the lane to the cottage should only be a couple of miles ahead of her.

She was glad that the drive from London was nearly over. Her back was stiff with tension, her eyes gritty and tired. Tired…She smiled cynically to herself. Eighteen months ago, even twelve months ago, if anyone had told her that tiredness, exhaustion, both physical and mental, and most of all emotional was going to overrun and dominate her entire life she would have laughed at them. But then she hadn’t known what she knew now: that this numbing, destructive, all-encompassing form of exhaustion, this longing to close her eyes, curl up in a small ball to sleep and go on sleeping was a form of depression as dangerous and invasive in its way as its far more publicised and recognised cousins.

She had learned an awful lot during these last eighteen months though, too much perhaps, and certainly a good deal that she would rather not have learned. Her mouth twisted painfully. She ought to have remembered that old adage about there being no fool like an old one; not that at twenty-eight she was old precisely, even though if, right at this moment, she felt as though she were inhabiting the body of a woman thirty years her senior rather than one supposedly at the height of her mental and sexual peak.

Her sexual peak. The twist of her mouth became even more pronounced. In these days of increasing concern over and responsiveness to the growing threat of AIDS, it was perhaps not the stigma it had once been to be a woman of over twenty-one with so limited a sexual history that she was still actually a virgin, but it was still something she preferred to keep to herself; a vulnerable Achilles’ heel, in someone who, to the rest of her small world at least, was the subject of admiration and envy.

When she had first taken over her father’s ailing business, manufacturing an old-fashioned brand of face cream and cleansers supplied on a mail-order basis to a very limited list of customers, she had done so because she had no alternative. When she was fresh from serving her articles with a firm of accountants, and had just passed her exams, her father’s sudden heart attack and death had left her mother solely dependent on an income from a company which had become more and more precariously financially based.

It had been a chance conversation with a friend which had led to her turning round the whole focus of the company, so that instead of marketing its traditional products Angelica had taken the huge risk of completely reorganising the company and marketing products which were based entirely on natural ingredients.

There had been no time for careful market research; no time to do anything other than make her decision and then act upon it.