The Youngest Sister

“Already I feel very beholden to you.”Letter to ReaderTitle PageCHAPTER ONECHAPTER TWOCHAPTER THREECHAPTER FOURCHAPTER FIVECHAPTER SIXCHAPTER SEVENCHAPTER EIGHTCHAPTER NINECHAPTER TENCopyright

“Already I feel very beholden to you.”

“There’s no need. You’re actually doing me a favor.”

“I don’t understand.”

“It’s been a long time since I had any female companionship. I hadn’t expected to find myself sitting here with a beautiful woman beside me so soon after my arrival.”

The way he talked, Cressy could almost believe she was beautiful. But she knew it had to be a line. She would only ever be a beauty to a man who loved her, and she couldn’t delude herself that someone like Nicolas had fallen in love at first sight. Neither had she—had she?

Dear Reader,

Many readers like to know how a story came to be written. This one was inspired by Ca’n Xenet, an old farmhouse in rural Majorca, which was given new life when it was bought by Shiela Peczenik, an artist, who made it her home and that of her painting school.

Although writers avoid using real people in their stories, for A Touch of the Devil (published 1980), which some of you may have read, I drew on my son’s experiences in the Spanish Foreign Legion to create a hero who had also been a legionnaire. Similarly, much of what I know about men like the hero of this story derives from my husband’s passion for mountains. While I was painting in Majorca, he was walking the Pennine Way and planning a trip with our son to the summit of Aconcagua, the highest peak in the Western Hemisphere.

In creating exciting heroes, it helps to be the wife and mother of men who do adventurous things. Had our first home not been in the wilds of “upcountry” Malaysia, I might never have written any romances, and certainly not Winter is Past, the one that launched me on a long and satisfying career as a storyteller.

Best wishes,

Anne Weale

www.millsandboon.co.uk

CHAPTER ONE

USUALLY when Cressy Vale travelled by air it was on the cheapest charter flight available.

Today she was flying business class on Centennial’s scheduled service because the journey was urgent and all the ordinary seats on airlines serving the island of Majorca were fully booked.

It was late June, a popular month with people who wanted to avoid the crowds of the high season as well as the more intense heat of the Mediterranean in July and August. This was the perfect time to go to the beautiful island off the east coast of Spain where the Spanish royal family spent their summer holidays.

Cressy was not going for pleasure, but to answer an SOS message that an elderly member of her father’s family, who had retired to Majorca, was in trouble.

Her flight to Palma, the island’s capital, took off at nine-thirty. By twelve-forty, Spanish time, she would be in golden sunshine instead of the cold, wet weather which had persisted since Easter in England.

Cressy lived and worked in London. On the train from Victoria station to Gatwick airport, she was one of a number of young people travelling in casual clothes with their belongings in rucksacks and roll-bags. But she wondered if, at the airline’s business class check-in desk, she would be conspicuously out of place in her jeans and faded indigo cotton sweater.

Her jeans were freshly laundered and the sweater had been expensive when her sister Anna had bought it. But now it was three years old and had undergone several repairs. Even her dark blue deck shoes had once been in Anna’s wardrobe. Both her sisters spent a lot of money on clothes, but they earned more than she did and needed to dress well for their jobs and their non-stop social lives. Cressy was saving for an expensive group trip to the Galápagos Islands, a sanctuary for rare wildlife in the Pacific. She felt lucky to have a family who supplied her with top-quality hand-me-downs.

However, when she reached the check-in any fears that she might be made to feel like a bag lady at a gala ball were driven out of her mind by the sight of the person being checked in ahead of her. When her questing glance dropped from the sign above and behind the desk to the tall figure standing in front of it, she stopped dead in her tracks.

Never in her life had she seen such a gorgeous male back-view.

For a moment her heart stood still, the way it had the first time she saw the soaring white summit of the Jungfrau on a family holiday in Switzerland.

The Jungfrau was there for ever. In a hundred years’ time it would still be stopping the hearts of impressionable schoolgirls. But any minute now the man she was looking at would finish his business at the desk and she would see his face. The probability was that his front wouldn’t match his scrumptious rear.

Bracing herself for the inevitable let-down, she savoured the brief illusion that here was the kind of man she had always dreamed of meeting—and not merely a fellow traveller in the same teeming airport, but actually going where she was going.

He was tall, the top of his head at least six inches above her own, with shoulders to match, and long, powerful but shapely brown legs exposed by very short shorts. But they weren’t the beach shorts of someone going on a sand, sun and sangria holiday. These were the serviceable shorts worn by trekkers, and this particular pair had seen a lot of service. As had his leather boots.