Kitabı oku: «Special Treatment»
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.
Special Treatment
Penny Jordan
MILLS & BOON
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CHAPTER ONE
THE BRIEFING WAS over. Rather unsteadily, Susannah got up and hurried out into the corridor, needing the sanctuary of the small cubby-hole that passed for her office.
Her teeth were clenched so hard that her jaw ached, and so did her head. Her nervous system, always the first thing to react when anything upset her, had gone into overdrive.
‘You rather got the cold shoulder from our new lord and master, didn’t you, darling? I wonder why,’ a slow female drawl came from behind her.
Oh, God, the last thing she wanted right now was to have to parry Claire Hunter’s acid curiosity!
The older woman had been with the magazine ever since its inception. Where her work was concerned, she was brilliant, quite without equal, witty and clever with her malicious tongue-in-cheek reporting of the foibles and fickleness of the fashionable world, which was her métier; but woe betide anyone who forgot to give Claire the recognition she considered her due.
Hazard Maine had not done so, and now she, Susannah, was having to pay the price, she reflected wryly, parrying her colleague’s inquisitive comment with a dismissive shrug of her shoulders and a casual, ‘No idea. New-broom syndrome, I suppose. I just happened to be first in the firing line. That will teach me to arrive at the last minute and get lumbered with a seat in the front row.’
Claire seemed satisfied with her response, and Susannah shut the door of her office behind her in relief. Damn Hazard Maine. Hazard Maine! What sort of a name was that, for God’s sake? He was probably American, of course, and his name was almost as familiar to her as her own. Most of his career years had been spent in New York and Sydney, and he had only recently been recalled to head the prestigious Tomorrow magazine, which was the flagship of MacFarlane Publishing.
She knew already that they weren’t going to get on. But then she had known that ever since Saturday …
Susannah closed her eyes momentarily. As if she didn’t have enough problems in her life, without adding any more! The very last thing she needed was to be on bad terms with her new boss. She and Richard had got on so well. Richard had encouraged and helped her. Richard …
It was pointless wishing Richard back in the editor’s seat. His wife, Tom MacFarlane’s only child, had made it plain that she was tired of sharing her husband with the demands of a highly successful monthly magazine, and Richard had reluctantly accepted that, unless he wanted to lose his wife, he was going to have to join his father-in-law on the board.
Maybe Aunt Emily was right, and it was Susannah’s vibrant chestnut hair that attracted all the problems that seemed to clutter her life. She ought to adopt Claire Hunter’s cool, dismissive approach to life, instead of allowing herself to become so involved in the problems of others—problems which inevitably, in some alchemic way, became her own.
Take last Saturday, for instance. Susannah groaned, pushing long, slim fingers into her already unruly curls. God, the very last thing she wanted to do was to remember that!
It had all been David’s fault, damn him. Susannah scowled ferociously, glowering at her typewriter.
She had been a fool ever to allow herself to become involved with David Martin, and it didn’t help knowing that she had fallen into the same trap as a good proportion of the rest of her sex.
Falling in love with a married man was so … so tacky, she fumed, hazel eyes glowing green as her temper got the better of her. She ought to have known … but how could she have done? They had met initially as guests on a local radio chat show. He had been working in television then, she for a local newspaper. They had had so much in common that, when he suggested dinner and a drink after the show, she had not even thought about refusing. Caution had never been one of her strong points and, by the time she had discovered he was married, she was almost in too deep.
It had been a friend who told her, a very concerned and apprehensive girl-friend who had known her for years, and who had guessed that she couldn’t know what, apparently, everyone else did—namely, that David was married.
Susannah had taxed him with it, and rather shamefacedly he had admitted that he had deceived her, pleading that it had only been by omission.
At first, he’d pleaded, he had not thought it important to tell her that he was married, and then by the time that it was … Well, he had been too scared of losing her to admit the truth.
Torn between the strength of her feelings—her own impulsiveness and the old-fashioned moral strictures she had grown up with—she hadn’t known whether to thank or curse Aunt Emily. Orphaned in the first months of her life, when a freak storm had overturned her father’s small boat, killing both her parents, she had been brought up by her only living relative. Being brought up by an elderly spinster, who was more properly her dead father’s aunt and not her own, did not equip one for life in the eighties, she had reflected miserably at the time. Another girl would have pushed aside her moral scruples and taken what life offered, but Susannah wasn’t like that. David was committed to someone else, and so, heartbreaking though it had been at the time, she had announced to Aunt Emily that it was time she spread her wings, and had started looking for a new job in London.
She had been lucky, thus confirming the old adage about those unlucky in love, or so she had told herself at the time.
In eight months, she had come a long way from the miserable twenty-three-year-old who had left Leicestershire feeling that nothing in life was worth while.
Richard, her boss, had practically adopted her. He had a keen eye for up-and-coming young reporters, whom he took a pride in nurturing and encouraging. She was lucky to have found a job working under him, so she had learned on the newspaper grapevine, and she was forced to concede that it was right. She was just beginning to get back her self-confidence, just beginning to feel that life, after all, might be worth living, albeit a different sort of life from the one she had envisaged that she and David would share, when David himself had shown up in London.
How he had inveigled her address out of Aunt Emily, Susannah didn’t know. He had arrived late one cool summer night, when it hadn’t stopped raining all day. She had been feeling tired, but exultant. A piece she had done, from an interview with a girl who had accidentally got caught up in a siege situation, had been highly praised by Richard and, as if to confirm that she was at last finding her feet in the fast-paced world of the city, two of Susannah’s female colleagues had insisted on her joining them for lunch. They were older than she was, and far more experienced and sophisticated, and it had been a heady experience to have them including her in their conversation as an equal.
She was, they had informed her, marked out as a woman who would go far.
‘We owe it to our sex to help and encourage one another. It’s time we found a way of beating the Old School Tie male system.’
Susannah had come away from the lunch feeling both elated and drained at the same time, her mind made up. From now on, she was going to concentrate on her career. From now on, no more men for her, married or unmarried.
To open her front door and find David standing there, and, what was worse, to feel her heart lurch in the old familiar way, had been dauntingly depressing.
He had insisted on coming in. He had left Louise, he had told her. Their marriage was over, and he was now free to start a new life with her.
She had been tempted. It was no good pretending that she hadn’t. David had wanted to spend the night with her, and she had almost given way. Only the uncomfortable memory of how Aunt Emily would look at her if she knew what Susannah was doing had stopped her. It was ridiculous in this day and age to have such Victorian scruples, but she couldn’t help it. Aunt Emily had done her work too well. As a teenager, Susannah had believed that, once she met the man she loved, all her moral doubts about the rights and wrongs of premarital sex would simply fade away, but it wasn’t as easy as that.
‘What are you trying to tell me?’ David had demanded incredulously. ‘That we can’t make love until we’re married?’
Put like that, it sounded archaic, and worse, scheming—as though she was bartering her body for a wedding ring.
‘No … It’s just that I’m not ready yet, David … I can’t explain …’
She had been perilously close to tears, shaking her head to try and blink them away, but to her relief David hadn’t been annoyed. Instead he had laughed and taken her into his arms.
‘What a fraud you are,’ he had teased her. ‘What would the world think if they knew that Ms Susannah Hargreaves, that champion of free will and women’s rights, is really a timid little virgin?’
She had been too relieved then to feel angry at his aura of sexual superiority; that had come later. She shivered a little, remembering the glitter of anticipation in his eyes. How much had David wanted her because he genuinely loved her, and how much because he saw her as a challenge?
What did it matter now? There could be nothing between them any more. She had made that abundantly clear to him.
Her flat wasn’t large enough for David to stay. It only had one small bedroom, so he had returned to Leicester, telling her that he would be back at the weekend and that they would sit down and make plans for their future together.
Only, before he came back, she had had another visit. This time, from David’s wife. Susannah knew her by sight, a small blonde woman, who looked permanently harassed.
The sight of her body, bloated by a very obviously advanced pregnancy, had shocked Susannah even more than her visit. Wordlessly, she had allowed her to walk into the flat, to sit down and to tell her in a savagely bitter monotone that David was demanding a divorce and leaving her with their unborn child. At first, Susannah hadn’t been able to take it all in. David’s wife pregnant … carrying his child? She wasn’t completely naïve; she knew that men—for a wide variety of reasons—made love to women for whom they felt little or no emotion. But this child must have been conceived before she had left for London, and now David wanted to pretend that it had never happened. He wanted to turn his back on his wife and child and simply walk away from them. In that moment, Susannah knew that no matter what she felt for him, she couldn’t marry him.
Looking into Louise’s white, bloated face, she wasn’t sure which of them she pitied and despised the most: Louise, for wanting her husband so desperately that she was prepared to beg like this for him, David, for being so weak that he had allowed his wife to become pregnant and then discarded her, or herself, for not realising the weakness that lay behind that charming smile of his. Well, she realised it now. Aunt Emily had once said to her, when Susannah asked her why she had never married, that she had never found a man she considered worthy of her respect and her trust. Susannah had laughed then, as teenagers do, not understanding what her aunt was telling her, but she understood it now. She loved David, and wanted him, but she did not respect him; she could never lean on him, never trust him.
The interview that followed was burned into her heart for all time. David had pleaded with her, wept tears of frustration and regret, but somehow she managed not to weaken. She had no idea whether or not he intended to go back to his wife. Somehow, she felt that he would, and she sincerely pitied the other woman for all that her life with him would probably be.
She told herself that she had had a narrow escape, that she was the fortunate one, that hers had been the choice, but somewhere deep inside her she still ached and wept for the love she had lost.
And it had been in that mood of bitter self-contempt and misery that she had gone to the Sunderlands’ ‘do’ on Saturday evening.
The Sunderlands were the closest thing she had to godparents. Neil Sunderland had been at school with her father. She had spent many holidays with the family, both at home and abroad, and now that their own two sons were married and living away from home, one in Canada, the other in Australia, she made a point of visiting Neil and Mamie just as often as she could.
Neil had retired earlier in the year from the merchant bank of which he was a director, and they had given up their London house and moved to a small village on the outskirts of Gloucester. Susannah had visited them there several times during the summer and, even though it was the last thing she felt like doing, she knew she would have to go to Mamie’s sixtieth birthday party.
Paul and Simon and their respective wives and children were all coming over for the occasion. Susannah was expected to stay the weekend; the house was a large one, with an extensive garden, and Susannah already knew all about the lavish plans for Mamie’s party.
Mamie was half-American, which accounted not just for her name, but very probably for her love of life as well. She and Aunt Emily did not get on, and no wonder, Susannah reflected wryly—they were as different as chalk and cheese. She could not imagine any girl brought up by Mamie worrying about the ethics of going to bed with a man to whom she was not married!
She got up clumsily, cursing the lack of space in her office; uncomfortably aware of the fact that using Aunt Emily for an excuse for her lack of sexuality was taking an easy way out. She could feel the starkness of a mood of deep introspection crowding in on her, like a winter’s afternoon obliterating the light. How she resented this side of her nature, this dark, and sometimes frightening, gloom that came down over her without warning, engulfing and possessing her.
No doubt, like her temper, it went with her hair, and so perhaps it did, part of a Celtic heritage, like her pale delicate skin and stormy green eyes.
And it hadn’t helped having Hazard Maine ripping into her like that. It was the worst of bad luck that he should have spotted that yawn she had tried to smother behind her hand.
Of course, she hadn’t found what he was saying boring—quite the contrary. How could anyone be bored when listening to a diatribe against the skills of an editorial staff among which one numbered? It hadn’t just been to cover up that she had accused him of wanting to behave like a traditional new broom. She had been so happy working for Richard. Susannah scowled, wondering for how long she would be given the opportunity to continue working for the magazine. Hazard Maine didn’t like her. To judge from his lecture to them this morning, he didn’t like any of them. He had attacked the magazine, throwing them all off guard, warning them that he intended to make changes. But surely those cold grey eyes had rested on her face just momentarily longer than they had on anyone else’s?
To her horror, she had had to stifle another yawn. This time, he hadn’t even attempted to soften his contempt.
‘Work comes first for anyone who wants to succeed on this magazine, Ms Hargreaves,’ he had told her crisply. ‘That being the case, I suggest you either change your job—or your lover.’
She had flushed scarlet, mortified by the ripple of amusement that ran through the room, and all too aware of the speculative glances of her male colleagues. She had a reputation for being cool and unapproachable. Her private life was something she never discussed at work, and with one short sentence Hazard Maine had created an image of her life-style that was totally false, and yet which she was completely unable to correct.
She knew why he had picked on her, of course. Her full mouth tightened angrily. He might be a big man in size, well over six foot and athletically muscled, but he certainly wasn’t in spirit. To hold what had happened on Saturday against her like that … Of all the bad luck! She had never imagined—but then why should she? Neil and Mamie moved in completely different circles from those she inhabited. She had never dreamed …
But then, the weekend had gone disastrously wrong, right from the start …
She sat back in her chair, trembling.
CHAPTER TWO
SHUTTING THE DOOR of her flat behind her with her shoulder, Susannah put down the box she was carrying. Her arms ached and she flexed them gratefully. A quick cup of coffee, change into her travelling clothes and then she could be away.
Trust Mamie not to warn her until the last minute that it was going to be a formal ‘do’. White tie and tails, no less! She had been lucky to be able to find a dress to fit her at such short notice. She was only a size eight, and the dress hire shop she had rung up in a state of panic had told her that they stocked very few extra-small sizes.
The dress she had chosen was quite plain. She wasn’t in the mood for dressing up in anything eye-catching. She wasn’t in the mood for anything other than her own company, if the truth were known, but if she failed to turn up Mamie would pick and question until she had got at the truth, and the last thing she wanted was for worldly, sophisticated Mamie to know what a fool she had made of herself.
They had an odd relationship—sometimes friends, sometimes enemies—and there were times when Susannah envied Mamie’s daughters-in-law the oceans that separated them from her inquisitive tongue. And yet she knew Mamie loved her.
‘Don’t be frightened of life,’ she was always urging her. ‘Jump in and enjoy it.’
‘Susannah isn’t the jumping-in type. We British aren’t,’ Neil had palliated, and yet somehow even his kind words left a slight sting.
A sting that was intensified now. How much of her rejection of David had to do with what she genuinely believed to be right, and how much was because she was terrified of the implications of committing herself to him? Was it because Emily had always held her firmly at a distance that she herself was unable to allow anyone to get close, really close to her?
Angry with herself, she hurried into her bedroom, pulling a brush through her tangled curls, and quickly changing out of her jeans and sweatshirt into the separates she had bought for herself the previous week.
At first sight, pink and black might not seem the best choice of colours for a redhead, but she had the colouring to get away with them, and the pink was of that soft, intensely feminine variety that made those who could not wear it gnash their teeth with envy.
The dress, her case and the present she had bought for Mamie were all speedily packed into her Fiesta, the flat locked up and the alarm set. She should be there in time for lunch. The afternoon would probably be taken up with a multitude of last-minute tasks for Mamie, and then there would only be the evening to be got through. Thank God, Mamie knew nothing about David … David … Even now, part of her wished …
What? she derided herself. That by some magic process he could miraculously be free? But he wasn’t free, and she didn’t think she could live with herself or him, knowing that he was prepared to turn his back on his child. Susannah wasn’t sentimental where children were concerned, but she had been brought up to recognise the importance of facing up to one’s responsibilities. And, if she was honest with herself, she didn’t know how she would cope with loving a man who had already previously committed himself to another woman.
Stop thinking about him, she admonished herself. It’s over …
Easier said than done, but one look at her face would alert Mamie to the fact that something was wrong, and then she would pry and question, and Susannah really didn’t think she was capable of dealing with Mamie’s curiosity, however well meant.
She tried to think about something else—about the praise Richard had given her for that piece on the siege victim. He had been enthusiastic and flattering about her talent. He had prophesied that she would go far. But Richard was leaving and Hazard Maine was taking his place. What would he be like, this American who had spent his life between continents, when he wasn’t reporting from some war-torn part of the globe?
She had read up his biog. They all had, once they had known that he was taking over the editor’s chair. He was thirty-four years old, ten years older than she was; unmarried. That had surprised her until she remembered that he had been a war correspondent, and war correspondents rarely married. He had edited papers in New York and Sydney, and now he was going to head Tomorrow, MacFarlane’s most prestigious publication.
Jokes had flown round the office about ‘wild colonial hicks’ and ‘clever New York hacks’, but none of them really knew what they were going to have to face. He had a formidable reputation; he was coming in with the power to hire and fire at will, to make his own rules and to do what he wished with the magazine. They had heard that much on the grapevine. Just as they had also heard that, at first, he had turned down the job, claiming that he was a newspaper man and that magazines, no matter how highly prized, did not interest him.
At least, that was the gist of what he had said. Rumour had it that his actual phraseology had been considerably more earthy!
Apart from being rather in awe of his professional reputation, Susannah had no strong feelings about Hazard Maine. She had run out of feelings of any kind. She simply felt she wanted to be left alone to pick up the pieces of her life. She knew that she was going to miss Richard. One or two of the staff had teased her about him, but no one who knew Richard could ever seriously imagine that his interest in her was anything other than professional.
Richard was very much in love with his wife. He had to be to give up a job he loved to take one in which he had very little interest but, as he had told Susannah, he felt he owed it to Caroline.
‘Newspaper men don’t make good husbands, she says, and she’s quite right. Now that the boys are growing up, they need me around. At the moment, I only really see them at weekends, and then not always as much as I should.’
Like her, Richard had been brought up with what was now considered an old-fashioned code of ethics. Susannah liked and admired him. She knew she was going to miss him, as a boss and as a mentor.
Neil and Mamie’s ‘new’ home was a seventeenth-century manor house, approached by a narrow curling drive that hid the stone façade with its mullioned windows from view right until the last moment.
Mamie, with typical American energy and enterprise, had had the inside almost completely gutted since moving in. Experienced and expensive designers had been brought in, and Susannah, who had rather liked the original shabby comfort of the place, was not particularly looking forward to seeing the changes they had wrought.
Several cars were already parked in front of the house, and she reversed her Fiesta into a small space left to one side of a large and very new-looking Jaguar saloon. She always parked next to new cars if she could. It meant the owners were likely to be that bit more careful about opening their doors on her paintwork, or so she always hoped.
The front door opened as she walked towards it and Mamie hurried out to embrace her. The soft tweed skirt, the pastel cashmere sweater, the pearls, all of them were perfectly co-ordinated, and so obviously chosen to fit in with their wearer’s background, that Susannah had to suppress a faint grin. Typical Mamie!
‘You’re too thin,’ she was told firmly. ‘And too pale. What have you been doing with yourself?’
‘Working,’ Susannah told her. ‘And, as for being too thin, I thought no woman could be that.’
‘There’s thin, and then there’s thin,’ Mamie pronounced darkly. ‘And you, my girl, are thin. It doesn’t suit you.’
‘Thanks, Mamie.’
Elegant eyebrows lifted towards the older woman’s beautifully styled silver-grey hair. ‘My goodness, you are prickly today.’ The smooth, unlined forehead creased slightly. ‘Susannah, is something wrong?’
Oh, heavens, this was the last thing she needed! Susannah bit down hard on her bottom lip. ‘No, I … You’re right. I think I must have been working too hard. If I apologise for feeling grouchy, will you show me round the house?’
She linked her arm through Mamie’s, deliberately forcing herself to withstand the older woman’s concerned inspection.
‘Apology accepted,’ Mamie said at last, patting her hand. ‘And don’t worry. I won’t indulge myself by taking you up on your self-sacrificing offer.’ She made a small moue. ‘I know that you preferred the house as it was before. You’re just like Neil. He thought we would move in and not touch a thing,’ she scoffed. ‘You English. How you hate change!’
They laughed together, harmony restored, and Susannah allowed herself to feel a small surge of relief. She had forgotten how sharp Mamie could be. She would have to be careful not to betray herself again. She knew that both Mamie and Neil were deeply fond of her. She had no wish to spoil their party by giving them cause for concern.
‘Have Paul and Simon arrived yet?’
‘Last night.’ Mamie rolled her eyes heavenwards. ‘Much as I love my grandchildren, I have to admit that en masse …’
‘What’s that, Ma? Not tired of us already?’
Paul was the image of Neil, his father, Susannah reflected, as the younger of the two boys enveloped her in a bear hug.
‘And how’s our little red-headed godsister? Good heavens, girl, what have you been doing to yourself? There’s nothing of you!’
‘That’s just what I’ve been telling her.’
‘Where are Sarah and the boys?’ Susannah asked, disentangling herself from Paul’s hug.
‘We’re all in the conservatory. Come on in. Ethel’s just made coffee.’
Ethel was the housekeeper who had been with Mamie and Neil for as long as Susannah had known them. At first, she had flatly refused to leave London, but somehow Mamie had persuaded her.
As they walked into the conservatory, Susannah could see out into the large rear garden, where a marquee had been erected. The whole area was a busy hive of activity, with caterers dashing to and fro, and florists still putting the final touches to their work.
Susannah already knew the two girls Simon and Paul had married, although two new babies had been added to the family since she had last seen them, and they had to be duly admired and cuddled before she could turn her attention to their grandfather.
Retirement suited Neil, she admitted, smiling at him. He was a gentler character than Mamie. Not perhaps as shrewd, but very astute in his own way.
Lunch was a relaxed affair, the conversation flowing freely. It had been almost twelve months since the whole family had last been together, and there was a good deal of gossip to catch up on. Susannah was quite content to sit on the sidelines, putting in the odd comment where appropriate.
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