Penny Jordan - Time For Trust

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 JORDANis 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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JESSICA heard the grandfather clock striking eleven. She lifted her head from her work, her concentration broken. The grandfather clock had been acquired through the ancient custom of exchange and barter still very definitely alive in this quiet part of the Avon countryside.

At first she had been very pleased with her ‘payment’ for one of her larger tapestries; she had even continued to be pleased when the thing had virtually had to be dismantled in order to be installed in the small hallway of her stone cottage, and had then required the services of an extremely expensive and highly individualistic clock mender.

In fact, it was only when she realised what the clock was going to mean in terms of interruptions to her concentration on her work that she began to doubt the wisdom of owning it.

Mind you, she allowed fair-mindedly, it did have its advantages. For instance today, if it had not interrupted her, she would doubtless have worked on until it was far too late to go to the post office. Today, Wednesday, was half-day closing, and she had a tapestry finished and ready to post to the exclusive shop in Bath which sold her work for her.

She had always loved embroidery from being quite small. She remembered how amused and then irritated her parents had been with her interest in it.

Her interest in tapestry had come later, when she knew more about her subject. She had spent a wonderful summer training at the Royal School of Needlework which had confirmed her conviction that her love of the craft meant that she wanted it to be far more than merely a hobby.

Now, five years after that fateful summer, she spent her time either working for the National Trust on the conservation and repair of their tapestries or designing and making tapestries of her own—some for sale through the shop in Bath, and others on direct commissions from people who had seen her work and fallen in love with it.

The tapestry she was working on today was one such commission. Her workroom at the top of her small cottage had a large window to let in the light she needed for her work. It overlooked the countryside to the rear of the small row of cottages of which hers was one. This view had inspired many of her designs; every day it changed, sometimes subtly, sometimes dramatically, and she knew she would never tire of looking at it.

She loved this part of the country with its quiet peace—just as she loved the solitude of her work and life-style. Both made her feel secure…safe…And those were feelings she needed desperately.

She shivered a little. How long was it going to be before she succeeded in wiping her memory free of the past? How long was it going to be before she woke up in the morning without that clutching, panicky feeling of sick fear tensing her body?

She still had nightmares about it…Still remembered every vivid detail of that appalling day.

It had started so normally—getting up, leaving her parents’fashionable London house for work. Her father was the chairman of the élite merchant bank which had been founded one hundred and fifty years previously by his ancestor.

All her life, Jessica had been conscious of her parents’ disappointment that their only child should be a daughter. Nothing was ever said, but all the time she was at school, being encouraged to work hard, to get good results, she had known of her parents’ real feelings. She ought to have been a boy; a boy to follow in her father’s footsteps, to head the bank and follow tradition. But she wasn’t—she was a girl…

Every time she heard her father say that it made no difference, that these days women were equally as capable as men, that there was no reason at all why she should not eventually take his place, she had sensed his real feelings—had known that she must work doubly hard at school, that she must do everything she could to make up to her parents for the disappointment of her sex.

She had known from being quite young what fate held in store for her. She would go to university, get a degree and then join her father in the bank, where she would be trained for the important role that would one day be hers.

‘And, of course, it isn’t the end of the world,’ she had once heard her father saying to her mother. ‘One day she’ll marry, and then there’ll be grandsons…’

But by the time she left university with her degree, she had known that she didn’t want to make a career in banking.

Every time she’d walked into the imposing Victorian edifice that housed the bank she had felt as though a heavy weight descended on her shoulders, as though something inside her was slowly dying.