Mistress To Her Husband

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.

Mistress to Her Husband

Penny Jordan

www.millsandboon.co.uk

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CHAPTER ONE

‘KATE you’ll never guess what! John told us this morning, whilst you were at the dentist. The business has been taken over. And the new boss is coming in tomorrow to interview everyone!’

Kate Vincent digested her co-worker’s excited comments in silence. Dropping enviably thick, dark lashes reflectively over topaz eyes, she considered what she had been told. She had only been with the company for six months, as before that she’d only been able to manage a part-time job whilst she was completing her Master’s. With the qualification nicely enhancing her CV she had felt confident enough to apply for this post, which previously she would have considered out of her range.

‘So who’s taking us over?’ Kate questioned Laura, absently flipping the smooth length of her chestnut-brown hair over her shoulder as she did so. It had been hot outside in the street, and the coolness of the office’s air-conditioning was very welcome.

‘Well, John wouldn’t say,’ Laura responded, suppressing a small envious sigh as she studied Kate’s elegantly slender body, clad in a neat white T-shirt teamed with a chocolate-brown linen skirt.

Laura had been with her when Kate had bought the skirt, an end-of-line sale buy which she herself would have deemed dull. But on Kate it looked not just good, but also somehow discreetly expensive.

‘Apparently everything has to be kept hush-hush until tomorrow.’ She gave Kate a rueful look.

‘I suppose we should have seen it coming. After all, John has been hinting for ages that he’d like to take early retirement—but I never thought he was contemplating selling out. Mind you, he and Sheila don’t have any children, do they? So I don’t suppose there’s much point in hanging on when they could be spending their time in that condo of theirs in Miami.’

Kate listened intently to Laura as she booted up her computer. The business John Loames had set up to supply specialist facilities and equipment to the building trade had been very successful, but Kate had seen for herself since she had started to work for the small private company as its accounts executive that John was growing less and less inclined to seek out new contracts. Which was a pity, because she knew that the business had a great deal of potential, and she was not entirely surprised that someone had bought John out.

‘Everyone’s worried about what might happen,’ Laura confided to her. ‘None of us want to lose our jobs.’

‘Someone new taking over might not necessarily be a bad thing,’ Kate pointed out to her calmly. ‘There’s ample room for the business to be expanded, and then there would be more than enough work for all of us—provided, of course, the new owner doesn’t already own a similar business and just wants to amalgamate John’s with his own.’

‘Oh, don’t say that!’ Laura begged worriedly, giving a small shudder. ‘Roy and I have only just increased our mortgage so that we can extend the house.’ Her face became slightly pink. ‘We’re trying for a family, and a baby will mean that we definitely need extra space. The last thing I need right now is to lose my job! Which reminds me—John told us that he wants us all here especially early tomorrow. Apparently the new owner has said specifically that he will be here at eight.’

‘Eight?’ Kate switched her attention from her e-mails to Laura, her forehead crinkling in a worried frown. ‘Are you telling me John wants us here at eight?’

‘Yes.’

Kate’s porcelain-clear skin paled slightly. It was impossible for her to make it to the office for eight o’clock in the morning. Pre-school didn’t start until eight, and she would have to leave Ollie at seven-thirty at the very latest if she was to make it here for eight. She could feel the tension cramping her stomach.

It was hard enough for any mother to work full time—a constant finely-judged balancing act—but when one added into that delicate balance the fact that the mother in question was a single parent, fighting desperately hard to give as much emotional security as two loving parents would, plus the fact that she had not told her employers that she had child, then that balancing act became dangerously unstable.

Just thinking about Ollie was enough to have her stomach twisting in knots of maternal protective anxiety.

‘What’s wrong?’ Laura asked curiously, sensing her tension.

‘Er…nothing.’

Kate hadn’t told anyone at work about Ollie. All too sensitive to the attitude of colleagues and employers to the difficulties that came hand in hand with a worker who was a mother—especially a single mother—Kate had made no mention of her son during her interview with John. It had only been after she had started to work for the company that she had learned that John had a somewhat old-fashioned attitude about employing women with very young children. By then she had realised how well suited she was to her job, and it to her, and although it had caused her some sleepless nights and many qualms, she had decided to keep Ollie’s existence a secret. Since she was fiercely honest by nature, this decision had pricked her conscience on more than one occasion, but she had told herself that it was a necessary omission if she was to succeed with her career plans.

She was well qualified now, and she was determined to provide her son with at least some of the material benefits he would have enjoyed had his father not abandoned her.

His father! Kate could feel the cold sickness and despair laced with anger spewing up inside her—it was a mixture as dangerous and toxic as arsenic, but she was the one it threatened to poison and destroy, not the man who had broken her heart and deserted her.

Now she considered that she and Oliver were better off without him—even though what she was earning only just covered the mortgage she was paying on the tiny cottage she had bought in a pretty village several miles away from the town and Oliver’s out-of-school childcare, leaving just enough for food and other essentials.

Childcare! Her lips, normally soft and sweetly curved, hardened and thinned. She was the best person to be providing her son with childcare, but she was not in a financial position to be able to do so.

Her current job was the first rung on the career ladder she was going to have to climb in order to support them both properly. The head of her department was due to retire in two years’ time, and Kate had secretly been hoping that if she did her job well enough John might promote her into the vacancy.

Her twenty-fifth birthday wasn’t that far away, and neither was Ollie’s fifth. His fifth birthday and her fifth year of being alone, of being without—Swiftly Kate buried the potentially damaging thoughts. She didn’t need them, she didn’t want them, and she damn well wasn’t going to let them disturb her hard-won peace of mind.

It was her future she needed to focus on, and not her past! This takeover could destroy any chance she might have had of such a promotion, but it might also give her increased opportunities, she reflected, as she studied some comparison charts she had set up on her own initiative, to see which customers could be approached to increase their orders.

As she stood in the open doorway of the small village nursery and watched her son run towards her, his face lighting up as he saw her, Kate felt her heart contract with love. When she bent to scoop him up into her arms, and buried her face into the warm flesh of his neck to breathe in his delicious little-boy smell, she knew that no matter what sacrifices she had to make, or how hard she had to work, she would do it for Ollie’s sake.

A small frown pleated her forehead as she looked round the classroom, empty now of the other children. She had chosen to live in the village because she had wanted to provide Ollie with a sense of belonging and community, to provide him with the kind of childhood she herself had been denied. But living here meant she had to travel to the city to work, which in turn meant that Ollie had to wait for her long after the others had been collected.

She had never intended that her child should grow up like this—an only child with no family other than her. She had wanted things to be so different for her child, her children, than they had been for her.

Two loving parents, siblings, the sure knowledge of being loved and wanted. The sure knowledge of being loved and wanted!

Pain gripped her. It had been five years—surely only a woman with no sense of self-worth or self-respect would allow herself to think about a man who had betrayed her love and rejected her? A man who had sworn love for ever, who had sworn that he shared her dreams and goals, who had taught her to trust and love him, and who had whispered against her lips as he took her virginal body that he wanted to give her his child, that he wanted to surround that child with love and security.

A man who had lied to her and left her brokenhearted, disillusioned, and completely alone.

To be with him she had gone against the wishes of the aunt and uncle who had brought her up, and because of that they had disowned her.

Not that Kate would have wanted her aunt and uncle involved in the life of her precious son. They might have given her a home when she had been orphaned, but they had done so out of duty and not love. And she had craved love so badly, so very badly.

‘Ollie was beginning to worry.’

The faint hint of reproach in the nursery teacher’s voice made Kate wince inwardly.

‘I know I’m a bit late,’ she apologised. ‘There was an accident on the bypass.’

The nursery teacher was comfortably round and in late middle age. She had grandchildren herself, and her small charges loved and respected her. Kate had lost count of the number of time she had heard Ollie insisting, ‘But Mary says…’

Ten minutes later Kate was unlocking the door to their small cottage. It was right in the centre of the village, its front windows overlooking the green, with its duck pond, and at the back of the house a long narrow garden.

Ollie was a sturdily built child, with firm solid muscles and a head of thick black curls. An inheritance from his father, although Ollie himself did not know it.

So far as Kate was concerned the man who had fathered her son no longer existed, and she refused to allow him any place in their lives. Ollie’s placid nature meant that until recently he had accepted that he did not have a father, without asking Kate very many questions about him. However, the fact that his new best friend did have a father had led to Ollie starting to want to know more.

Kate frowned. So far Ollie had been content with her responses, but it made her heart ache to see the way he watched longingly whilst Tom Lawson played with his son.

Sean unfurled his long body from the seat of his Mercedes and stood still whilst he looked at the building in front of him.

His handmade Savile Row suit sat elegantly on his lean-limbed body, the jacket subtly masking the powerful breadth of his shoulders and the muscles he had built up in the years when he had earned his living hiring himself out to whichever builder would take him on.

His sweat had gone into the making of more than one motorway, as well as several housing estates, but even in those days as an ill-educated teenager he had promised himself that one day things would be different, that one day he would be the man giving the orders and not taking them.

As a young child he’d literally had to fight for his food until, aged five, he’d been abandoned by his hippie mother and been taken into care. In his twenties he had spent his days building extensions, and anything else he would get paid for, and his nights studying for a Business Studies degree. He had celebrated his thirty-first birthday by selling the building company he had built up from nothing for twenty million. Had he wanted to do so, he could have retired. But that was not his way. He had seen the potential of companies such as John’s and had seized the opportunities with both hands. He was now thirty-five.

He had big expansion plans for the business he had just acquired, but for his plans to succeed he needed the right kind of workforce. A dedicated, energetic, enthusiastic and ambitious workforce. This morning he was going to meet his new employees, and he was going to assess them in the same way he had assessed those who had worked for him when he had first set up in business—by meeting them face to face. Then—and only then—would he read their personnel files.

He was an arrestingly good-looking man, but the early-morning sunlight picked out the harsh lines that slashed from his nose to his mouth and revealed a man of gritty determination who rarely smiled. He wore his obvious sexuality with open cynicism, and it glittered in the dense Celtic blue of his eyes now, as a young woman stopped walking to give him an appreciative and appraising look.

In the years since he had made his millions he had been pursued by some extraordinarily beautiful women, but Sean knew that they would have turned away in disgust and contempt from the young man he had once been.

Something—part bitterness and part pain—took the warmth from his gaze and dulled its blueness.

He had come a long way from what he had once been. A long way—and yet still not far enough?

Locking his car, he started to stride towards the building.

Kate could feel perspiration beginning to dew her forehead as she willed the traffic lights to change. Her stomach was so tight with nervous anxiety that it hurt.

She had swallowed her normal pride last night and asked Carol, Ollie’s best friend’s mother, if she could leave Ollie with her at seven-thirty for her to take him on to school with her son George. The pain in her stomach intensified. She hated treating her precious son as though he was a…a bundle of washing!

Why on earth had the new owner insisted on them arriving so early? Was he just unthinking, or uncaring? Whichever it was, it did not bode well for her future with the company, she decided fretfully.

As she reached the traffic lights she saw the broken-down car which had been the cause of the delay. It was already ten past eight, and it would take her at least another ten minutes to get to work.

Half past eight! Kate gritted her teeth as she hurried into the building. She was already walking fast, and she broke into an anxious run as she covered the last few yards. But the hope she had had that she might be able to slide discreetly into John’s office whilst the meeting was still in progress was destroyed as the door opened and her colleagues came out into the corridor.

‘You’re late!’ Laura whispered as she saw Kate. ‘What happened?’

It was difficult to talk with so many people in the corridor.

‘I’ll tell you later—’ she began, and then froze as two men came through the door.

One of them was John, and the other…the other…

The other was her ex-husband!

‘Perhaps you’d like to tell me—now?’

How well she remembered that smooth chocolate voice, with its underlying ice.

People were staring at her, Kate realised, and she fought off her sick shock.

John was looking anguished and uncomfortable. ‘Sean, I think perhaps…I am sure that…’

Arrogantly ignoring John, Sean demanded, ‘In here!’ He was holding the door open, waiting for her to walk past him and into John’s office.

For a moment their gazes met and clashed, battled, topaz fighting dense blue for supremacy.

Her ex-husband was their new boss!

How could fate have dealt her such a low blow?

When Sean had walked out of her life to be with the woman he was leaving her for she had prayed that she would never, ever have to see him again. She had given him everything she had had to give—defying her aunt and uncle to be with him, helping and encouraging him, loving him—but that had not been enough for him. She had not been enough for him. The success she had helped him to achieve had meant that he no longer considered her good enough for him.

She was holding her breath and badly needed to exhale, but she was terrified that if she did she was going to start shaking—and there was so way she was going to allow Sean to witness that kind of vulnerability.

How well she remembered that challenging hard-edged blue gaze. He had looked at her like that the first time they had met, defying her to ignore him. No one would dare to ignore him now.

‘Kate is a very—’ She could hear John about to defend her.

‘Thank you, John. I shall deal with this myself,’ Sean announced curtly as she walked past him into the room, and he closed the door, excluding John from his own office.

‘Kate?’ he demanded grimly. ‘What happened to Kathy?’

Just hearing him say that name resurrected far too many painful memories. She had been Kathy when he had taunted her the first time they had met, for being too posh to dance with a man like him. And she had been Kathy too when he had taken her in his arms and shown her—Fiercely she pushed away the tormenting memories.

Tilting her chin, she said coldly, ‘Kathy?’ She gave a mirthless laugh. ‘She doesn’t exist any longer, Sean. You destroyed her when you destroyed our marriage.’

‘And your surname is?’ Sean wondered whether she could hear or understand the cause of the anger that was making his throat raw and his voice terse as he grappled with his own shock.

‘Kate Vincent,’ Kate answered him coldly.

‘Vincent?’ he questioned savagely.

‘Yes, Vincent. You didn’t think I would want to keep your name, did you? And I certainly didn’t want my aunt and uncle’s—after all, like you, they didn’t want me.’

‘So you remarried just to change your name?’

Anger darkened Kate’s eyes as she heard the contempt in his voice.

‘Why were you late?’ Sean demanded abruptly. ‘Didn’t he want to let you out of his bed?’

Furious colour scorched Kate’s face.

‘Just because you—’ she began, and then stopped, swallowing hard as out of nowhere the memories started to fill her head. Sean waking her up in the morning with the gentlest of kisses…that was until she was fully awake…and then…

She could feel the tension building up inside her body, a tension activated by memories crowding out the reality she was trying desperately hard to cling on to, to use as a bulwark.

A bulwark? Against what? The love she had once felt for Sean had been completely destroyed, and by Sean himself. Cruelly and deliberately. Her body stiffened with pride. She was glad that he thought she had found someone else. Married someone else.

Had he married the woman he had left her for?

Sean’s mobile rang, and he answered it, frowning briefly as he told Kate that she could go.

As she turned to leave Kate heard a female voice saying, quite clearly, ‘Sean, darling…’

Kate was halfway through clearing out her desk when Laura came in.

‘What on earth are you doing?’ she demanded.

‘Clearing my desk. What does it look like?’ Kate responded tersely.

‘You’re leaving?’

Kate could see how shocked and dismayed Laura was.

‘You mean he’s sacked you just for being late?’

Kate permitted herself a thin and slightly bitter smile. ‘No, he hasn’t sacked me, but let’s just say I’m leaving ahead of having him do so.’

‘Oh, Kate, no!’ Laura protested, obviously upset. ‘I can see that things have got off to bad start for you—!’ She stopped, biting her lip and looking uncomfortable.

Laura would never make a politician, Kate reflected wryly, witnessing her colleague’s discomfort.

‘Laura?’ she prodded firmly.

‘Well, I’m sure he didn’t mean anything—to be critical…or unkind. But I did hear Sean asking John where you were,’ Laura admitted reluctantly, adding quickly, ‘I’m sure he’ll be understanding, Kate. He seems such a sweetie, and so gorgeous.’

A sweetie! Sean! Kate suppressed a bitter laugh.

Sean might be many things, but he had never been a sweetie—not even when she had first known him.

A tough, streetwise, untamed rogue male, who could make a girl go weak at the knees and hot in places she hadn’t previously known existed with just one taunting look, that was what he had been. And she…

Her face started to burn as she recognised where her unwanted thoughts were leading. She switched on her computer and started to type.

‘Oh, thank goodness you’ve changed your mind,’ Laura began, with relief, but Kate shook her head.

‘No, I haven’t. I’m just typing out my notice,’ Kate informed her crisply.

‘Your notice! Oh, Kate.’ Laura looked aghast, and immediately tried to dissuade her, but Kate refused to let herself be swayed.

Finishing her typing, she checked and then printed off her letter, placing it neatly in an envelope, which she put in the internal post tray.