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.

Time For Trust
Penny Jordan

www.millsandboon.co.uk

CHAPTER ONE

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.

Her father’s plan was that she would follow in his footsteps, learning their business from the bottom rung, slowly making her way up the ladder, moving from department to department.

Everyone had been kind to her, but she had felt suffocated by the weight of her responsibility, by the bank itself and its solidity. Whenever she could she escaped to Avon to stay with her godmother, an old schoolfriend of her mother’s.

She knew that she was disappointing her parents—that they could not understand the malaise that affected her.

And then came the event that was to have such a cataclysmic effect on her life…

Warningly, the clock chimed the quarter hour. She mustn’t miss the post.

Sighing softly, she got up, a tall, almost too slender young woman, with a soft, full mouth and vulnerable grey eyes. Her hair was that shade somewhere between blonde and brown. The summer sun had lightened it in places, giving its smooth, straight length a fashionably highlighted effect.

As it swung forwards to obscure her profile she pushed it back off her face with a surprisingly strong and supple hand. Her wrists looked too fragile to support such strength, but her long hours spent working on her tapestries had strengthened the muscles.

This particular commission on which she was working was for a young couple who had recently moved into a large house just outside Bath. He was predictably something in the City. She was pleasant enough, but slightly pretentious. They had two children, both as yet under five, but both boys were down to attend prestigious boarding-schools.

The tapestry, a modern one, was to be the focal point of a large, rectangular, galleried hallway and was to be hung so that it was the first thing that caught the visitor’s eye upon entering the house. Jessica had given a good deal of thought to its subject matter.

Arabella Moore had said vaguely that she was quite happy to leave everything to her; she had apparently seen some of her work in the shop in Bath, and had additionally read the very good report that had appeared in a prestigious glossy magazine, praising Jessica’s innovative skills.

‘Something amusing and witty,’ was the only specification Arabella had made, and Jessica only hoped that her client would be happy with her design. As yet she had not started work on the tapestry itself. The design was still very much at the drawing-board stage, awaiting completion then approval from Arabella.

As always when she was engrossed in a project, Jessica resented anything that took her away from it.

As she went to open her workroom door she heard an indignant yowl from outside and grimaced to herself, wondering what trophy Cluny her cat had brought back for her to admire. Cluny had been a stray, rescued one stormy November night, when she had found him crouched, wet and shivering, in her back garden. Now fully grown, he was sleek and black, and full of his own importance.

She opened the door and looked outside, giving a faint sigh of relief at the lack of any small, furry corpse. Cluny was a hunter, and nothing she could say to him seemed to make any difference, so she had had to learn to live with his uncivilised habit of bringing her back gifts of small, pathetic, lifeless bodies.

Everyone had a right to life, she believed that most passionately and intensely, and always had, but her belief had grown stronger and fiercer ever since she herself had come face to face with the realisation that her own life could end between the taking of one breath and the next, and despite the security of her cottage and the sheltered life-style she now lived, seeing only a few close friends, admitting no one new to her circle until she felt completely secure with them, there was still that haunting fear which had never really left her.

It had been a good summer, but now they were into October, and the blue sky beyond her window held the clear pureness that warned of dropping temperatures. She was wearing jeans and a thick woollen sweater, because, despite the fact that the rest of the cottage was centrally heated, she preferred to keep her workroom free of anything that might damage the valuable antique tapestries she sometimes worked on at home.

The cottage had a sharp, narrow flight of stairs which she preferred to keep polished in the old-fashioned way, a central runner kept in place with stair-rods—both the rods and the runner had been lucky finds at an antique fair. The runner, once cleaned, had proved to have a strength of colour which went well with the cottage’s oak stairs and floors.

Only one or two of her prospective clients had ever remarked that surely modern fitted carpets would be both warmer and cleaner, and these clients had always proved to be the difficult ones—the ones to whom her work was something that had newly become fashionable and who really had no true appreciation of its history and art.

Downstairs she had a small, comfortable sitting-room with windows overlooking her tiny front garden and beyond it the main road that ran through the village, and a good-sized kitchen-cum-dining-room-cum-sitting-room which she had furnished mainly with antiques picked up here and there from various sales.

Only the kitchen cupboards were modern, and that was because the lack of space forced her to make the maximum use of every corner. Solid oak and limed, they had been built by a local craftsman and added a pleasing lightness to the low-beamed ceilinged room.

A scrubbed farmhouse table divided the kitchen area of the room from the sitting area. She had retained the open fireplace, and alongside it against the wall was a comfortable sofa draped with a soft woollen blanket and covered with tapestry cushions.

The stone floor was warmed by a collection of rugs, but the thing that struck strangers most forcibly about Jessica’s home was the startling amount of vibrant colour. Those who had only met her outside her home assumed that, because she chose to wear camouflage colours of beige, olive and taupe, her home would echo these subtle but sometimes dull shades. Instead, it was full of vibrant rich reds, blues, greens and golds put so harmoniously together that the surprised visitor came away with the sensation of having been exposed to something exceptionally alive and warming.

No one was more aware of dichotomy between her habitat and her personal mode of dress than Jessica herself. Once, as a child, she had pleaded with her mother to be allowed to have a rich ruby velvet dress. She could see it in her mind’s eye now, feel the delicious warmth of the supple fabric, smell its rich scent. Her mother had been aghast, controlling her own distaste for the dress by gently pointing her in the direction of another one in muted olive Viyella. And she had learned then that little girls who were going to grow up to run a merchant bank did not dress in rich ruby velvet.

Now out of habit rather than anything else she still wore those same colours gently dictated by her mother. Not that clothes interested her anyway—not in the way that fabrics, colours and textures did. Clothes were simply the means one used to protect one’s body from heat and cold…and, in her case, to provide her with the protection of anonymity.

No one would look twice at a slender young woman, unremarkable of face and figure, dressed in dull, practical clothes. No one would pick her out as a target…a victim…

Her parents had never understood her decision to come and live and work in Avon. They had pleaded with her to change her mind, but she had remained steadfast, and she had had the report of her doctor to back her up. Peace and tranquillity, relief from pressure, a need to recuperate and gather up her mental strength—that was what he had advised.

That had been five years ago. Now her parents accepted, albeit reluctantly, that she lived a different life from theirs.

Her mother had never given up trying to coax her back to London. Every few months she had a fresh attempt—still hoping, perhaps, for that all-important grandson—but Jessica shied away from the commitment that marriage involved. She was free for the first time in her life, and that was the way she intended to stay. Marriage meant responsibilities, duties, putting others’ feelings first…She didn’t want that.

In her hall she picked up her parcel and let herself out into the small front garden. The sun was warm, but the air cool once she stepped into the shadows. She paused to admire the dwarf Michaelmas daisies she had planted much earlier in the year. Their rich massing of purple, mauve and lilac pleased her and she bent to touch their petals gently. Gardening was her second love, and she planted her garden in much the same way as she worked on her tapestries, but with the artist’s fine eye for colour and form.

The post office was the only shop in the village; the nearest garage was ten miles away in the small market town, and the post office was very much the focus of village life. Mrs Gillingham, who ran it, knew all the local gossip and passed it on to her customers with genial impartiality. Jessica interested her. It was unusual for so young and pretty a woman to live so very much alone. Martha Gillingham put her single state down to a broken romance in her past, romantically assuming that it was this relationship which had led to her arrival in the village and to her single state.

She was quite wrong.

Jessica had never been in love. Initially because there had never been time. At university she had worked desperately hard for her degree, terrified of disappointing her parents’ hopes for her, and then when she joined the bank everyone had known exactly who she was—the daughter of the bank’s chairman—and that knowledge had isolated her from the other young people working there.

And then, after what had happened, the last thing on her mind had been falling in love. She liked her single state and was content with it, but something in the speculative way Mrs Gillingham always questioned her about her private life made her feel raw and hurt inside, as though the postmistress had uncovered a wound she hadn’t known was there.

Not that there was anything malicious in her questions. She was just inquisitive, and over the years Jessica had learned to parry them with tact and diplomacy.

Today she had the attention of the postmistress to herself. She was just waiting for her parcel to be weighed when she felt the cold rush of air behind her as the door opened.

The postmistress stopped what she was doing to smile warmly at the newcomer, exclaiming, ‘Good morning, Mr Hayward! Are you all settled in yet?’

‘Not yet, I’m afraid.’

The man had a deep, pleasant voice, and even without looking at him Jessica knew that he was smiling. She had heard from the milkman about this newcomer who had moved into the once lovely, but now derelict Carolean house on the outskirts of the village, but so far she hadn’t actually met him.

‘In fact, I was wondering if you could help me,’ he was saying, and then added, ‘but please finish serving this young lady first.’

The faint touch of reproof in his voice startled Jessica, giving the words far more than the form of mere good manners.

She turned round instinctively and was confronted by a tall, almost overpoweringly male man, dressed in jeans similar to her own and a thick sweater over a woollen shirt, his dark hair flecked with what looked like spots of white paint, and a rather grim expression in his eyes.

There was something about him that suggested that he wasn’t the kind to suffer fools gladly. All Jessica knew about him was that he had bought the house at auction, and that he was planning to virtually camp out in it while the builders worked to make it habitable.

He had arrived in the village only that weekend, and had apparently been having most of his meals at the Bell, the local pub, because the kitchen up at the house was unusable.

She had heard that he worked in London, and that being the case Jessica would have thought it would be more sensible of him to stay there at least until such time as his house was habitable.

Mrs Gillingham had finished weighing the parcel, and, summing up the situation with a skilled and speedy eye, quickly performed introductions, giving Jessica no option but to take the hard brown hand extended to her and to respond to his quick ‘Please call me Daniel,’ with a similarly friendly gesture.

‘Jessica Collingwood…’ His eyebrows drew together briefly, as though somehow he was disconcerted, the pressure of his grip hardening slightly, and then he was relaxing, releasing her and saying evenly, ‘Jessica—it suits you.’

And yet Jessica had the impression that the flattery was an absent-minded means of deflecting her attention away from that momentary tense surprise that had leapt to his eyes as he’d repeated her name.

Mrs Gillingham, eyeing them with satisfaction, went on enlighteningly. ‘Jessica makes tapestries, Mr Hayward. You’ll have to go and look at her work,’she added archly. ‘It’s just the sort of thing you’re going to need for that house of yours.’

Jessica gritted her teeth at this piece of arch manipulation and hoped that Daniel Hayward would realise that this arrant piece of salesmanship was not at her instigation.

It seemed he did, because he gave her a warm, reassuring smile and then said ruefully, ‘Unfortunately, before I can hang any tapestries on them I’m going to have to have some walls. This…’ he touched his hair gingerly ‘…is the result of an unsafe ceiling collapsing on me this morning.’ His face suddenly went grim and Jessica shivered, recognising that here was the real man, the pure male essence of him in the hard, flat determination she could read in his eyes.

‘I’ve sacked the builder I was using for negligence, and I was hoping you might be able to give me the names of some others from whom I might get estimates…’

Mrs Gillingham pursed her mouth, trying not to look flattered by this appeal. ‘Well, there’s Ron Todd. He does a lot of work hereabouts…and then there’s that man you had to do your kitchen, Jessica. What’s his name?’

‘Alan Pierce,’ Jessica informed her, helplessly being drawn into the conversation, wanting to stay and bask in the warm admiration she could read so clearly in Daniel Hayward’s lion-gold eyes, and at the same time wanting desperately to escape before she became helplessly involved in something she sensed instinctively was dangerous.

‘Oh, yes, that’s it…Well, he’s very good. Made a fine job of Jessica’s kitchen. You ought to see it…’

Numbly Jessica recognised that she was being given a very firm push in the direction Mrs Gillingham had decided she was going to take.

No need to enquire if Daniel Hayward was married or otherwise attached. Mrs Gillingham was a strict moralist, and if she was playing matchmaker then it could only be in the knowledge that he was single.

Helplessly, torn between anger and a strange, sweet stirring of excited pleasure, she found herself stumblingly inviting Daniel to call round and see how Alan Pierce had transformed her two small, dark rooms into her large, comfortable living kitchen.

‘But, of course…you must be busy…and…’

He started to say that he wasn’t, when suddenly the post office door banged open.

A man came in, masked and holding a gun. He motioned to them all with it and said gutturally, ‘Over there, all of you!’

Mrs Gillingham was protesting shrilly. At her side, Jessica was dimly conscious of Daniel Hayward’s protective bulk coming between her and the man, but he couldn’t protect her! Nothing could. It was her worst nightmare come back to haunt her. She started to tremble, dragged back into that time in the past—that awful, unforgettable day that had changed the whole course of her life…

CHAPTER TWO

JESSICA had left for work at eight o’clock as she always did. She liked to arrive at the bank at the same time as the other staff. Her father arrived later, his chauffeur dropping him off outside the bank’s premises at about nine-thirty.

There was nothing remarkable about the day. It was late March, cold and blustery still, with no real hint of spring. She was wrapped up against the cold wind in the navy wool coat which seemed to be the uniform of ambitious, career-minded young women, her hair styled sleekly in the expensive bob that her parents liked so much, its colour subtly enlivened by monthly visits to an expensive Knightsbridge hairdresser.

Beneath her coat she was wearing a navy businesslike suit and a striped cotton blouse which more resembled a man’s shirt than a woman’s.

On her feet she had good quality, low-heeled leather pumps, and when she got on the tube she mingled anonymously into the crowd of similarly dressed young women.

The bank, like others of its kind, was situated inside that part of London known as the ‘City’, several streets off Threadneedle Street, taking up a prominent corner position in a small square.

The commissionaire greeted Jessica with a smile that held just that hint of knowing deference. She was acutely conscious of the fact that, while she was supposed to be treated just as any other junior member of the staff, she was in fact being handled cautiously with kid gloves not just by her fellow workers, but also by her superiors, all of whom were very conscious of the fact that she was the chairman’s daughter.

It wasn’t an enviable position, despite what some of her contemporaries thought—she had overheard one of the other girls making catty remarks about her in the cloakroom. She felt set apart from the other girls, alien to them, all too aware of their muted hostility.

Not that being her father’s daughter actually afforded her the type of privileges they seemed to think. In the evening, when they were out discoing and enjoying themselves, she was at home being catechised by her father as to what she had learned. Her degree did not exempt her from sitting all her Institute exams, and she was all too conscious that he was expecting her to do well.

The pressure on her, well-meant and proud though it was, kept her weight a little under what it ought to be for her height. Even now, early in her working day, she was conscious of an unhealthy tension across her shoulder-blades.

Tonight was the night she went to advanced evening classes for embroidery; the one bright shining pleasure in her otherwise tension-filled week.

She knew that, no matter how much she strove, working in the bank was never going to be anything other than a duty, and a reluctant one at that, but she just couldn’t bring herself to disappoint her parents—especially her father—by telling them that she could not fulfil their ambitions for her.

This particular morning there was no commissionaire on duty, but when she turned the handle on the door of the back entrance to the bank, which the staff used on arriving and leaving, she found that the door was unlocked.

She walked into the familiar Stygian darkness of the narrow Victorian passage that led to the offices and cubby-holes at the back of the banking hall proper.

The first thing that struck her as she emerged into the general office was the silence…the second was the group of masked, armed men, one of whom was advancing grimly towards her, the rest holding the other members of the staff in a silent, threatened group.

‘Get over there and keep your mouth closed.’

Her body trembling with shock, she did as she was instructed. It took several seconds for it to fully dawn on her that this was that most dreaded of all events within the banking community—an armed bank raid.

In such events, all bank staff were instructed not to try to do anything that might risk either their lives or those of others.

As she joined the silent group, Jessica saw that her father’s second in command was among them, his normally highly coloured fleshy features a shade of old tallow. As her father’s second in command he was in charge of one set of vault keys, while the bank accountant held the other. Together every morning they would unlock the vault so that the cashiers could collect cash for their tills.

Whenever necessary, and never normally on a regular basis, fresh supplies of cash were delivered from the nearby Bank of England. Only yesterday, late in the afternoon after close of banking hours, they had received an exceptionally large consignment of cash, and Jessica realised in sick fear that somehow the thieves must have known of this.

In retrospect, the ordeal of waiting while each member of staff arrived and was duly imprisoned with his or her colleagues seemed to be dragged out over a lifetime of unimaginable terror and shock.

None of them had any way of knowing what was to happen to them…whether they would all emerge unharmed from their ordeal.

On this particular day, Jessica knew that her father was not due into the bank until after lunch, having a morning appointment with an important customer. It seemed the thieves knew it as well, because just as soon as they were sure that all the staff had arrived they took them all at gunpoint to one of the large safes beneath the branch and shut them in it under armed guard.

Still forbidden to speak, and under the silent, masked threat of the gunmen facing them, they felt tension fill the room like a sour taste in the air.

All of them were close to breaking-point, but still it came as something of a shock when one of the other girls, the one who had been so catty about her working in the bank, suddenly called out frantically to their guard, ‘She’s the one you ought to be concentrating on. She’s the chairman’s daughter. She’s far more use to you than we are.’

Jessica held her breath, her chest painfully tight with anxiety and fear as the gunman turned slowly in her direction. Through the slits in his mask, she could see the icy glitter of his eyes. He motioned to her to step forward. When she hesitated, John Knowles, the accountant, bravely stepped in front of her, saying quickly, ‘She’s just a girl. Let her be.’

When the gunman hit him on the side of his head with the butt of his gun, a massed audible breath of shock rippled through them all.

Shaking with tension, Jessica obeyed the gunman’s instruction to step forward. He walked slowly round her, the sensation of him standing behind her making the hairs rise in the nape of her neck.

So this was terror, this thick, cold sensation that bordered on paralysis, freezing the body and yet leaving the mind sharply clear to assimilate the vulnerabilities of her position.

The sound of the safe door opening took the gunman from behind her to join his fellow members of the gang. In the low-toned conversation they exchanged Jessica caught her own name, but not much else, and then to her horror she was being told to walk towards them. Flanked on either side by a gunman, she was escorted from the safe.

Hearing the safe door clang closed behind her was the very worst sound she had ever heard. Behind that closed door were her colleagues, safe now, surely, while she…

‘Better take her upstairs to the boss,’ the second gunman instructed the first.

The ‘boss’ was a powerfully built man with the coldest, shrewdest eyes she had ever seen.

‘Chairman’s daughter, is she?’ he repeated when informed of her status.

‘Yeah. I thought we could get a good ransom.’

A quick turn of the ‘boss’s’ hand silenced her jailer.

‘We’ll take her with us,’ the ‘boss’ announced chillingly after studying her for several seconds. ‘She can be our insurance.’

What followed still haunted her in her nightmares. Blindfolded and gagged, she was bundled out of the bank and directly into the kind of armoured vehicle normally used by security companies. Once inside she could sense the presence of other people, even though they remained silent.

The van was driven away and she heard someone saying, ‘How long do you reckon before anyone can raise the alarm?’

‘Bank’s supposed to be open in five minutes. That should give us half an hour or so before anyone realises what’s happened…It will take them a fair time to break into the safe. The only other set of keys are held by the chairman, and he’s out in Kent.’

‘By the time they do get hold of them we’ll—’

A sudden curse obviously reminded the speaker of her presence and he fell silent. She was sitting on the floor of the van, bound, blindfolded and gagged. Her body ached from the pressure of the hard floor and the fear-induced tension. She was sure she was going to die, to become another statistic of violence and greed, and when the van finally stopped and she was bundled out and half dragged, half carried up flight after flight of stairs and then pushed in a dank, foul-smelling room she was even more convinced that this was the end.

She heard the door close but dared not move, not knowing how many members of the gang were preserving a silent vigil around her. The silence went on and on, a relentless pressure against her stretched eardrums, like a soundless, high-pitched scream, battering at her senses.

Time lost all meaning. Her arms and hands were numb, but still she dared not move, picturing the armed man perhaps sitting in front of her, watching her. Her throat was dry and sore, but she couldn’t ask for a drink. Her body ached, and cramp ran like a violent wrenching wire from her left calf to her ankle.

Outwardly motionless and controlled, inwardly she was falling apart, suffering the most appalling imagined fates, wondering if whoever had said those immortal words ‘a brave man dies once, the coward a thousand times over’ had really any awareness of the true terrors created by the imagination—terrors which had nothing whatsoever to do with one’s ability to endure actual physical pain.

At some point she slipped into a semicomatose state that gave her some relief, a sort of self-induced, drugged miasma of mental agony which separated her from her physical body and its discomforts. She couldn’t move at all…couldn’t do anything other than sit there where she had been left, straining her ears for some other movement in the room.

Quite when she began to realise she might be on her own she had no idea; perhaps it was when the quality of the silence struck her as being empty. She held her breath, listening anxiously for the sound of other breath, trying not to imagine the grinning faces of the gang while they witnessed her pathetic attempts to use what senses were left to her to work out if they were there.

If they were there…She was almost sure they weren’t. Which meant…which meant that she was alone.

She ought to have felt relief, but instead she felt all the blind, frantic panic of a helpless child deserted by its parents. She couldn’t move—her wrists were bound and so were her ankles, and her wrists were tied to some kind of pipe.

She heard a noise—not a human sound…The hairs on her arms stood up in terror as she felt something run across her bare leg. She wanted desperately to scream, but couldn’t remove the gag nor scream through it.

Panic engulfed her; she tried desperately to pull herself free, and succeeded only in rubbing her wrists raw on their bonds so that the broken skin bled.

After panic and terror came dull, destructive acceptance. She was going to die here in this unknown place, and she might as well resign herself to it.

How long had she been here already? Hours…but how many?

She tried to think constructively, but it was impossible. All she wanted now was oblivion, escape…

When the door finally opened, her rescuers were all moved to different degrees of shock and pity by what they saw.

A telephone call to the bank had announced that any attempt to find her or them during the next five hours would result in her death, but that if no attempt was made to track them down for that period then her father would be informed of where she could be found.

Since the police had no idea of where to start looking for the thieves, they had had no option other than to comply with their demands, and against all their expectations they had actually received the promised call later in the day giving the address of a slum-clearance flat in a high-rise block where she could be found.

To Jessica, the debriefing that followed her imprisonment was almost as gruelling as the imprisonment itself, although in a different way.

The whole nightmare affair had left her perilously close to the edge of a complete mental and physical breakdown, with the result that she had finally told her parents that she could not return to the bank, and that instead she was going to use the small inheritance left to her by her maternal grandparents to train for a career much more suited to her now fierce determination to live as quiet and safe a life as possible.

Of course her parents had protested, especially when they had learned she intended moving to Avon.

There was no reason why she couldn’t continue to live at home in London and practise her career from there, they told her, but she refused to be swayed. London was now a place that terrified her. She couldn’t walk down a busy street without being overcome by the feeling that someone was walking behind her, stalking her—without the fear she had known in that small, frightening prison coming back to drag her back down into the pit of self-destructive fear she was only just beginning to leave behind.

In the end her parents had reluctantly given way on the advice of her doctor, who had told them that she needed to find a way of healing herself and coming to terms with what had happened.

That healing process was still going on, and now, suddenly and shockingly, she had been dragged back into that remembered horror.

She saw the gunman coming towards her and started to scream. He lashed out at her with the butt of his gun. She felt a stunning pain like fire in her shoulder, followed by a cold wash of paralysing weakness, and knew that she was going to faint.

When she came round, the small post office was full of people. She was lying on the floor with something under her head and someone kneeling beside her holding her wrist while he measured her pulse.

She looked up cold with fear, trembling with the remembered shock of the past, and encountered the warm gold eyes of Daniel Hayward. His look of warmth and compassion was reassuring and comforting. She tried to sit up, conscious of her undignified prone position and the curious glances of the people standing around her.

As she looked round the shop, Daniel Hayward seemed to know what she was looking for and said quietly, ‘It’s all right. He’s gone.’

‘Gone?’

She looked bewildered, and it was left to Mrs Gillingham to explain excitedly, ‘Mr Hayward was ever so brave. He reached right out and took the gun off him, and told me to open the door and shout for help.’

While Jessica looked uncomprehendingly at him, he said humorously, ‘Not brave, really. I simply made use of the excellent distraction you provided by drawing our friend’s fire, although such a course of action is not really to be recommended. You’ll be lucky if your arm isn’t out of action for a good few days, I’m afraid.’

Her arm…Jessica tried to lift it and gasped as the pain coursed like fire though the bruised muscles.

‘It’s all right…nothing’s actually broken,’ Daniel Hayward was telling her reassuringly. ‘But that was a nasty blow you took, and there’s bound to be some very considerable bruising. Look,’ he offered quietly, ‘why don’t you let me take you home? I’ve got my car outside. Mrs Gillingham has sent someone to fetch the doctor, but I think you’ll feel much more comfortable lying on your own bed than lying here…’

He was so understanding, so concerned, so gentle in the way that he touched her, gently helping her to her feet. She couldn’t ever remember a man treating her like this before, nor herself wanting one to. Almost instinctively she leaned against him, letting him take her slender weight as he guided her towards the door, politely refusing the offers of help showered on them both.

‘I suspect the police will probably want to interview you later,’ he told her gently as he settled her in the passenger seat of an immaculate and brand new Daimler saloon. Her father always drove a Daimler, and she was aware of a certain, unexpected nostalgic yearning for her parents’ presence as he set the car in motion.

The last time she had seen them had been Christmas, when she had paid a reluctant duty visit to her old home. She had been on edge and nervous the whole time she was there—not so much because of her old fear of London’s crowds and anonymity, she had recognised in some surprise, but because of her deep-rooted guilt, and fear that somehow or other her parents would succeed in gently pressuring her into returning to her old life…a life she knew she could no longer tolerate because of the restrictions it placed upon her.

Although the gulf between them saddened her, although she was still consumed with guilt in knowing that she had let them down, she still found her new life immensely fulfilling—immensely satisfying and pleasing in an entirely personal and difficult-to-explain way, other than to say it was as though she had now found a piece of herself which had previously been missing, and that in doing so she had completed her personality, making it whole.

‘Which house is it?’ Daniel Hayward asked her. ‘Mrs G said it was along here somewhere…’

She gathered her thoughts and indicated which house was hers, conscious of the discreet twitching of curtains as he stopped the Daimler outside and then got out.

Her neighbours were elderly and very kind, and would doubtless be all agog with curiosity and shock once they heard what had happened.

It had been idiotic of her to react like that. The man had obviously not been much of a threat after all, but she had panicked remembering…

‘I think I’d better carry you inside,’ Daniel told her easily. ‘You still look pretty groggy.’

She wanted to protest, but she felt too weak, her body fluid and amorphous as he swung her up into his arms. It was only a short distance to her front door, but long enough for her to feel the measured beat of his heart and to register the strength in the arms which held her.

Such intimacy with another human being was alien and unfamiliar to her, and yet beneath the rapid thudding of her pulse, beneath the dregs of fear induced by the attempted robbery, and beneath even the instinctive, defensive coiling of her muscles as they locked in protest against the sensation of being so completely within the physical power of someone else, ran another feeling, slow, golden, like a full and lazy river warmed by a summer’s heat, its flow so deceptively slow that one wasn’t aware of the relentlessness of its strength until it was too late to swim against it.

Her heart seemed to miss a beat and then another; her fingers curled into the roughness of his sweater, and, as though he sensed what was running through her mind and the enormity of her struggle to comprehend the bewildering range of the conflicting emotions she was suffering, he looked at her, the golden eyes calm and gentle, almost as though he knew her fear and was reassuring her.

As he unlocked the door to her house and carried her inside she had the crazy feeling that an intimacy had been born between them that cut through the normal barriers of convention and defensiveness which held the sexes apart. It was as though at some very deep level they had reached out and communicated wordlessly with one another, and that that communication held a silent promise for both their futures. What futures? She was alone, independent, by preference, by choice.

It was odd to hear him ask her quite mundanely, ‘Shall I help you upstairs, or…?’

She shook her head.

‘No…The sofa in the kitchen will be just as comfortable as my bed,’ she told him quickly. ‘It’s through that door.’

He put her down and then announced that he intended to stay with her until the doctor arrived to check her over, softening his statement with a warm smile. In repose his face possessed a hard purposefulness which in other circumstances would have repelled her. It made him look too much like the fiercely competitive and power-hungry men who moved in her parents’ social circle.

The thought disconcerted her, and as he released her he frowned and asked curtly, ‘What’s wrong? Did I hurt you?’

The words seemed to echo warningly inside her, making her shiver with the knowledge of how easily this man could hurt her, and then she looked up at him and saw only the concern softening the harshness of his face, and the anxiety shadowing the clear golden warmth of his eyes.

She shook her head, half marvelling at how at ease she felt with him, almost as though he were an old and valued friend.

But he was a stranger—outwardly at least—and she was perhaps reading more into his kindness than she ought, taking up more of his time than she ought, allowing him far more into her life than she ought.

As she struggled to thank him and offer him an opportunity to leave, he stunned her by taking hold of her hands and holding them firmly within the grip of his own.

‘I’m staying,’ he told her evenly.

His palms were slightly calloused, the strength in his grip reminding her of his maleness. Comforting her. In reality the last thing she wanted was to be left alone to relive the horror of that other time…to remember the choking, destructive horror of the fear she had experienced then. That must be why she felt almost like clinging to him, why she wanted to be with him.

While they were waiting for the doctor he made them both a cup of tea, nodding approvingly when he saw the squat canisters with their differing blends of leaves so much more flavorsome than the dull uniformity of mass-produced tea-bags.

The one he chose, Russian Caravan, was one of her own favourites, drunk piping hot, its taste sharpened with a slice of lemon.

He let her sip hers in silence and then said, complimenting her, ‘I like this room. It’s comfortable…lived in. It has the kind of ambiance I want for my own place.’

Jessica laughed, amused that this obviously wealthy man whose house, even in its present state of dereliction, was far grander than her own small cottage should admire her simple décor.

‘I should have thought for a house like yours you’d have wanted to get in interior designers,’ she commented.

To her surprise he shook his head.

‘No. The house is going to be my home, not a set piece that looks like a photograph out of a glossy magazine. Mind you, I’m a long way from the decorating and furnishing stage as yet. As I discovered this morning, there’s some pretty bad damp damage, and an awful lot of restoration work to be done, simply to bring the fabric of the building up to scratch. At the moment I’m virtually camped out in a couple of rooms.’ He grimaced wryly. ‘I was hoping to get the worst of the repairs over before Christmas, that’s why I’m so damned annoyed with this builder.’

‘Wouldn’t it have been more sensible to stay in London at least until the house is habitable?’ Jessica asked him, curiosity about him overcoming the dull ache in her arm.

‘Sensible, perhaps,’ he agreed. ‘But there comes a time when living and working at the hectic pace demanded by city life begins to pall. My business necessitates my working in the City, but I don’t have to live there. Once I’d made the choice to move out…’ He shrugged meaningfully, and Jessica guessed that he was a man who, once he had made a decision, seldom changed his mind.

‘Your business…?’ she asked and then hesitated, wondering if her questions were too intrusive. She had never felt anything to match the fierce need she was now experiencing to know everything there was to know about this man. He filled her senses, absorbing her attention to the exclusion of everything else, and these sensations were a phenomenon to her. She found it hard to understand how she, normally so cautious in her dealings with others, could feel so at ease with this stranger, and yet at the same time so keyed up, so buoyed up by his presence that everything in her life now seemed to be coloured by her reactions to him.

She sensed his hesitation in answering her question and flushed uncomfortably. Was she being too pushy, too inquisitive? After all, she had no previous experience to go on—no past relationships in her life to show her how to deal with the sensations he was arousing inside her.

But at last he answered her, his voice oddly sombre as he told her almost reluctantly, ‘I’m an economist. I work in the City.’

An economist. She guessed vaguely that he was probably involved in some way with the stock market, and, knowing how secretive people involved in the sales of stocks and shares sometimes had to be, she felt she could understand his reticence and quickly changed the subject.

‘Quite a few City people have moved out this way recently, although we are a bit off the beaten track. It isn’t unknown for the village to be snowed in in a bad winter,’ she warned him, but he laughed and seemed unconcerned by the threat of not being able to reach the City.

‘What about you?’ he challenged her. ‘I’ve already heard all about your tapestries. In fact, I suspect that the marvellous creation I recently admired hanging on a friend’s wall was designed and made by you, but surely from a selling point of view you’d do better living somewhere, if not central to London, then, say, like Bath, where there’s a thriving interior decoration industry.’

‘I don’t like cities…or crowds,’ she told him shortly. The ache in her shoulder was nagging painfully. ‘I prefer to live somewhere quiet.’

‘And isolated?’ he probed skilfully, the golden eyes watching her as she looked at him in startled defensiveness. ‘It wasn’t so difficult to deduce,’ he told her gently, as though answering her unspoken question. ‘A very attractive and clever young woman living alone in a tiny rural village; a young woman whom it is obvious was not born and bred here, and whose skills have a much wider field of demand than her environs suggest. What happened?’ he asked gently.

Tears clogged her throat. This was the first time anyone had asked her about the past; the first time anyone had seen past her defences and guessed that there was more to her desire to live so quietly than merely a love of the Avon countryside. She wanted to tell him, and yet conversely was afraid to do so. Why? In case he dismissed her fears as trivial and foolish as her parents had done? In case he was embarrassed by them as her London friends had been? Or just in case he simply did not understand the trauma of what she had endured and how it had affected her?

Panic suddenly overwhelmed her, followed by the old dread of talking to anyone about what she had endured—a fear which her doctor told her probably sprang from an atavistic belief that, in somehow refusing to talk about her ordeal, she was succeeding in shutting herself off from it, and that her reluctance to talk about it sprang from a deep-rooted dread that, once she did, her old terror would mushroom and overwhelm her, growing beyond her control to the point where it dragged her down and consumed her.

Her throat muscles locked, her body suddenly tense as she sat crouched on the sofa, defensive and inarticulate, the half of her brain that could still reason knowing that he must be wondering what on earth he had said to spark off such a reaction, and dreading him withdrawing from her.

A sound beyond the room distracted him. He lifted his head, frowning, and then said quietly, ‘I think the doctor has probably arrived. I’ll go and let him in.’

Tactfully he offered to leave her alone with the doctor, but she shook her head, wanting his presence, feeling protected and comforted by it, and yet at the same time feeling guilty, because she was imposing on him.

When she tried to say as much he shook his head and then took hold of both her hands, saying quietly, ‘No, never…I want to stay.’

And then he smiled at her, and in the warmth of his eyes she saw a promise that dazzled and awed her. He shared her awareness of that instant and shocking recognition, that sensation of feeling inexplicably attuned to one another. She had heard of people falling in love at first sight. Was this what had happened to them?

But falling in love was an ephemeral, laughable thing that only happened to the reckless and impulsive, and she was neither of those. There was nothing shallow about the way she felt about him. No. This was more than a sense of recognition, of knowing that here was a man who seemed to understand, as though by instinct, everything there was to know about her—about her fears and apprehensions, about her weaknesses and strengths. Indeed, it was almost as though he possessed some deep inner knowledge of her that enabled him to recognise her every emotion and feeling.

He deliberately busied himself clearing away their china mugs and emptying the teapot while the doctor asked her to remove her sweater and examined her injured shoulder and arm.

Already both were painfully swollen, showing evidence of the bruising that was yet to come.

‘Mm…Nothing’s broken, but you’re going to find that arm painful and stiff for a few days, I’m afraid. I think it might be as well to rest it in a sling at least for the next forty-eight hours.’

It would have to be her right arm, Jessica reflected wryly as the doctor rummaged in his bag for an antiseptic pack containing the requisite sling.

‘I can leave you some pain-killers,’ he suggested, eyeing her thoughtfully. ‘Generally speaking, when a patient suffers extreme shock as you have done I can prescribe a mild sleeping tablet…’

Jessica shuddered and shook her head. She remembered the drugs she had been prescribed before, supposedly to help her sleep, but which in reality had doped and numbed her to such an extent that they had actually intensified her struggle to come to terms with her residual fear once she was without the crutch they offered.

‘Sensible girl,’ the doctor approved. ‘A mild sedative isn’t necessarily addictive, but I don’t like prescribing them unless it’s absolutely essential. If you want my advice, perhaps a good tot of brandy in your bedtime cocoa is just as effective.’

And equally addictive, Jessica thought to herself, but he was an old-fashioned doctor, with his patients’ welfare very much at heart.

He closed his bag and turned to leave, pausing by the door to frown and ask, ‘You live here alone, don’t you?’

Jessica nodded, a cold finger of ice touching her spine, and she asked quickly, ‘What’s wrong? The man didn’t escape, did he? I thought…’

‘No, nothing like that,’ he was quick to reassure her. ‘It’s just that with that arm you might be better having someone staying here overnight with you. Just in case you’re tempted to dispense with the sling and overstrain the muscle. I could have a word with Mrs G—’

‘There’s no need,’ Daniel intervened unexpectedly. ‘I shall be staying here tonight.’

Jessica gasped, but the small sound was lost as the doctor nodded his approval and opened the door saying, ‘No…No, there’s no need to see me out. Nasty business altogether. Who’d have thought, in a small village like this…? Lucky thing you acted so promptly, young man…’

His voice faded away as Daniel ignored his protests and escorted him to the door. Jessica waited tensely as the door closed and she heard Daniel walking back to the kitchen.

‘Yes. I know,’ he said calmly as he came in. ‘I jumped in there without consulting you, but I thought you’d prefer my presence to that of Mrs G, good neighbour though she is. If I was wrong…’

Jessica shook her head. He wasn’t wrong at all, but they hardly knew one another. Until a few short hours ago they had been strangers, and, despite the fact that she felt drawn to him in a way she had never before experienced, the habits of a lifetime could not be so easily overthrown. She plucked nervously at her sweater with fingers that trembled a little, unable to bring herself to look at him in case she saw mockery in those too perceptive gold eyes.

‘You’re worried about what people might say about my staying here, is that it?’ he asked her quietly.

Instantly her head shot up, her eyes blazing with pride and anger.

‘Certainly not,’ she told him curtly. ‘I’m not so narrow-minded nor insular. I prefer to set my own standards for the way I live my life, not pay lip-service to other people’s.’

‘Then what are you afraid of?’ he asked her gently, dropping down on to the sofa beside her, sitting so close to her that she could feel the heat passing from his body to her own, an unnerving, vibrant male heat that made her body quicken and her muscles tense—in expectation, not fear. ‘Not me, surely?’

How could she tell him it was herself she feared, and her out-of-character reactions to him?

‘I’m just not used to sharing my home with anyone,’ she told him evasively.

‘I’m invading your privacy, and you’re not sure how you feel about it, is that it? Well, I can understand that. Like you I, too, prize my solitude. Like you I’ve always preferred to live alone. However, there comes a time…’

His voice had slowed and deepened. Without looking at him she sensed that he had moved closer to her, felt it in the warm vibration of his breath against her temple, and quivered in silent reaction to it.

When he reached for her hand she let him take it, even though she knew what her trembling would reveal to him.

With his other hand he cupped her face and turned it so that he could look at her. The warm grasp of his hand was somehow reassuring, as though he knew what she was feeling.

‘If I’m presuming too much…if I’m letting my own feelings and reactions blind me into believing that what’s happening between us is mutual, then tell me so, Jessica.’

An idiotic shyness swamped her, and it was as much as she could do to shake her head, her throat clogged with emotional tension.

‘There are so many things we still have to learn about one another…so many things we still don’t know or share, but there will be time for us to discover and learn all those things. For now shall we simply let it be enough that we’re here together at the beginning of a journey we both want to share?’

Gratefully Jessica nodded her head.

He was telling her that he wasn’t going to rush or pressure her. He seemed to know how unused she was to everything that was happening to her, how alarmed she was by it, at the same time as she thrilled to the knowledge that he shared her feeling; she who had never wanted this kind of involvement suddenly wanted it desperately.

As she looked at him, she wondered blindingly what it would be like when he kissed her, and as though he had read the question in her eyes his own suddenly darkened awesomely.

‘Don’t,’ he warned her huskily, and then added, ‘Once I start touching you I shan’t be able to stop.’

Shockingly, her body responded to his warning so intensely that for a moment she was almost tempted into reckless incitement of the desire she saw burning in his eyes. She looked at his mouth and felt her body tremble. She reached out to touch her fingers to the male texture of his lips, to explore their shape and form, and then sanity prevailed and she drew back, her face betraying her own bewilderment.

Fighting to master the temptation flooding her, she said unsteadily, ‘Tell me about your house. How did you find it? What do you plan to do with it?You’re our first really local migrant from London, you realise. There are others, but they live on the other side of Blanchester. What brought you out as far as this?’

She was desperately trying to distract herself, to bring herself back on an even keel, and so missed the sudden tension of his body, the brief hesitation as he replied, ‘Chance, really. I’d been looking for a house outside London for some time, and then someone mentioned this village.’

‘Someone mentioned it?’ Jessica looked at him, frowning, and then her frown cleared. ‘Oh, you mean your estate agents. Well, they must have been relieved to have sold the Court. It’s been empty for almost two years, and it’s been badly vandalised.’

‘You don’t have to tell me that,’ Daniel told her wryly. ‘When you feel up to it, I’d like to have your views on how best to redesign the kitchen. My existing builder is a bit short on imagination, and I want to avoid the stereotyped blandness so prevalent among kitchen designers. It will be a good-sized room: two rooms, really, since I’m having the wall between it and what was at one time the housekeeper’s room knocked down.’

Gradually the sexual tension was easing from her body, to be replaced by a genuine interest in his plans for the house. When he glanced at his watch and informed her that it was almost seven o’clock she could hardly believe it.

‘Will you be OK if I leave you for long enough to go and collect a few things?’ he asked her. ‘I could ask Mrs G to sit with you…’

Jessica shook her head. ‘I’ll be fine. Really, you don’t need to stay overnight. I—’

‘I’m staying,’ he told her gently. ‘And don’t you dare move from that sofa until I get back. Remember what the doctor said about not straining the muscles.’

It wasn’t very difficult to obey him; in fact, it wasn’t any hardship at all to simply sit there and give in to the luxury of day-dreaming about the promises that had been implicit in almost everything he had said to her.

She had never believed this would happen to her—that she would meet someone and fall in love so quickly and intensely that within a few short hours it would be impossible to imagine her life without him—but it had happened, and not just to her, but to him as well.

She closed her eyes and gave in to the temptation of imagining what it would feel like to have his mouth moving on hers, his hands touching her skin, exploring her body with all the delicate skill his touch had already promised.

A rash of goose-bumps broke out under her skin, a tense, coiling sensation invading her lower stomach.

Physical desire…Up until now she had been a stranger to such feelings, so what was it about this particular man encountered in such harrowing circumstances that had led to its birth now?

Were the feelings, both emotional and physical, which she was experiencing genuine, or were they some kind of by-product of her fear?

Deep within her a part of herself recognised that alongside her burgeoning happiness ran a fine thread of cautious reluctance, as though that part of her was unwilling to allow itself to be committed to what she was feeling for Daniel.

She was too exhausted to dwell on the matter. Upstairs in her workroom, the phone rang. That was her business line, and by rights she ought to go up there and answer it. She was doing quite well now, but not so well that she could afford to turn down business.

Daniel had been so kind to her. So caring. Surely far more so than she, as a stranger to him, merited, and it struck her that he himself must be a very well-adjusted human being to be able to reach out so readily and warmly to a stranger, disregarding the possibility of their rejection. She realised that in similar circumstances she would most probably not have offered the same Good-Samaritan-inspired kindness, not because she would not have wanted to, but because she would have been afraid, as she suspected many people were afraid, of having her offer misconstrued or, even worse, resented. If she had spurned Daniel’s kindness and retreated into the prickly sharp shell she normally used to conceal her true self from strangers, she suspected that he would have treated her reaction with equally considerate and thoughtful kindness.

He was plainly a man of intense generosity of spirit, and it humbled her that he should choose to treat her as his equal when she knew that inwardly she was nothing of the sort. She tended to hold even people who knew her at a distance, deliberately refusing to let them trespass too far.

Daniel was the first person in a long time whom she had actually wanted to draw into her life.

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