Пэнни Джордан – A Perfect Night (страница 1)
“Indeed there is, but I think you’ll find most men—and women—want the pleasure of enjoying and arousing their chosen partner’s sexual desires. You must have experienced that for yourself.”
She made no response other than tensing in Sebastian’s grasp.
“You have experienced it, haven’t you, Katie?” he asked her softly.
“What I have or have not experienced is no concern of yours.”
“Perhaps not,” Seb agreed, but instead of releasing her and turning away as she had expected, he suddenly moved closer to her, causing her stomach to turn in anxious protest. He bent his head and his mouth came down expertly and inescapably over hers.
“No…” she managed to protest sharply.
“You’re a liar, Katie, if what you say you want is a gentle, passive lover,” she heard him telling her savagely. “You want a man whose passion matches your own.”
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 a hundred and eighty-seven novels for Mills & Boon, including the phenomenally successful
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.
A Perfect Family
The Perfect Seduction
Perfect Marriage Material
Figgy Pudding
The Perfect Lover
The Perfect Sinner
The Perfect Father
A Perfect Night
Coming Home
Starting Over
A Perfect Night
Penny Jordan
CONTENTS
AS SEB drove past the sign that read, Haslewich—Please Drive Carefully, he was aware of a dispiriting grey cloud of self-criticism and disappointment dulling what, if life mirrored fiction, by rights should be his triumphal return to the place of his birth.
He was thirty-eight years old, virtually at the top of his career ladder having just been headhunted by the international drug company Aarlston-Becker to head their research team. No small feat surely for man who, as a boy, had been sneeringly dismissed by one of his teachers as ‘just another hopeless by-product of the Cooke clan.’
He had money in the bank accumulated by hard work and shrewd investment, a family who even if he hadn’t seen much of them in recent years were by all accounts more than willing to do the modern equivalent of roasting a fatted calf to welcome him home, and he was about to take a kind of professional post that many among his colleagues would have given their eye-teeth for; all of which surely must be pretty heavyweight pluses on anyone’s balance sheet of life.
But then he needed some heavyweight assets to balance out the equally, to him at least, heavyweight negative aspects of his life.
‘What negative aspects?’ his second or was it third cousin Guy Cooke had asked him drily when they had been discussing the subject of his impending return.
‘How about an ill-judged early marriage followed predictably, I suppose, by a divorce.’
Guy’s eyebrows had lifted as he shrugged dismissively, ‘Divorce isn’t exactly a social sin any longer Seb, and from what you’ve told us your ex-wife has remarried very happily and the two of you are on relatively comfortable terms.’
‘Oh yes, from Sandra’s and my own point of view the divorce was the best thing we could have done other than not to have married in the first place.
‘No, it’s not the fact that we married far too young and for all the wrong reasons that I feel bad. It’s…’ He had paused, grimacing before continuing, ‘Sandy always used to complain that I was a selfish bastard not really fit to be either a husband or a father, too wrapped up in my career and my own professional goals. I thought at the time that she was being ridiculous. After all, I was working to provide a decent standard of living for her, or so I used to tell her and myself, but of course that was just the excuse I used to conceal the fact that she was right that I was being selfish, and that the rush I got from knowing I was right in there at the cutting edge of discovering new drugs that were going to provide the kind of breakthrough that would change the world was far more important to me, far more compelling and addictive than any pleasure I got from being with her.’
Guy and Chrissie, his wife, had exchanged ruefully happily married looks while Chrissie had lifted their son Anthony up off the floor to give him a hug, and although they had both made the right kind of protestingly reassuring noises Seb hadn’t been deceived. Of course privately they must both have thought that he had been selfish. How could they think otherwise? Seb had seen the loving commitment Guy was making to his own family, had witnessed at first hand during his stay with them when he had attended his initial interview the ‘hands on’ fathering that Guy was giving his son.
‘But at least you and Charlotte have formed a proper father and daughter bond now,’ Chrissie had reminded him gently.
‘Yes, more thanks to Charlotte’s maturity than any good parenting on my part,’ Seb had returned, adding, ‘After all she could very easily have refused to see me when I wrote and asked her if she would consider allowing me back into her life. George, Sandra’s second husband has been far more of a proper father to her than I have.’
‘Maybe so from a practical point of view,’ Guy had agreed, ‘But biologically you are her father and you only have to see the two of you together to see that.’
‘Oh yes, she’s got my genes when it comes to her physical looks,’ he agreed.
‘And she’s got your brains by all accounts too,’ Chrissie had laughed.
‘Well, Sandra and I met originally at university so I suppose that aspect of her nature is down to both of us, but I admit that I was surprised when she told me that she intends to follow much the same career path as I’ve chosen.’
‘And since she’s going to be studying for her A levels at a private sixth-form college near Manchester, you’re bound to be able to see a lot more of her.’
‘I hope so,’ Seb had agreed. ‘Although at sixteen she’s almost an adult now with her own life and her own friends. Sandra did say though that she was relieved to know that I would be on hand for her at the weekends especially now that Sandra and George are likely to be based abroad for the foreseeable future.’
‘Well we certainly loved meeting Charlotte,’ Chrissie had told him warmly. ‘Although I suspect she felt a little bit overwhelmed by the massed ranks and fervent curiosity of the Cooke clan in force.’
The Cooke clan. How he had hated and chafed under the burdensome weight of his family’s reputation when he had been growing up, Seb reflected now. Of course he hadn’t known then that he wasn’t on his own and that Guy, too, had suffered his own personal war between his inner needs and the town’s expectations. But then Guy had met Chrissie and in helping her to make peace with her family history Guy had come to terms with his own unhappy childhood memories.
Seb knew that without the incentive of having Charlotte at college in nearby Manchester there was no way he would have come back to his birthplace in the small historical Cheshire town where, or so the story went, his family line had come into being following the seduction of a local girl by a member of a notorious band of Romany travellers who visited the town every year.
The children—the clan—that union had given birth to down through the centuries, whether rightly or wrongly, had garnered a notorious reputation in the town for not always walking on the right side of the law, and of course predictably it had often been a case of ‘give a dog a bad name…’ Certainly it seemed that historically, their family had been a convenient peg for the townspeople to hang all their local crimes of theft and unlawfulness on.