by Penny Jordan
*The Crightons
*The Crightons
“In those ridiculous shoes you’re wearing you couldn’t make it through one centimeter of snow, never mind close to ten.”
“Ten. No, that’s impossible,” Maggie gasped, adding with a glower, “And will you please stop criticizing my shoes? Just because you don’t like them.”
Finn turned around, subjecting her to the full force of a look of such intense sensuality that it made her moan out loud.
“I never said anything about not liking them,” he told her succinctly. “I simply said that they were impractical.”
“Ridiculous was the word you used,” Maggie reminded him.
As she turned toward the door, she heard Finn saying softly, “I was wrong. Neither ridiculous nor impractical is the right description for them. But provocative—now, that is.”
PENNY JORDAN has been writing for almost twenty years and has an outstanding record—over one hundred novels published, including Power Play, which hit the New York Times bestseller lists, and more recently, the phenomenally successful To Love, Honor and Betray. With over 60 million copies of her books in print worldwide and translations in more than seventeen languages, Penny Jordan has established herself as an internationally acclaimed author. She was born in Preston, in Lancashire, England, and now lives with her husband in a beautiful fourteenth-century house in rural Cheshire.
Books by Penny Jordan
HARLEQUIN PRESENTS®
2129—BACK IN THE MARRIAGE BED
2146—ONE INTIMATE NIGHT
2158—MISSION: MAKE-OVER
2169—THE DEMETRIOS VIRGIN
2189—THE ULTIMATE SURRENDER
2211—THE MARRIAGE DEMAND
HARLEQUIN SINGLE TITLES
COMING HOME*
STARTING OVER*
Penny Jordan
THE CITY-GIRL BRIDE
CONTENTS
PROLOGUE
CHAPTER ONE
CHAPTER TWO
CHAPTER THREE
CHAPTER FOUR
CHAPTER FIVE
CHAPTER SIX
CHAPTER SEVEN
CHAPTER EIGHT
CHAPTER NINE
PROLOGUE
THE head of the Perfect Matches Department, English Speaking Division, scratched the top of his wing in irritation.
‘Now look what’s happened,’ he complained to his newest and least experienced recruit. ‘They’ve called a summit meeting of all the top angels in Cupid Department to discuss the current state of romance. Far too many people are refusing to fall in love and make commitments. If this continues we shall be out of business and a fine thing that would be. Of course they would call this wretched conference when I’m already short-staffed and I’ve just finished drawing up this session’s list of ideally matched pairs. It’s too late to put things on hold now, and besides—’ he glowered darkly ‘—this session I’m determined that we’re going to meet our target, I am not having that pompous idiot from the Third Agers Section telling me yet again that he’s matched up more couples than us. But there’s just no one to do the work.’
‘There’s me.’ His newest assistant reminded him eagerly.
The head of the department sighed as he studied the hopeful smile of his trainee recruit. Enthusiasm for one’s job was all very well, and to be applauded of course, but in this particular recruit’s case that enthusiasm needed to be tempered by the caution of experience and time. However, right now…Right now he had six couples to get together: couples who as yet had no idea that they were meant for one another, couples whose romances needed to be set in motion asap.
Reluctantly he acknowledged that on this occasion he would have to bow to expediency and ignore his forebodings. Handing over his carefully compiled list, he told his junior ‘Every one of these couples has been carefully vetted and checked for compatibility. In this department we do not put couples together unless we are sure they will stay together. Everything is set in place and nothing can go wrong. All you have to do is make sure that each and every one of them is in the right place at the right time. You must follow my instructions exactly. No experimentation or short cuts. Do you understand?’
All students had to learn, of course, but it was, to say the least, unfortunate that this particular student’s experimentation had led to a New York socialite’s pedigree chow falling desperately in love with her neighbour’s prize-winning Burmese cat. Luckily the outcome had not been totally without merit, and the marriage which had ensued between the socialite and her neighbour had been a very satisfactory conclusion to the whole affair. He had been working towards pairing her off with someone very different, but there you are…
‘Hi there. What are you doing?’
The new recruit grimaced as one of the naughtiest zephyrs blew playfully on his wings.
‘I’m busy,’ he responded loftily. ‘So go away and bother someone else.’
With hindsight he acknowledged that it had probably been the wrong thing to say. It was common knowledge that this particular zephyr positively enjoyed her reputation for boisterous behaviour, and perhaps it was silly of him to have spread out all the head of department’s carefully written notes and instructions, along with the slips on which the names of the humans they related to were written.
‘Go away like this, do you mean?’ she challenged him, taking a deep breath and sending all his precious papers flying as she exhaled noisily over them.
Of course afterwards she was contrite, and helped him to gather everything up. It was surprising just how much power there was in that ethereal frame, and by the time they had finally collected everything he was feeling out of breath himself.
But that was nothing to the feeling of dread filling him as he tried frantically to remember which couples had been paired together.
The zephyr did what she could, and in the end he was as sure as he could be that he knew what he was supposed to do.
‘So, which couple are you going to do first?’ she asked him.
He took a deep breath. ‘This one,’ he told her, showing her their names.
She frowned as she looked at the names and their addresses. ‘But how are they going to meet?’ she asked him.
‘I don’t know,’ he admitted. ‘I’ll think of something.’
‘Can I help?’ she begged eagerly. This was so much more fun than blowing a few leaves off trees, which was all she was ever allowed to do.
‘No,’ he denied firmly, quickly changing his mind when he saw her taking another deep breath.
As a first step in bringing the two ideally matched partners together, his job was to engineer a meeting between them according to the instructions he had been left.
Engineer a meeting…Right…
CHAPTER ONE
MAGGIE stared in disbelief at the downpour which had suddenly appeared out of nowhere, turning the road she had been driving along into a vast puddle and making her head ache with the tension of concentrating. From the moment she had seen the sale advertised she had been determined to buy the house. She was sure that it was exactly what her adored grandmother needed to lift her out of her current unhappiness.
Of course Maggie knew that nothing and no one could ever replace her grandfather in her grandmother’s life, but Maggie was convinced that returning to live in the house where her grandparents had started their married life, a house that was filled with memories of their shared love, would help to take her grandmother’s mind off the sadness of her loss. And Maggie was a woman who, once her mind was made up about anything or anyone, refused to change it. Which was why she was such a successful businesswoman—successful enough to be able to attend the auction being held to sell off the large Shropshire estate on which her grandparents had beg
un their married lives, in the rented house which was now being auctioned for sale.
Maggie had grown up hearing stores of Shropshire and its rich farmlands, but Maggie was a city girl; farms, rain, mud, animals, farmers—they were not for her. The company she owned and ran as a headhunter, her modern city apartment, her friends—single career woman like her—these were the things she enjoyed and valued. But her love for her grandparents was something else, something special. They had provided her with a secure and loving home when her own parents had split up, they had encouraged and praised her, supported her emotionally, loved her, and it both hurt and frightened her to see her once strong grandmother looking so frail and lost.
Until Maggie had seen the Shopcutte estate advertised for sale—its Georgian mansion, farmlands and estate properties, including the pretty Dower House where her grandparents had spent the first years of their marriage—she had been in despair, not knowing how to lift her grandmother’s spirits and terrified, if she was honest, that she might actually lose her. But now she knew she had found the perfect means of cheering her up. It was imperative that she was successful at the sale auction, that she acquired the house. And she was determined that she would.
But for this appalling and unforecasted torrential rain she would have reached her destination by now—the small country town adjacent to the estate, where the auction was to be held and where she had booked herself a room at the town’s only decent hotel.
When the rain had first started, appearing from nowhere out of a hitherto cloudless sky, she had had to slow her speed down to a crawl. The sky was far from blue now, in fact it was nearly black, and the road was empty of any other traffic as it narrowed and dipped at a perilously acute angle.
Was this really the A-class road she had been following? Impossible, surely, that she might have made a wrong turning. She simply did not do things like that. If there was one thing that Maggie prided herself on it was being in control.
From the top of her glossily groomed, perfectly cut blonde hair to the tips of her equally perfectly pedicured and painted toes Maggie epitomised feminine elegance and self-discipline. Her size eight figure was the envy of her friends—and that flawless skin, that equally flawless personal life, as devoid of the untidiness of emotional entanglements as Maggie’s home was devoid of clutter. Yes, Maggie was a woman to be reckoned with: a woman no man would dare not to respect or would risk tangling antagonistically with. After seeing the havoc and mess caused by her parents’ various sexual and emotional relationships, Maggie had decided that she intended to remain safely and tidily single. And so far none of the many men she had met had done anything to make her change that decision.
‘But you are far too gorgeous to be alone,’ one would-be suitor had told her, only to be given one of her most scathing and dismissive looks.
Perhaps somewhere deep down inside herself she did sometimes secretly wonder just why she should be so immune to the dangerous intensity of emotional and physical desire experienced by other women, but she refused to allow herself to dwell on such thoughts. Why should she? She was happy the way she was. Or at least she would be once she had got this auction out of the way and was the owner of the Dower House.
It was ridiculous that she should have had to come out here at all, she fumed as she began a steep descent. She had tried to buy the house prior to the auction, but the agent had refused to sell it. So here she was, and…
‘Oh, no. I don’t believe it,’ she protested out loud as the road turned sharply and she saw in front of her a sign marked ‘Ford’.
Ford…as in fording a river, as in some archaic means of crossing it surely more suitable to the Middle Ages rather than the current century. But that was what the sign said, and there in front of her was a shallow river, with the road running right through it and up the hill on its opposite side.
And this was an A road? Irritably Maggie started to drive through the water. That was the country for you, she fumed grittily.
She could hear above the noise of her car engine a loud rushing sound that for some reason made the hair at the back of her neck prickle, and then she saw why. Coming towards her at an unbelievable speed along the course of the river was a wall of water almost as high as the car itself.
For the first time in her life, Maggie panicked. The car’s wheels spun as she depressed the accelerator, but the car itself didn’t move, and the wall of water…
Finn was not in a good mood. His meeting had taken much longer than he had planned and now he was going to be late getting back. His mind was preoccupied with his own thoughts, so it gave him a shock to see the unfamiliar car motionless in the middle of the ford, but it gave him even more of a shock to see the swollen race of river threatening to overwhelm it.
He was in no mood to rescue unwanted and uninvited visitors with no more sense than to try to attempt to cross the river during what had to be the worst cloudburst the area had known in living memory, and in such an unsuitable vehicle. He frowned ominously as he dropped the Land Rover into its lowest gear.
He might have made the fortune which had enabled him to retire from the world of commerce by using what his mentor had once told him was the keenest and shrewdest financial brain he had ever come across, but that world and everything it encompassed was not one he ever wanted to return to. This was his métiere—what he wanted. But he wanted it permanently. And the lease on Ryle Farm could not be renewed when it ran out in three months’ time, which was why he had decided to bid for the Shopcutte estate. He knew that the house, the land and the other properties were being auctioned off in separate lots, but Finn wanted them all. He wanted and he intended to keep the estate intact, and with it his own privacy.
Protecting his privacy; guarding his solitude was vitally important to Finn, and fortunately, thanks to those hectic years he had spent working as one of the City’s most successful money market dealers, he had the financial means to buy that privacy and solitude—in the shape of the Shopcutte estate.
Those people who had known him in his early twenties wouldn’t be able to reconcile the man he had been then with the man he was now. He was a decade older now, of course, and in those days…In those days his high earning power had gained him an entrée into a fast-living world of trust fund socialites, models, money and drugs. But, as he had quickly come to discover, it was a world driven by greed and filled with insincerity. He had been too hardheaded to succumb to the easy availability of sex and drugs, but others he had known had not been so wise, or so lucky.
Already disenchanted with what had been going on around him, Finn had been filled with a sense of revulsion for the life he was living after the death of one of his colleagues from an accidental drug overdose. Finn had been openly and brazenly propositioned by girls crazed with need by their addiction, had attended parties thrown by clients where those same girls and the drugs that had ruined their lives had been handed round like sweets. It was a world that valued material wealth and held human beings cheap, and one day Finn had woken up and known that it could no longer be his world.
Perhaps unfairly, he had come to blame big city culture for sins that should have more appropriately been apportioned to his fellow human beings. But his own needs had forced him to question what he really wanted out of life, filling him with a craving for peace and a simpler, cleaner, more natural way of life, as well as a loathing for city life and, if he was honest, a wary hostility towards those who lauded it.
His mother had come from farming stock and he had obviously inherited those genes. He had made his plans, taken a calculated gamble on his own judgement which had netted him a profit that had run into millions. His employers had pleaded with him to stay, telling him he could name his own terms, but he had made his decision. Owning his own land would give him the opportunity to grow organic crops as well as breed cattle and increase his small herd of alpaca.
Unlike Maggie, the moment Finn heard the sound of the water thundering towards the ford he knew what it was, and immedia
tely stopped his Land Rover, cursing under his breath as he realised that the huge flood of water filling the riverbed would mean that the ford would be impassable, even for his sturdy four-wheel drive, and that he would end up being marooned on the wrong side of the river. Angrily he looked at Maggie’s car. A trendy, top-of-the-range convertible that only a fool would possibly have attempted to take across a flooded ford.
The dangerously fast-flowing water was halfway up the side of the car—and rising. In another few minutes the car would be in danger of being swept completely away, and its blonde-haired driver with it.
Grimly Finn restarted his own vehicle and drove slowly and carefully through the swilling water towards Maggie, gritting his teeth as he felt the powerful surge of the water buffeting the side of the Land Rover and trying to force it downstream.
In her own car, Maggie could not believe what was happening to her. Things like this simply did not happen…especially not to her. How could she possibly be here, in the middle of a flooding river with water creeping higher and higher? She gave a shocked gasp as the car started to move, slewing sideways. She was going to be swept away completely. She might even drown. But she had seen the Land Rover coming up behind her and told herself that she was panicking unnecessarily. If its driver could cross the ford then so could she. Determinedly she tried to restart her car.
Finn simply could not believe his eyes. As he saw Maggie’s shiny blonde hair swing across her face when she leaned forward to restart her car he thought he must be hallucinating. What on earth was she doing? Surely she must realise that her car was not going to start? And even if by some remote chance it did…
