Man of Stone

by Frances Roding

  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.

  Man of Stone

  Penny Jordan

  www.millsandboon.co.uk

  Table of Contents

  Cover

  Concept Page

  About the Author

  Title Page

  Chapter One

  Chapter Two

  Chapter Three

  Chapter Four

  Chapter Five

  Chapter Six

  Chapter Seven

  Chapter Eight

  Chapter Nine

  Chapter Ten

  Copyright

  End Page

  CHAPTER ONE

  ‘SO THERE’S NO money, then; no money, no house, no anything.’

  Her stepsister’s light voice had hardened fractionally, and Sara winced as she looked up and saw a matching hardening in Cressy’s pale blue eyes.

  This was so difficult for Cressy, she acknowledged painfully. She herself had been more prepared. Her father had warned her only a few months ago about the precariousness of his financial position.

  Once a fashionable and sought-after painter, he had no illusions about himself or his talent. In the days when he had commanded large sums for his paintings, he had spent lavishly. Now those days were gone, and it seemed that even the Chelsea house had not actually been owned by him, but was on a lease from someone else.

  With his death that lease was cancelled, which meant… Which meant that from the end of the month they would all three of them be homeless, Sara recognised bleakly.

  For herself, she could perhaps have managed. Although she had always been the one to run the house, to do her father’s books and take charge of the household, she had had a secretarial training that, with a little polishing, could equip her to earn her own living. But there were other things to be taken into consideration.

  ‘So what are you going to do about Tom?’ Cressy asked her in a hard voice. ‘There’s no way I can take charge of him, and he won’t be able to stay on at school. There won’t be any money for private school fees now.’

  Tom, the eight-year-old half-brother born of the marriage between her father and Cressy’s mother. Tom, with his delicate constitution and his tendency towards asthma attacks. Tom, who, she had known since they first gave her the news of the accident, would be her responsibility.

  It was pointless wishing that Cressy was different; Cressy was Cressy.

  She looked across the kitchen at her beautiful stepsister and sighed.

  ‘I never understood why on earth my mother married your father,’ Cressy complained. ‘Mother was so beautiful. She could have married anyone.’

  By anyone, Cressy meant a man with money, and Sara neglected to point out that when they had first married her father had been comparatively wealthy. Instead, she said softly, ‘They were in love, Cressy.’

  ‘Oh, love…’ She tossed her head, making shimmering beams of light dance off the carefully lightened curls. ‘Who cares about that? When I marry, it will be to a wealthy man. You’ll have to take charge of Tom, of course.’

  Sara didn’t question her abruptness, nor the hard determination in her voice. She knew Cressy too well. Others were so easily deceived by Cressy’s sugar-sweet façade, she thought sadly. They saw the blonde hair and the blue eyes, the fragile bone structure and the deliciously curved body, and they didn’t look any further.

  It wasn’t that she was jealous. Well, at least, not totally, she admitted painfully, unable to deny that it would have been rather nice to look as femininely precious as Cressy. She felt that she was plain in comparison, five foot four, with hair the colour of polished hazelnuts when the sun shone on it, and at other times a rather dull brown. Likewise, her eyes reflected the chameleon quality of her personality, green one moment, hazel another.

  She was a quiet, rather shy girl, used to effacing herself, used to standing in the shadow of her far more self-assured stepsister, even though Cressy was her junior by two years.

  Cressy’s father had been an actor, and Cressy was determined to follow in his footsteps. She had just left drama school, and had actually been cast in a very minor role in a West End play.

  They had all gone to see it. Even Tom, who had been home from the private boarding-school he attended in Berkshire. Cressy had been very good. Her father had been very proud of her, Sara remembered with a faint tinge of loneliness.

  There were times when she had thought that her father wished that Cressy had been his daughter, rather than herself. She took after her mother, apparently, but she had no real way of knowing if this was true, because Lucy Rodney had died when Sara was born.

  She had got on well enough with Laura, Cressy’s mother. She and her father had been a well-matched pair, both of them enjoying the luxurious and rather fast-paced life that James Rodney embraced.

  That was one of the reasons that there was no money. Her father must have thought himself immortal, Sara thought wryly. He had certainly never thought to make any provision for a tragedy such as the one which had just overwhelmed them.

  She had read about the avalanche that had buried an alpine village in her morning paper. It had been lunch time before she learned that her father and Laura had been killed in it.

  Now there were just the three of them; an odd and very disparate family unit, consisting of two young women and one half-grown child. But Cressy was already making it plain that she was going to opt out of that unit, and so it would just be the two of them. Tom and herself.

  Sara wanted to protest, to remind her stepsister that Tom was their shared responsibility, but she thought of Tom’s strained, pale face, and the way he always shied away from the often acerbic Cressy and instead she said quietly, ‘Perhaps that would be best.’

  She had to turn away to avoid seeing the r
elieved satisfaction in Cressy’s eyes.

  ‘Well, it is the most sensible solution, darling. After all, looking after a small and rather sickly child is hardly my scene, is it? Besides, I may get a chance at a role in an American soap. I could hardly take Tom out to California with me. Not with his asthma.’

  Sara forbore to comment that, on the contrary, the hot, dry climate would probably do their half-brother a world of good. She had far more weighty things on her mind than Cressy’s selfishness. For one thing, where on earth were they going to live? Without the house, the small salary she could bring in was hardly going to provide comfortable accommodation for a young woman and an eight-year-old child.

  ‘Darling, I must fly. I’m due out tonight…’

  ‘Cressy, we still haven’t discussed where we’re going to live,’ Sara protested. ‘We lose this house at the end of the month.’

  ‘Oh, haven’t I told you? Jenneth has a spare room in her flat, which she offered me.’ The blue eyes hardened. ‘Look, Sara, be practical for once in your life. Why on earth don’t you get in touch with your mother’s family?’

  ‘My mother’s family?’ Sara repeated stupidly. ‘But…’

  ‘Oh, come on, darling. Use your head. Your mother came from a wealthy Cheshire family. We all know that! All right, so they refused to have anything to do with her when she defied her parents and ran away to marry your father, but that’s years ago now. If you turn up on their doorstep, destitute, with a small child in tow, they’re bound to take you in.’

  ‘Cressy!’ Sara was horrified, and it showed. She was also bewildered. From the pat way Cressy was voicing it, it was obvious that this wasn’t the first time that such a solution had occurred to her stepsister. She herself had never for one moment thought of contacting her mother’s family. She didn’t even know how to. She had heard the story of her parents’ run-away marriage so often that she simply accepted it as one might a fairy story.

  ‘Cressy, we don’t know that my mother’s people are wealthy. Dad could…’

  ‘They were… they are,’ Cressy interrupted her grimly. ‘I’ve been checking up on them.’ She ignored Sara’s gasp of shock. ‘I’ve been thinking about this ever since the funeral, Sara. It’s the ideal solution. You can’t stay in London. How could you support yourself, never mind Tom?’

  ‘My secretarial training…’

  ‘Oh, that!’ Cressy brushed her stammered words aside. ‘That wouldn’t bring in enough to keep you both. Face it, darling, the parents used you as a drudge. You kept house for them and answered Pop’s post, but that was about all. You’d never get a proper job with those qualifications. Really, darling, you don’t have any alternative… You have to contact your mother’s family. Look, I’ll even drive you up to see them,’ Cressy offered magnanimously.

  ‘To see them? But, Cressy, if I do get in touch with them… surely a letter would be more…’

  ‘Don’t be ridiculous, you don’t have time to get involved in letters. You need somewhere to live, Sara. Tom needs somewhere to live,’ Cressy pointed out.

  Tom… A tiny shaft of fear shook Sara. There were times when Tom seemed such a fragile, delicate child. She thought of him being cooped up in a tiny London bedsit, and her mouth went dry.

  But what Cressy was suggesting was so… so… so calculating, she admitted unhappily. There had been no contact between her father and his first wife’s family from the date of their marriage. Even after their daughter’s death, they had evinced no interest in their grandchild.

  ‘Look,’ Cressy interrupted, ‘what have you got to lose? What alternative do you have?’

  ‘They might not want me,’ Sara told her through stiff lips.

  She missed the hard, rather unkind look her stepsister gave her.

  ‘Well, we’ll just have to make sure that they do, won’t we? We’ll collect Tom from school on Monday, and then I’ll drive you straight up there. I might as well have Dad’s car,’ she added, carelessly appropriating the one asset that remained. ‘You won’t need it…’

  Sara opened her mouth to object, and then closed it again. She felt too tired, too emotionally weary to quarrel with Cressy. Besides, she was probably right.

  But the car could have been sold, a tiny voice reminded her, and that money… But there were other more important questions that demanded answers, and she voiced them uncertainly.

  ‘Cressy, my mother’s family… You seem to know so much about them…’

  All her doubt and distaste of the venture her stepsister was suggesting was there in her voice, but Cressy ignored them.

  ‘Well, one of us had to do something. Actually, Pop told me all about them. It seems they offered to take you off his hands when he and Ma married, but you were such a clinging little thing, he knew you wouldn’t want to go.’

  How could one describe such sensations? Sara thought wanly as she struggled to come to terms with the shock of her stepsister’s revelation. She felt betrayed, abandoned, almost; she had never even known that her father had had any contact with her mother’s family, that he had even been approached by them. She had always had the impression from her father that her grandparents hadn’t wanted to have anything to do with her.

  ‘Heaven knows why he didn’t let you go,’ Cressy said carelessly. ‘And I suppose Ma would have farmed me out, too, if she could. To be honest, you’d probably have been better off if he had sent you to them, Sara,’ she added cynically. ‘They’re very well off. I suppose it was always at the back of Pop’s mind that he could turn to them if things ever got really desperate.’

  Sara wanted to deny it, but she couldn’t. She had received so many crushing blows recently and survived them, so why was it that this, the lightest of them all, should have such a paralysing effect?

  She had always known that her father’s love for her was at best lukewarm. If he genuinely loved any of them, it was Cressy. Cressy, who made him laugh, who flirted with him and teased him, Cressy, who was exactly the sort of vibrant daughter he would have wanted.

  ‘It wasn’t hard to get old Hobbs to do some discreet checking up,’ Cressy continued.

  Sara stared at her.

  ‘You asked Dad’s solicitor to do that?’

  ‘Why not?’ Cressy demanded carelessly, ignoring Sara’s distress. ‘Oh, come on!’ Suddenly she was impatient and showing it. ‘What other options do you have, Sara? You’ve always claimed to love Tom. Are you going to deny him the one chance he has of living a reasonably comfortable life? Starving in noble poverty is all very well in theory, but in practice…’

  Sara knew that Cressy was right, and yet her pride recoiled instinctively from the thought of throwing herself on the mercy of the family who had so cruelly abandoned her mother. And as for Cressy’s suggestion that she and Tom just turn up on their doorstep, so to speak…

  ‘Don’t you want to hear what Hobbsy found out?’

  Cressy had always known how to torment her. It was almost as though she actually knew of all those lonely childhood nights when Sara had lain awake, imagining what it would be like to have a real mother, a real family. That had been before her father married Laura, of course. But, kind though Laura had been, she had never come anywhere near to filling the empty space inside her, Sara acknowledged.

  It was a shock to discover that her grandparents had actually offered to have her, and even more of a shock to know that her father had kept this information from her. Why? And then, unkindly, she was reminded of how, whenever she suggested that it was time she left home to train properly for a job, her father would remind her of all the small tasks she performed which were so essential to the smooth running of the household. Tasks which no single employee could ever be asked to perform. She was allowing Cressy’s cynicism to infect her, she thought miserably. Her father had loved her, in his way, but Cressy, being Cressy, hadn’t been able to bypass an opportunity to torment her. She had always been like that. Loving and affectionate one minute, and then clawing and spitting spitefully the next. It w
as difficult for Sara to know what motivated her; they were such very different people.

  ‘My little Martha,’ her father had sometimes called her, and she shivered in the coldness of the unheated kitchen, remembering that the words had not always been delivered kindly.

  The trouble was that she had always been too pedestrian, too ordinary to appeal to her larger-than-life parent.

  ‘Sara, you aren’t listening to me,’ Cressy complained, dragging her back from the melancholy of her thoughts. ‘I was going to tell you about your relatives. They live in Cheshire—your father met your mother when he was visiting Chester. Hobbsy didn’t know much about their property, other than that it had been in the family for over three hundred years.’ Cressy made a face. ‘God, can you imagine? No wonder your mother ran away. Your grandmother’s still alive, but your grandfather died four years ago. Hobbsy says that your aunt and uncle lived in Sydney, and that your cousin Louise married an Australian. Your uncle and your cousin were killed in a car accident over there.’

  Sara sank down into one of the kitchen chairs. Her brain felt numb, assaulted by far too much information for it to take it all in at once. She had a family. Strange, when for so many years she had longed and ached to know more about her mother and her grandparents, that now that she did there was this curious emptiness inside her.

  ‘So that’s all you’ve got to face, Sara. One old lady.’

  She took a deep breath and swallowed.

  ‘Cressy, I know you mean well, but I just can’t dump myself on them… her. You must see that?’ Sara appealed frantically.

  The younger girl’s eyes were hard and calculating.

  ‘So what do you intend to do? Stay here until you’re forcibly evicted? How do you think that will affect Tom? I’m leaving for the States at the end of the month, Sara, and nothing’s going to stop me.’

  Why on earth did she feel that her stepsister had delivered a threat rather than a warning? Sara wondered miserably, concealing her shock at the swiftness with which Cressy had made her arrangements.