The Perfect Match?

The Perfect Match?
PENNY JORDAN

The Crightons have position, power and elegance…and a past scandal to haunt them.The dark, brooding Guy Cooke just had to be the ideal man. Chrissie was entranced and, the wonder of it was, Guy appeared to be equally mesmerized by her! It seemed the perfect match but was it all too good to last? Chrissie had a family secret that Guy could surely never forgive….Follow the turbulent lives of the Crighton family in this dramatic sequel to A Perfect Family, The Perfect Seduction and Perfect Marriage MaterialPresents Extravaganza25 YEARS!

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.

The Perfect Match?

Penny Jordan

www.millsandboon.co.uk (http://www.millsandboon.co.uk)

The Crighton Family

BEN CRIGHTON: Proud patriarch of the family, a strong- minded character in his seventies, determined to see his dynasty thrive and prosper.

RUTH REYNOLDS: Ben’s sister, a vibrant woman now happily reunited with Grant, the man from whom she was tragically separated during the war years—and also with the daughter she gave up for adoption. Ruth is a caring, perceptive woman and she holds the Crighton family together.

JON AND JENNY CRIGHTON: Steady, family-oriented couple. Jon keeps the Crighton law firm running smoothly, and Jenny is a partner in a local antiques business with Guy Cooke. Guy helped Jenny through difficult times in her marriage. He has always been close to Jenny, and they have a strong friendship.

MAX CRIGHTON: Son of Jon and Jenny, a self-assured, sexy, ruthlessly ambitious lawyer who married his wife, Madeleine, a gentle woman and daughter of a High Court judge, to advance his career. The couple lives in London with their two children, but Madeleine has concerns about the stability of their marriage....

ROSE OLDHAM: Rose had connections with the Crighton family when she was growing up—as did her mother and grandmother. But she’s since moved away from the area and is reluctant to return to Haslewich when her brother dies, sending her daughter Chrissie instead.

CHRISSIE OLDHAM: Rose’s daughter, a spirited but romantic English teacher who is convinced her ideal hero just doesn’t exist. She longs for a passionate, unconventional man—and is astonished when she arrives in Haslewich to be swept off her feet by the broodingly sensual Guy Cooke....

GUY COOKE: Jenny’s partner in a successful antiques business, Guy is close to the Crighton family and very loyal to Jenny. He has Gypsy ancestors and is devastatingly sexy and adored by women. Fiery and impetuous, he’s the exact opposite of gentle Chrissie—but feels an instant bond when he meets her.

CHAPTER ONE

‘AND you’re sure you don’t mind going to Haslewich to sort out everything...?’

‘No, Mum, I don’t mind at all,’ Chrissie assured her mother quietly, exchanging looks over her head with her father as she did so.

It was no secret in their small, close-knit family unit just how much her younger brother’s irresponsible behaviour and alcoholic lifestyle had upset Chrissie’s mother.

In the early years of her marriage she had tried her best to help Charles, naively believing that he was genuinely trying to mend his ways. But eight years ago, following a short custodial sentence after he had been convicted of stealing several small items from the home of an acquaintance, which he had later sold to pay for the drink on which he was by then dependent, Chrissie’s mother had decided that enough was enough and had cut herself off from him completely.

Chrissie understood just why she had felt compelled to do so.

Her father was a hard-working heart surgeon in a busy local hospital in the small Scottish border town where they lived and her mother was a member of the local town council and involved in several local charities.

Her brother’s unsavoury reputation and dishonest behaviour was so completely opposite to her own way of life that it was very hard for her to deal with the situation.

Now though, Uncle Charles was dead and someone, one of them, would have to travel to Cheshire to sort things out, dispose of the small property he had owned in the centre of the town of Haslewich—all that was left from his share of the farmhouse and land that he and Chrissie’s mother had inherited from their parents, and Chrissie had volunteered to take on the task.

‘Heaven knows what kind of state the house will be in.’ Chrissie’s mother gave a small shudder. ‘The last time I was there the whole place was filthy and you couldn’t open a single cupboard door without an empty bottle falling out.

‘I just wish I knew why he...’ She closed her eyes. ‘Even as a child he was different...awkward...selfdestructive, very different from our father. He was such a kind, gentle man like my grandfather, but Charles... We were never very close as children, perhaps because of the big age gap between us.’ She shook her head.

‘I feel guilty about letting you go down to Haslewich on your own but we’ve got this conference in Mexico followed by your father’s lecture tour.’

‘Look, Mum, it’s all right,’ Chrissie reiterated. ‘I don’t mind, honestly, and it isn’t as though I don’t have the time.’

There was a big reshuffle going on in the English department of the school where Chrissie worked as a teacher and she had already warned her parents she had heard on the grapevine that the department was looking to cut costs and shed some staff.

‘Well, I’m not entirely happy about your having to stay in Charles’s house,’ her mother told her.

‘But that is the whole point of my going,’ Chrissie reminded her wryly. ‘The house has to be sold to help pay off Uncle Charles’s debts and you said yourself that there was no way it could be put on the market until it had been cleaned from top to bottom.’

‘I know. Which reminds me, I’ll have to get in touch with the bank and the solicitors to make sure you’ve got my authority to deal with all the necessary paperwork.’

Once again Chrissie and her father shared a look over her mother’s head.

Charles Platt had not just left behind him an untidy house and an unsavoury reputation; there was also a large number of outstanding debts.

In truth, she wasn’t particularly looking forward to being the one to sort out the mess Uncle Charles had left behind, Chrissie admitted, but someone had to do it and she certainly wasn’t going to let her mother be even more upset than she was already by letting her see her own distaste for the task.

The last time she had visited Haslewich had been following her grandmother’s death, and her memories of the occasion and the area were coloured by her mother’s grief.

Her Uncle Charles had been living with his mother in the old Cheshire farmhouse that had been passed down through many generations of their family, but her grandfather, disappointed in his son and well aware of his weakness, had sold off the land to another farmer, and following his wife’s death the farmhouse itself had been sold, as well.

She could still remember the searing shame she had felt on seeing her Uncle Charles staggering from one of the town’s many public houses whilst she had been shopping there with her mother. When a group of children had jeered at him and mocked him, her mother had drawn a quick, sharp breath and gone white before turning round and abruptly walking Chrissie off in the opposite direction.

That had been the first time she had become aware of the reason for the pain in her mother’s face and voice whenever she mentioned her brother.

Now, as an adult, Chrissie was, of course, fully au fait with the history of her uncle’s addiction to alcohol and gambling.

Weak and vain, he was something of a misfit in the local farming community in which he had grown up, and it had been obvious even before he reached his teens that he was not going to follow in the family tradition of farming.

‘He broke my father’s heart,’ Chrissie’s mother had once told her sadly. ‘Dad did his best, selling off small pieces of land so that he could give Charles an allowance. He tried to understand and support him when he said that he wanted to be an actor. But it was all just an excuse to get money out of Dad and spend his time gambling and drinking, initially in Chester and then, when his cronies there got wise to him, back in Haslewich.’

And as they had talked, Chrissie had recognised how hurt her grandparents and her mother had been by her uncle’s behaviour, how his attitudes to life, which were so very different from theirs, confused them. How impossible they found it to understand how he could so easily and carelessly flout the moral laws they lived their lives by and, most painful of all perhaps, how shamed they felt by him.

And now he was dead and with him had died a small piece of Haslewich history. Platts had farmed the land around Haslewich for over three centuries as the headstones on their graves in Haslewich’s churchyard testified, but no longer.