Jordan, Penny Read online

  Once bitten, twice shy

  No man would make a fool of Angelica again-not after the way Giles had treated her.

  She certainly wasn't interested in the attractive and charming Daniel Forbes. Although Daniel was at least honest enough not to offer her protestations of udying love.

  But when he let Angelica know-in a way that only Daniel could-that he found her a highly desirable woman, Angelica finally began to realize just how hard it was going to be to resist this man's brand of persuasion.

  "something wrong?"

  Daniel's soft question startled Angelica. She swallowed back her automatic denial, saying, "Not really. I was just wishing I hadn't stopped for that meal."

  "Because it made you ill, or because the illness made you dependent on me?"

  "No one likes to feel dependent on a stranger," she responded guardedly. But as he leaned across to take her empty cup, she flinched back automatically.

  "IS it because I'm a stranger, or because I'm a man?" Daniel asked her bluntly. "Is that the reason you're so anxious to move next door, even though both of us know damn well that you're not strong enough?"

  "No,"she denied, horrified by what he was saying. The truth was...it was herself she was afraid of. Her own reactions, her own needs-needs that she felt were getting out of hand....

  PENNY JORDAN was constantly in trouble in school because of her inability to stop daydreaming-especially during French lessons. In her teens, she was an avid romance reader, although it didn't occur to her to try writing one herself until she was older. "My first half dozen attempts ended up ingloriously," she remembers,

  "but I persevered, and one manuscript was finished." She plucked up the courage to send it to a publisher, convinced her book would be rejected. It wasn't, and the rest is history! Penny is married and lives in Cheshire.

  Jordan' s striking mainstream novel power Play Quickly became a New York Times bestseller. She followed that success with Silver, a story of ambition, passion and Intrigue and The Hidden Years, a novel that lays bare the choices all women face in their search for love.

  Books by penny Jordan

  HARLEQUIN PRESENTS

  1369-BITIER BETRAYAL

  1388-BREAKING AWAY

  1404-UNSPOKEN DESIRE

  1418-RIVAL ATIRACTIONS

  1427-0UT OF THE NIGHT

  1442-GAME OF LOVE

  HARLEQUIN SIGNATURE EDITION

  LOVE'S CHOICES

  STRONGER THAN YEARNING

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  If you purchased this book without a cover you should be aware that this book is stolen property. It was reported as "unsold and destroyed" to the publisher, and neither the author nor the publisher has received any payment for this "stripped book."

  Harlequin Presents first edition July 1992 ISBN 0-373-11476-1

  Original hardcover edition published in 1990 by Mills Boon Limited

  Copyright © 1990 by Penny Jordan. All rights reserved. Except for use in any review, the reproduction or utilization of this work in Whole or in part in any form by any electronic, mechanical or other means, now known or hereafter invented, including xerography, photocopying and recording, or in any information storage or retrieval system, is forbidden without the permission of the publisher, Harlequin Enterprises Limited, 225 Duncan Mill Road, Don Mills, Ontario, Canada M3B 3K9.

  All the characters in this book have no existence outside the imagination of the author and have no relation whatsoever to anyone bearing the same name or names. They are not even distantly inspired by any individual known or unknown to the author, and all incidents are pure invention.

  ® are Trademarks registered in the United States Patent and Trademark Office and in other countries.

  Printed in U.S.A.

  CHAPTER ONE

  NOT far now. Angelica had just driven through the last village on Tom's list, and, according to the route he had worked out for her, the lane to the cottage should only be a couple of miles ahead of her.

  She was glad that the drive from London was nearly over. Her back was stiff with tension, her eyes gritty and tired. Tired ... She smiled cynically to herself. Eighteen months ago, even twelve months ago, if anyone had told her that tiredness, exhaustion, both physical and mental, and most of all emotional was going to overrun and dominate her entire life she would have laughed at them. But then she hadn't known what she knew now: that this numbing, destructive, all-encompassing form of exhaustion, this longing to close her eyes, curl up in a small ball to sleep and go on sleeping was a form of depression as dangerous and invasive in its way as its far more publicised and recognised cousins.

  She had learned an awful lot during these last eighteen months though, too much perhaps, and certainly a good deal that she would rather not have learned. Her mouth twisted painfully. She ought to have remembered that old adage about there being no fool like an old one; not that at twenty-eight she was old precisely, even though if, right at this moment, she felt as though she were inhabiting the body of a woman thirty years her senior rather than one supposedly at the height of her mental and sexual peak.

  Her sexual peak. The twist of her mouth became even more pronounced. In these days of increasing concern over and responsiveness to the growing threat of AIDS, it was perhaps not the stigma it had once been to be a woman of over twenty-one with so limited a sexual history that she was still actually a virgin, but it was still something she preferred to keep to herself; a vulnerable Achilles' heel, in someone who, to the rest of her small world at least, was the subject of admiration and envy.

  When she had first taken over her father's ailing business, manufacturing an old-fashioned brand of face cream and cleansers supplied on a mail-order basis to a very limited list of customers, she had done so because she had no alternative. When she was fresh from serving her articles with a firm of accountants, and had just passed her exams, her father's sudden heart attack and death had left her mother solely dependent on an income from a company which had become more and more precariously financially based.

  It had been a chance conversation with a friend which had led to her turning round the whole focus of the company, so that instead of marketing its traditional products Angelica had taken the huge risk of completely reorganising the company and marketing products which were based entirely on natural ingredients.

  There had been no time for careful market research; no time to do anything other than make her decision and then act upon it.

  The success of the company was something that sometimes surprised even her. It had expanded to such an extent that she had had to invest in new factory premises and an increased work-force, and had taken on the kind of financial and emotional burdens that went with economic success.

  And yet she had thrived on it, revelled in the challenge. When others flagged, she had laughed at them; when others doubted, she had stuck to the force of her own convictions and been proved right.

  Her mother was now living very comfortably indeed in an elegant flat in Brighton, her future secure; Angelica herself had a tiny but very valuable mews cottage, tucked away from view in one of London's precious and increasingly rare oases of peace and quiet. All of the mews houses had separate garages, and the mews itself had no vehicular access to the pretty cobbled courtyard they all shared.

  On admittedly rare warm summer weekends, it was not unusual to see all its inhabitants breakfasting al fresco in the courtyard in a manner mo
re reminiscent of France than Britain, on delicacies supplied by a local delicatessen.

  It had been on one such morning that she had first met Giles. He had been living in one of the cottages on a temporary basis. He had told her that he had been loaned it by some friends who were spending six months in the States.

  Later she had discovered that this was not the truth; that in fact the house belonged to the parents of his previous girlfriend, and that he had casually moved in and refused to move out, claiming the property as his by virtue of his relationship with their daughter.

  Giles had had a gift for distorting the truth, for bending it to suit his own selfish purposes, and she, like the fool she was, had been completely taken in by him.

  It didn't help that her friends had been equally easily deceived, that they had been equally stunned by the truth. They had quickly and determinedly rallied around her when the blows had fallen, not singly, but in a massed attack which had left her feeling as though her heart and her mind had been beaten to a jelly that made it impossible for her to rationalise herself out of her anguish and suffering.

  And yet she had been so lucky... so very lucky. If her mother hadn't broken her arm just before she and Giles were due to take that holiday in Provence, if she hadn't returned unexpectedly to London that evening to collect some papers she had needed ... If Giles hadn't been arrogant "and reckless enough to spend not just the evening but the night as well with someone else, and if she hadn't seen that someone else leaving his house in the early hours of the morning, she might never have discovered the truth or at least she might only have discovered it when it was too late.

  And the worst of it was that to her own mind at least she had been so trusting, so idiotic, that she had actually believed that he loved her, that she had never questioned why such a charming and good-looking man of twenty-seven should actually want a woman like her-a woman who had never really had time to play and enjoy life, a woman who had dedicated herself to her business life, a woman who took her responsibilities so seriously that they were the prime focus of her whole life.

  She had been a fool. And it didn't help knowing that she was far from the first woman Giles had deceived. Indeed he had made quite a career out of it, safe in the knowledge that his other victims, like her, would not want to broadcast their idiocy.

  It made it no better knowing that she had willingly allowed him to dictate the course of their relationship, to sweep her off her feet, insisting that he loved her, that he wanted to spend the rest of his life with her. That holiday in Provence had been going to be a time of pre-wedding intimacy, a whole month of getting to know one another, of becoming lovers, of committing themselves to their shared future.

  She had been so blinded by wonder, by the thrill of believing that he loved her, that she hadn't even looked for any flaws in him.

  Tom had told her gently that she mustn't blame herself; that there came a time in everyone's life when they were vulnerable to that kind of foolishness-that she had been lucky because fate had stepped in and saved her before it was too late.

  As her solicitor he had felt bound to point out to her that, had she and Giles actually been married, she could have suffered far more than the emotional destruction of her life. She could have virtually lost if not everything she had worked for then certainly a good part of it.

  That had been a bitter pill to swallow: the knowledge that Giles, simply because of her imagined wealth, had callously and cold-bloodedly set out to deceive her into believing he loved her. He had wanted, not her, but the company. His desire had not been for her, but for money.

  The humiliation of that knowledge was something she thought she would have to carry for the rest of her life-that and the knowledge that she had been such a fool. Falling in love with a cheat was something a girl in her teens could be forgiven, but a woman of her age ought to have known better, ought to have realised ... What? That it was impossible for a man to fall instantly and completely in love with someone like her, a woman who, while passably attractive, had hardly the kind of head-turning looks that had men falling over themselves for her attention.

  Even now she still couldn't understand why it had happened-why she had so easily allowed herself to be deceived. She shivered suddenly, her flesh going cold as she dwelt on all she had put at risk-not just her own future, but her mother's as well and those of her employees, and all for what? For the meaningless smiles and even more meaningless flattery of a man who had cold-bloodedly set out to use her.

  Was she so emotionally bereft of inner strength, so vulnerable, so in need of believing herself loved that she had not had the sense to see what Giles really wanted? Was she so much of an emotional fool that she had really believed him when he'd sworn he loved her, when he'd told her he wanted her as his wife? Why hadn't she questioned him more deeply? Why hadn't she suspected?

  Because it had never occurred to her that she might fall into that kind of trap, that a man might want her simply because of the financial gain she represented.

  That was what hurt her the most of all, she recognised: that she had been stupid enough to believe herself loved when all the time Giles had been laughing at her gullibility, when he had been secretly assessing her financial worth. All those lies about wanting their lovemaking to be perfect, about wanting to take her away somewhere where he could have her all to himself. All those lies, which she had believed, when the truth was that he had already been sleeping with someone else.

  In New York women employed private detectives to search into the lives of their men-friends. She had thought them cynical and cold-blooded. Now she was not so sure.

  Facing up to the knowledge that she had made such a fool of herself had been the hardest thing she had ever had to do. She had been remorseless with herself, not allowing herself to hide from the truth, making herself confront her own frailties, her own stupidity, making herself see that she had craved being loved so much that she had almost eagerly thrown away her intelligence and self-respect.

  Up until Giles's arrival in her life, she had considered herself to be fulfilled and as reasonably happy as any human being could expect to be.

  Marriage, children-these were secret dreams she had kept tucked away in a private corner of her mind. She had looked around at the relationships of her friends, seen how very difficult it was in this frenetically paced age merely to find the time to devote to developing and then cosseting emotional bonds, and had told herself prosaically that maybe later in her life she would opt for a sensible, unpassionate marriage to some kind, bland mart who would share her desire for children and stability, but that that time had not come yet and that she was presently more than content with her life, that the wild love-affairs indulged in by some of her friends were not for her and more to be looked upon with mild amusement than envy, that the trauma of intense emotional relationships were never worth the expenditure of time and emotion that went into them.

  And then she had met Giles, and he had turned her whole world upside-down, and she, fool that she was, had helped him.

  Well, she was suffering for that self-indulgence now.

  'Exhaustion' was her doctor's pithy diagnosis of the enervating malaise that had drained her to the point where she felt she could simply no longer function as the person she had once been.

  There had been a good deal of shocked reaction from her friends. The words 'yuppie flu' had floated sympathetically on the air. None of them had been tactless enough to suggest she was suffering from something as unfashionable as the misery caused by a broken heart, especially as it was twelve months since she and Giles had parted. Modern women did not have hearts that broke; they were far too sensible, far too mature. They wisely assessed the advantages and disadvantages of every relationship they entered, not having the time to waste on those that were unprofitable. If only she had followed that sensible course ...But she hadn't, had she? And she was left, not only with the pain of being deceived by someone she had thought cared for her, not only with the anguish of he
r own misery and her bruised pride, but she was also having to contend with the realisation that she was not the woman she had always supposed; that she was not the mature, wise creature she had always prided herself on being; that she was in fact as vulnerable as the rest of her sex when it came to her deepest emotions and needs.

  Which was why, on the insistence of her doctor, she was taking this enforced break. It had been Tom, her solicitor, and one of her closest friends, who had offered her the use of the Pembrokeshire cottage he had recently inherited from an uncle.

  'It's virtually in the middle of nowhere, five miles from the nearest village, but the countryside is wonderful. I went down there never having even seen the place. I'd already made up my mind to sell, but once I did see it ... Well, I've decided to keep it, and it's yours for just as long as you need it, Angelica.'

  She had wanted to protest that she wasn't an invalid, that she didn't need it, that she didn't need anything or anyone; that was how raw and sore she still was inside, but she had known she would have been lying. She badly needed somewhere to crawl away into and hide, somewhere where she could lick her wounds and recover at her own pace.

  She could leave the business in the capable hands of Paul Lyons, her second-in-command; she knew that.

  She didn't love Giles any more. How could she? The man she had thought she loved had never actually existed, but that didn't stop her heart from thumping crazily every time she saw a man with fair, sun-streaked hair and blue eyes. It didn't stop her from waking up alone at night with her face stiff from the drying salt of her tears. It didn't stop her from feeling it was impossible for her to face the world, from feeling that everyone who looked at her knew what a fool she had been.

  Tom was right--six weeks away from London, living simply and on her own, was probably just what she needed to get things back into perspective, to recoup her old energy and determination.

  They had had lunch together yesterday, and then he had gone back to the house with her, to make sure that she had got the route clear, he had said, but she had known that he was worried about her. That knowledge had warmed her. She and Tom had been friends for a long time. Her mother adored him, and often hinted that they would make a good couple, but, close though they were, both of them had separately and mutually acknowledged that their relationship was more akin to one of brother and sister, that their emotional bonding was such that it precluded any possibility of sexual desire. Torn had recently fallen in love, and she liked his new girlfriend very much.