Christmas Nights: A Bride for His Majesty's Pleasure / Her Christmas Fantasy / Figgy Pudding

Christmas Nights: A Bride for His Majesty's Pleasure / Her Christmas Fantasy / Figgy Pudding
PENNY JORDAN

Millions, mistletoe & a merry, sexy ChristmasA Bride for His Majesty’s PleasureIonanthe must pay the price for her sister’s mistake. She will leave her freedom at the castle doors. Recently crowned Prince Max plans to bring change to his country, after his new bride pays her debt.Her Christmas Fantasy Lisa yearned for stability and the traditional family Christmas she never had as a child. But then she met the exasperating – and sinfully attractive – Oliver, who was determined to make all her Christmas fantasies come true…Figgy Pudding Take one woman, add a boss who’s told the world they’re having an affair, and then concoct one very special dish in order to save the heroine’s catering career!

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

Dear Reader,

Christmas is a particularly poignant time of year for me as I was privileged to be able to spend part of Christmas day with Penny, one of my dearest friends, before for this courageous, witty, dignified lady passed away just a few days later.

I will never forget Penny, or how we met.

I have a very special envelope on my desk. On the front it says: Lot 4. Be An Author For A Day. Your chance to work with local author Penny Jordan.

Author for a day? A friend for life, as it turned out.

My husband bought this lot for me at a ‘Pride and Prejudice’ charity auction, which we attended in full costume—ate the food and danced the dances of those long-ago times.

After the ball I was in awe at the thought of meeting one of my favourite authors, though less so when Penny opened the door and her four dogs bounded out to greet me, as I had three dogs of my own. Our friendship was cemented the moment we noticed matching dog slobber on our identical trousers.

Grace, elegance, kindness, thoughtfulness—none of these could do sufficient credit to a woman who brought reading pleasure into so many people’s lives. I was with Penny shortly before she died and her most urgent request was that I tell you, her readers, how much you meant to her. You were Penny’s inspiration, and her only regret was that she couldn’t finish all the books she wanted to write for you. But as, I told Penny, however many books she wrote we, her loyal readers, would always want more.

I know you will enjoy this collection of wonderful stories as much as I have.

With my warmest wishes to you all,

Susan Stephens

About the Author

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 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.

Christmas Nights

A Bride for His Majesty’s Pleasure

Her Christmas Fantasy

Figgy Pudding

Penny Jordan

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

A Bride for His Majesty’s Pleasure

PROLOGUE

‘AND if I refuse to marry you?’ Although she did her best not to allow her feelings to show, she was conscious of the fact that her voice trembled slightly.

Max looked at her.

‘I think you already know the answer to your own question.’

The dying sun streaming in through the tower window warmed the darkness of her hair and revealed the classical beauty of her facial bone structure, before stroking golden fingers along the exposed column of her throat.

A twenty-first-century woman, caught in an ancient and powerful trap of savagery and custom, Max acknowledged wryly, if only to himself.

The intensity of the powerful and unwanted emotional and physical reaction that punched through him caught him off guard. It was a dangerous mix of sympathy and desire, neither of which he should be feeling. But most especially not the desire. Immediately Max turned away from her—like a schoolboy desperate to conceal the over-enthusiastic and inappropriate reaction of his developing maleness, he derided himself. But he was not a schoolboy, and furthermore he was perfectly capable of controlling both his emotions and his physical desire. So his own body had momentarily caught him off guard? It would not happen again.

What he was doing wasn’t something he wanted to do, nor was it in any way for his own benefit. It was a duty, and she was the doorway via which he could access what he needed to help those who needed it so desperately. It was a loathsome situation; either he sacrificed her, and in a sense himself, or he risked sacrificing his people. He did not have the luxury of indulging in personal and private emotional needs. His duty now obliged him to channel his thoughts and feelings towards those to whom he had given his commitment when he had accepted the crown and become the ruling Prince of Fortenegro. His people. This woman’s people.

He turned back towards her. So much was at stake; the future of a whole country lay in this woman’s hands. He would have preferred to be honest with her—but how could he, given her family background? She was a rich man’s grandchild. Her grandfather a man, he knew now, who had alternated between both over-indulging his grandchildren and over-controlling them—to the extent that they had become adept at deceit and were motivated only by self interest.

Ionanthe looked at the man facing her—a man who represented so much that she hated.

‘You mean that I’ll be thrown to the wolves, so to speak? In the form of the people? Forced to pay my family’s debt of honour to you?’

When he gave no reply she laughed bitterly.

‘And you dare to call yourself civilized?’

‘I own neither the crime nor its punishment. I am as impotent in this situation as you are yourself,’ Max defended himself caustically.

Impotent. It was a deliberately telling choice of word, surely, given that he had just told her that she must marry him and give him a son as recompense for her sister’s crimes against him. Or be handed over to the people to be tried by a feudal form of justice that was no justice at all.

As he waited for her response Max thought back over the events that had led them both to this unwanted impasse.

CHAPTER ONE

‘THERE must be vengeance, Highness.’ The courtier was emphatic and determined as he addressed Max.

The Count no doubt considered him ill fitted for his role of ruler of the island of Fortenegro—the black fort, so named originally because of the sheer dark cliffs that protected the mainland facing side of the island.

‘Justice must be seen to be done,’ Count Petronius continued forcefully.

The Count, like most of the courtiers, was in his late sixties. Fortenegro’s society was fiercely patriarchal, and its laws harsh and even cruel, reflecting its refusal to move with the times. A refusal which Max fully intended to change. The only reason he had not flatly refused to step into his late cousin’s shoes and become the new ruler of the principality was because of his determination to do what he knew his late father had longed to do—and that was to bring Fortenegro, and more importantly its people, out of the Dark Ages and into the light of the twenty-first century. That, though, was going to take time and patience, and first he must win the respect of his people and, just as importantly, their trust.

Fortenegrans were constitutionally opposed to change—especially, according to his courtiers, any kind of change that threatened their way of life and the beliefs that went with that way of life: beliefs such as the need to take revenge for insults and slights both real and imagined.

‘An eye for an eye; a tooth for a tooth—that is the law of our people,’ the Count continued enthusiastically. ‘And they will expect you to uphold it. In their eyes a prince and a ruler who cannot protect his own honour cannot be trusted to protect theirs. That is their way and the way they live.’

And not just them, Max reflected grimly as he looked one by one at the group of elderly courtiers who had been his late cousin’s advisers and who, in many ways, despite the fact that he was now ruler of the island, were still reluctant to cede to him the power they had taken for themselves during his late cousin’s reign. But then Cosmo had been a playboy, unashamedly hedonistic and not in the least bit interested in the island he ruled or its people—only the wealth with which it had provided him.