Secrets: One Night in His Arms / Taken for Revenge, Bedded for Pleasure

?Penny Jordan & India Grey Powerful, dramatic writers Her secret fantasy Shamed by her teenage infatuation with Ranulf Carrington, Sylvie knew it was important that he understand they were now meeting on equal terms. Her body still ached for him and maybe Ran would never come to love her, but she knew she’d do almost anything for just one night in his arms. Could her innocent allure tame the devil?Dangerously handsome Olivier Moreau has everything: power, money, and endless women warming his bed. But he is still hungry for revenge. What better vengeance than to seduce innocent Bella Lawrence? But when cold revenge turns to red-hot passion, Olivier finds he has no intention of letting her go…

Praise

Sinfully sexy stories from Sunday Times bestselling author Penny Jordan and one of Mills & Boon’s rising stars, USA TODAY bestselling author, India Grey!

“Ms Jordan produces an absorbing tale with rich characters, a layered conflict and a sensual tone.”

“The revenge-is-sweet plot quickly lures readers into a dazzling story drenched in emotion and sensuality.”

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 one hundred and eight-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.

Look out for Penny’s last books: The Price of Royal Duty launched the new continuity THE SANTINA CROWN and was available in May 2012, and her final original novel, A Secret Disgrace, became available in June 2012.

It is such a pleasure for me to have one of my books linked to a book—Taken for Revenge, Bedded for Pleasure—by fellow author India Grey. I love her books so much for their fresh, zesty approach, and for the special emotional intensity she brings to her writing, and I know that you will enjoy reading this book every bit as much as I did. She has such a wonderful and naturally talented writing voice and such an instinctive sense of what readers look for in Modern™ romance books.

I have to admit, though, that there is another reason for having a very special place on my bookshelves for India Grey’s books. She and I were members of the same writing group and, after reading her work I encouraged her, indeed bullied her almost, into sending her manuscript in to Mills & Boon. I should also admit here that when I read those opening pages, I became involved with her characters so immediately that I felt rather envious of her talent. However, happily there is room in the Mills & Boon “stable” for a wide variety of authors, each with their own distinctive voice, and it is both a pleasure and a privilege for me to have my book partnered with hers.

PROLOGUE

‘WHAT the hell are you doing, Sylvie? Just what kind of game are you playing now?’ Ran demanded angrily as he removed her hands, releasing her fingers from his shirt where she had unconsciously curled them in her attempt to get him to listen to what she wanted to say, to understand that she was no longer a child, that she was now completely and totally a woman … a woman who loved and wanted him.

‘Ran, this isn’t a game,’ she protested, her eyes starting to fill with anguished tears as he thrust her away. ‘I want—’

‘Oh, I know exactly what you want, Sylvie,’ he interrupted her savagely. ‘You want me to take you to bed. But right now what I feel more like doing—’ He broke off, said something she couldn’t quite catch under his breath and then turned to look at her so that the light fell sharply across his face, outlining the aristocratic arrogance of his profile.

‘This doesn’t have anything to do with Alex,’ Sylvie protested frantically. ‘This is just between you and me, Ran.’

‘You and me? There is no you and me,’ he told her cruelly. ‘You are just a schoolgirl, Sylvie, whilst I am a fully adult man.’

‘But Ran, I love you,’ Sylvie pleaded desperately, throwing everything she had left into one last attempt to make him see how she felt.

‘Really?’ Ran drawled mockingly. ‘How much? As much as the pop star you were ready to die for six months ago, or the pony you wanted three months before that?’

So very little space separated them—a few feet … that was all. If she let him walk away from her now without at least trying …

Boldly she closed the distance between them, taking him off guard as she placed her body close to his and wrapped her arms possessively around him, possessively and far too tightly for him to remove them as he had done so easily a few moments ago.

‘Ran …’ She pleaded with him, lifting her face to him, her mouth trembling. ‘Ran, please …’

She felt something that could have been a shudder galvanise his body before clumsily and inexpertly she pressed her mouth against his in a closed-lipped, untutored kiss.

His mouth felt hard and hot, his skin where he had shaved thrillingly rough against her own. Fireworks ignited and exploded deep within her body; her heart was beating so fast she thought she might die of the excitement.

‘Ran,’ she moaned passionately against his mouth as she twisted with innocent provocation against his body.

Suddenly his own arms were around her, not pushing her away as he had done earlier, but holding onto her, his fingers biting hard into her slender arms as he slid one hand into the back of her hair, holding her head still whilst his mouth started to move on hers.

If she had thought that her heart was beating fast before, that was nothing to the way it was pounding now. Her whole body ached and pulsed with the intoxication of what was happening.

She loved him so much, wanted him so much. Eagerly she pressed her still coltishly youthful body even closer to his. She could feel every nerve-ending in her skin aching with the intensity of her yearning for him.

She wanted him to make love to her so desperately. These last few weeks, whilst they had been working together clearing the overgrown stagnant lake in the woods on her stepbrother’s estate, working on a conservation project which Ran, as her stepbrother’s estate manager, had been overseeing, she had come to see him in a new light and in doing so had fallen head over heels in love with him, with all the passion and intensity of her seventeen-year-old nature.

And now, after the corrosive hurt of all his recent rebuffs, all his painful rejections of her attempts to make him realise how she felt, here he was holding her, kissing her … wanting her …

A fiercely sharp thrill of feminine excitement spun through her. Her breasts ached for the touch of his hands, to be held and caressed by him as she had read about, seen in films. The thought of their two naked bodies entwined in the sensual privacy of Ran’s bed was almost too much for her. Eagerly she opened her mouth, inviting him to probe deeper with his tongue, but then abruptly, to her shock, Ran was suddenly pushing her away as quickly as he had taken hold of her, his face dark with anger.

‘What’s wrong? Oh, for God’s sake …’ she heard him mutter. ‘The fact that you even need to ask that kind of question shows just how … You’re a child still, Sylvie … Six months from now …’

She bit down hard on her bottom lip when she saw the irritation in his eyes as he ran his hand through his thick dark copper hair.

‘No, Sylvie,’ she heard Ran telling her grittily. ‘What I wanted,’ he told her bluntly, ‘was not you, but what you offered. I’m a man, and when a woman comes on to me, offering me sex …’ He stopped and shook his head. ‘You’re a child still, Sylvie.’

‘I bet if we were in bed together you wouldn’t be saying that,’ Sylvie challenged him boldly, adding recklessly, ‘I’m not a child at all, Ran, and I could prove it to you …’

‘Dear God,’ she heard him rasp, ‘have you the first idea of what you’re saying … suggesting …?’

‘Well, I sure as hell don’t want or love you,’ he told her ferociously, his face suddenly shockingly pale underneath its weather-beaten tan. ‘And let me give you a small warning, Sylvie: if you continue to go around offering yourself to men, sooner or later one of them’s going to take you up on your offer and I promise you that the experience won’t be a pleasant one. You’re far too young to be experimenting with sex, and when you are old enough it should be with someone of your own age and not … I’m a man, not a boy, Sylvie,’ he told her brutally, ‘and … well, let’s just say that the idea of taking some over-excited and inexperienced little virgin to bed and playing touchy-feely games with her is not my idea of a particularly satisfying relationship—not sexually, not mentally and certainly not emotionally …

‘Go and find someone your own age to play with, Sylvie,’ he told her grimly.

For a moment Sylvie was tempted to protest, to argue and plead, or even more daringly to throw herself back into his arms and prove to him that she could make him want her despite her age and her lack of experience. She was not normally so easily defeated or diminished, but something deep down inside, some very new sense of womanliness, shrank from enduring another rejection from him. And so, instead, swallowing back the tears she was aching to cry, she lifted her head and, tilting her chin to him defiantly, said, ‘Yes, I think I will …’

There had been one boy in particular in the party of co-workers involved in the conservation campaign who had shown a very marked interest in her. At the time, newly, wildly in love with Ran, she hadn’t paid him very much attention, but now …

‘Sylvie,’ he warned. Angrily she refused to stop and listen to him, he had no jurisdiction over her.

The bright delicacy of her newly emergent tender love was already tarnishing and fading as resentment, pride and enmity took its place.

She loved him but now she felt as though she could very easily come to hate him—she certainly wanted to hate him.

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Praise

About the Author

PROLOGUE