Yuletide Reunion

Dear Reader,

One hundred. Doesn’t matter how many times I say it, I still can’t believe that’s how many books I’ve written. It’s a fabulous feeling but more fabulous still is the news that Mills & Boon are issuing every single one of my backlist as digital titles. Wow. I can’t wait to share all my stories with you - which are as vivid to me now as when I wrote them.

There’s BOUGHT FOR HER HUSBAND, with its outrageously macho Greek hero and A SCANDAL, A SECRET AND A BABY featuring a very sexy Tuscan. THE SHEIKH’S HEIR proved so popular with readers that it spent two weeks on the USA Today charts and…well, I could go on, but I’ll leave you to discover them for yourselves.

I remember the first line of my very first book: “So you’ve come to Australia looking for a husband?” Actually, the heroine had gone to Australia to escape men, but guess what? She found a husband all the same! The man who inspired that book rang me up recently and when I told him I was beginning my 100th story and couldn’t decide what to write, he said, “Why don’t you go back to where it all started?”

So I did. And that’s how A ROYAL VOW OF CONVENIENCE was born. It opens in beautiful Queensland and moves to England and New York. It’s about a runaway princess and the enigmatic billionaire who is infuriated by her, yet who winds up rescuing her. But then, she goes and rescues him… Wouldn’t you know it?

I’ll end by saying how very grateful I am to have a career I love, and to thank each and every one of you who has supported me along the way. You really are very dear readers.

Love,

Sharon xxx

Mills & Boon are proud to present a thrilling digital collection of all Sharon Kendrick’s novels and novellas for us to celebrate the publication of her amazing and awesome 100th book! Sharon is known worldwide for her likeable, spirited heroines and her gorgeous, utterly masculine heroes.

SHARON KENDRICK once won a national writing competition, describing her ideal date: being flown to an exotic island by a gorgeous and powerful man. Little did she realise that she’d just wandered into her dream job! Today she writes for Mills & Boon, featuring her often stubborn but always to-die-for heroes and the women who bring them to their knees. She believes that the best books are those you never want to end. Just like life…

Yuletide Reunion

Sharon Kendrick

www.millsandboon.co.uk

Contents

Cover

Dear Reader

About the Author

Title Page

CHAPTER ONE

CHAPTER TWO

CHAPTER THREE

CHAPTER FOUR

CHAPTER FIVE

CHAPTER SIX

CHAPTER SEVEN

Copyright

CHAPTER ONE

THE first time Clemmie saw Aleck Cutler, she knew she had to have him.

There was only one tiny obstacle in the way—he just happened to be dating someone else at the time.

Worse. He might only be eighteen years old, but apparently he was serious about the girl. Everybody said so. Very, very serious.

Clemmie didn’t believe them. Not at first. People didn’t get married at eighteen, for goodness’ sake, so it couldn’t be that serious, could it? Okay, people could fall in love at eighteen, but they didn’t generally get married. What would be the point?

And anyway, Clemmie thought, staring hard at her fountain pen. He couldn’t possibly be in love with Alison Fleming, even if he thought he was. Because that wasn’t part of Clemmie’s life plan. He was going to fall in love with her, just as she had fallen love with him the first time she saw him. When he had held the door open for her and said, ‘Hi,’ his greeny-blue eyes crinkling at the corners as he gave her the most irresistible smile imaginable.

It was like being touched by magic—there was no other way to describe it. And if Aleck hadn’t realised yet what was as obvious to Clemmie as the writing on the wall—namely, that they were made for each other—well, he soon would!

Clemmie gave a great sigh as she glanced down at the open textbook in front of her. She was bored; that was the trouble. She had been bored for a whole month—ever since she had joined the sixth-form of Ashfield High. A month of trying to get used to a new house, a new town, new school, new stepfather...

Clemmie bit her lip and picked up her pen to write, but found herself unable to concentrate and put it down again almost immediately. She stared out of the window across the school playing fields. It wasn’t as though she didn’t like her stepfather—she did. Dan was a good man, who loved her mother, and her mother deserved that love. Clemmie’s father had died when she was little, and it had been a real struggle for her mother. It was just...

Clemmie sighed once more as she retied the ribbon at the end of one thick, shiny plait. Did the two of them have to be quite so ecstatic about each other all the time, and in front of her?

It wasn’t that they were constantly pawing at each other, or kissing, or anything like that. Just that sometimes the way her mother gazed at Dan, and the way that he gazed back at her—well, it just made Clemmie think she shouldn’t even be in the same building, let alone the same room!

The school was fine, too, if she was being honest, and much more relaxed than the city school she had been used to in London. It had a good academic reputation and it wasn’t too big, though it had lots of playing fields where you could walk at lunchtime and lose your soul up into the sky. And the other girls in her year were friendly. The boys, too, thought Clemmie, wincing; some of them had been very friendly.

Except for Aleck Cutler, of course.

Apart from that one blinding smile on her first day, he had remained cool and polite and indifferent.

He was in the year above Clemmie, and the unrivalled star of the school. He was the kind of person you wanted to hate because he was so perfect, but ended up sighing over. He loved sport and hated books, but he had the best grades in his year. He never showed any personal vanity whatsoever—in fact, he never seemed to bother what he looked like—yet he never looked anything other than thoroughly delectable, whatever he was doing. Covered in mud and wearing a pair of short-shorts, he attracted large audiences of swooning schoolgirls who normally couldn’t tell one end of a rugby ball from the other!

He lived on his parents’ farm on the edge of Ashfield, and he worked there every weekend and all through the holidays—and the hard, physical work made him fitter and tougher than anyone else of his age.

He was wonderful in just about every way, Clemmie had decided. In fact, there was only one blot on the landscape, and that was Alison Fleming, his girlfriend.

Clemmie had found out as much as she could without seeming too obvious. The facts were simple. Aleck had been going out with Alison Fleming for six months, and in that time he had not looked at another female. Worse was to follow. Alison Fleming was very beautiful, with pale, turquoise eyes and a mass of honey-coloured hair which always hung in an immaculate gleaming bell to her shoulders.

Clemmie did everything in her power to get Aleck to notice her, motivated by a deviousness she’d been unaware she possessed. She hung around unobtrusively until she saw him leave the building—with or without Alison—and then she would saunter along home on the opposite side of the road, with her long red-brown hair flying wildly and her skirt rolled over twice at the waistband so that it showed yards of long, stockinged leg.

She joined the School Debating Society, of which he was the Chairperson. The only problem being that whenever he was in the room all Clemmie’s brilliantly thought-out arguments went straight out of her head, and she stared at him, totally tongue-tied. It certainly put her off a career in public speaking!

But as time went on, and the end of the year approached, Clemmie gradually began to accept that maybe the love affair she longed for just wasn’t meant to be. Aleck would be leaving soon, and going off to university. And not alone either—but with Alison. He obviously just wasn’t interested in any other girl. Although sometimes, sometimes, Clemmie could have sworn that she had seen him giving her a hard, slanting look from beneath the dark lashes which shaded those amazing blue-green eyes of his.

It might have all died a quiet death had it not been for the night of the Summer Ball on the last night of term, which was thrown in honour of all those who were leaving the school. Clemmie didn’t particularly want to go—seeing Aleck for the last time, with his arms draped around Alison, would be like subjecting herself to the most awful form of torture.

In the end, she was persuaded to go by her mother.

‘You must go, Clemmie.’ Hilary Powers frowned at her daughter. ‘You’re always complaining that there’s nothing to do around here, and now you’re turning down the opportunity to go to a really nice dance!’

Clemmie turned her mouth down. What could she say? That she’d fallen hook, line and sinker for a man who was besotted with someone else?

‘And I’ll give you money for a new dress,’ smiled Dan. ‘How about that?’

Clemmie couldn’t win.

She bought a dress which was absolutely beautiful but left very little to the imagination. A black silk slip dress, beneath which she could wear only the briefest of black lace thongs.

‘Do you like it?’ she asked her mother.

Her mother screwed her face up and looked at her daughter. Pale face, too many freckles, dark hair spilling down like mahogany satin—gorgeous! But the dress? ‘I’m not sure, darling. It’s a bit revealing.’

‘Gee, thanks, Mum!’ scowled Clemmie. ‘You do wonders for my confidence!’ What was it with mothers, sometimes?

‘Are you wearing a bra?’

‘I can’t wear a bra—it shows!’

‘Then I’ll lend you my black chiffon wrap,’ said her mother briskly. ‘You can throw that round your neck and look slightly more decent.’

Clemmie got ready with Mary Adams from her year, the two of them standing giggling and shaking with nerves as Clemmie swept unfamiliarly thick mascara onto her dark lashes. She was so nervous that she accepted a glass of wine from the cask in Mary’s fridge, and then another. By the time she arrived at the dance she was floating, floating—and danced with every single boy who asked her.

Too giddy and too excited to eat, she glugged back a glass of the fruity punch she was given and tried not to look at Alison Fleming, who was demure and stunning in virginal white. While Aleck looked like the only real man in the room, his height and build and bearing making him seem like warm flesh and blood, while the others all looked like cardboard cut-outs.

Clemmie was on her way back from the rest room, moving slightly unsteadily along the corridor with her eyes glittering darkly against the dead-pale of her cheeks, when she saw Aleck.

He was standing with his back to her, standing perfectly still by the window of an empty, unlit classroom. His old classroom.

Clemmie drew in a deep breath of longing. She should go straight past. He wasn’t interested. He had a girlfriend.

But the wine and the punch had loosened her tongue and this was probably the last time she would ever see him.

‘Hi,’ she said recklessly, standing illuminated in the bright light of the corridor.

Aleck turned round slowly, his eyes flickering over her in a way she didn’t quite understand. If he was surprised to see her, he didn’t show it. But then, his face rarely showed anything, and it certainly didn’t now.

‘Hi,’ he said coolly.

Clemmie gulped and walked over to stand beside him at the window, which overlooked the tennis courts and the soccer pitches beyond. She wondered what this school would be like next year, with no Aleck Cutler to gaze at, to think about, to fantasise over... It didn’t really bear thinking about.

‘So,’ she said, and stared out into the night as her eyes grew accustomed to the darkness. ‘What are you looking at?’

He gave a small laugh, then shook his head. ‘Nothing.’

Clemmie felt bold. ‘Yes, you were!’ she teased. ‘I saw you.’

He found himself smiling reluctantly. She was as exuberant as a puppy. ‘Okay, then,’ he admitted. ‘I was just looking out at that old house. See?’

She followed the direction of his eyes but she knew which house he was talking about. The tumbledown house which dominated the town. From her bedroom window in Dan’s house, Clemmie would look down at the overgrown lawns, the flowerbeds which were choked with weeds. In autumn, the fruit fell from the apple and pear trees, lying ignored and rotting on the ground. It was a sad house, she had often thought. A neglected house. ‘You mean the old grey one? Isn’t it supposed to be haunted?’

He shook his head. ‘I don’t believe in all that stuff! It’s only spooky because no one’s lived in it for years.’

‘I wonder why?’ she queried softly.

Aleck looked at her, finding her ridiculously easy to talk to and yet sensing some unknown danger in the air. ‘Because it’s big. And it’s run-down—you’d need serious money to update it and run it. People with that kind of money don’t generally want to live in a small town like Ashfield.’

‘But you do?’ she asked perceptively.

He shrugged. ‘Maybe.’

There was silence for a moment, though Clemmie could hear her heart booming out in a muffled thud. She saw the pensive set of his profile. ‘Feeling sad?’ she asked softly.

He narrowed his eyes suspiciously, like a man not used to being quizzed about his feelings. ‘Sad?’

‘About leaving.’ She noticed that he wasn’t looking into her eyes any more, just staring very hard at her silky black dress, and that a tiny muscle had begun to work in one cheek.

There was a pause. ‘A little. Closing a chapter of your life is always sad.’ He gave a low laugh, and abruptly turned his attention away. But not for long. He looked back into her eyes then, and Clemmie felt drawn in by the magnetism of that cool, mocking gaze. ‘Though maybe nostalgic would be a better word.’

‘Yes.’ Clemmie giddily swept her fingers back through her thick red-brown hair, so that it spilt in mahogany streams all the way down over her silk-covered breasts. Dizzy with wine and longing, she tried to think of something interesting and original to say, and failed dismally. ‘Will you be sorry to leave?’ She leaned back to perch her bottom on the wide window-ledge and smiled at him.

The movement distracted him as much as the invitation in her eyes, and Aleck found his eyes drawn once again to the pale gleam as her breasts thrust heavily towards him. He felt the slow, insistent throbbing of desire start to build up, felt it begin to pulse powerfully through his veins. ‘Sure, I’ll be sorry,’ he said, in a husky voice that didn’t sound like his own at all. ‘There’s a lot I’m going to miss.’

Drunk with the heady delight of his proximity, with the obvious appreciation in his eyes, Clemmie found herself purring like a parody of a sex-symbol. ‘And what are you going to miss most?’

Aleck felt his muscles tense as she lounged back negligently on the window-ledge. She might as well have been naked for all that dress was covering her up, the two inverted vees of the bodice taut and stretched as they struggled to restrain the lush young breasts. The silk lay smoothly against her flesh, except for where he could quite clearly see the outline of some outrageously flimsy G-string. Aleck swallowed. ‘Well, I’ll miss seeing you,’ he told her, in a throaty whisper.

Clemmie opened her dark eyes even wider, her surprise completely genuine. ‘Will you?’

‘Sure, I will.’

‘I didn’t think you’d even noticed me,’ she told him honestly.

He gave a hollow guilty laugh, as Alison’s memory slipped from his mind like sand through his fingers. ‘Not notice you?’ he demanded unsteadily. ‘Oh, come on. You’d need to be blind or pretty stupid not to notice you, Clemmie...’

His face gave him away.

Clemmie could see the fight that was taking place within him, yet she was too trapped by desire to heed it. Too flattered by the look on his face which must have mirrored her own. A look she had dreamed of, night after night, but never thought she would see in the flesh. Compelled by a need she did not recognise, she put her hands up behind her head to cushion her head on her palms, and the action did even more to accentuate her breasts. ‘You do say the nicest things,’ she smiled.

Appalled at his behaviour, and yet unwilling or unable to stop himself, Aleck took a step towards her. Why not just give her what she so obviously wanted? What he so obviously wanted, too. ‘Do I?’ he murmured. ‘I don’t just say the nicest things, Clemmie, I do them as well...’

He moved his lips towards hers, and Clemmie wondered if she had imagined the dark note of warning which had coloured the throaty whisper of his response. But then his mouth was covering hers and the effect was like lighting touchpaper.

He showed none of the finesse of the Aleck of her dreams, just pulled her into his arms and began a kiss which was so shockingly intimate and so unbelievably sensual that Clemmie felt she should have been outraged by it. Yet she found herself kissing him back as though she had been born for just this moment.

He pulled her closer, so close that her lush silken-covered breasts were crushed against his chest. God, he could feel those nipples digging into him like tight little rocks. He couldn’t help himself, and just briefly brushed his fingertips over each straining mound, expecting her to slap his face. But she didn’t.

She couldn’t. The moment he touched her, she was lost. His. Submerged and drowning in silky-dark erotic waters. She knew that she shouldn’t be letting him do this, that she should be pushing him away, insulted—but instead Clemmie nearly died with pleasure when he touched her breasts. The wine and her loneliness and the overwhelming emotion she had felt for Aleck Cutler since the moment she’d first laid eyes on him, all combined to become the most potent, sensual cocktail of her young life.

His mouth was still on hers as his thigh pushed its way insistently between hers, his fingers now straying beneath the silk of the bodice itself until they alighted on each exquisitely aroused nipple and he circled the bare skin of each painful peak with erotic triumph.

‘Clemmie,’ he moaned into her mouth.

‘W-what?’

‘God, you’re so beautiful,’ he managed to get out, from between gritted teeth.

Her head tipped back as he kissed her neck. ‘No, I’m n-not...’

’Beautiful,’ he contradicted, still in that dazed kind of voice. ‘And I want you. Do you know that? So badly.’

‘I want you, too,’ she gasped in wonderment, and laced her fingers into his thick dark hair.

His hand moved to the pert curve of her bottom, cupping each silk-covered buttock with a groan, and he was just about to slide the slithery material up, so that he could touch her legs and beyond, when the brief and rapid sound of footsteps heralded a third person’s arrival and the room was thrown into bright light.

Bedazzled, they sprang apart—just in time to see the Head of Science standing by the light switch, with a whole gaggle of giggling fifth-formers just behind him.

‘Good evening, Cutler,’ he said stonily. ‘Perhaps you and Miss Powers would like to come to my office. I think that a little talk is probably long overdue. Don’t you?’

Clemmie looked up into Aleck’s face. For a split second their eyes connected, and in his she could read the unmistakable message of self-disgust and outraged recrimination.

And she knew then why mothers always warned their daughters about being too easy. Because Clemmie would have done anything to be able to remove that look of seething contempt from Aleck Cutler’s beautiful eyes.

CHAPTER TWO

’MOM, Mom—Mom! Is this really, really our new home?’

Clemmie laughed and looked up from the packing case she was hunting through. Where was the wretched kettle? She smiled into the excited face of her ten-year-old daughter. ‘Yes, Justine,’ she smiled. ‘It really, really is!’

‘And did I come here when I was very little?’ Justine sat back on her heels and looked up at her mother.

‘Yes, you did. You wouldn’t remember. It was where Grandma used to live—’

‘With Grandad Dan?’

‘That’s right.’ Clemmie lifted the bright blue kettle out of the packing case with a look of triumph. ‘There—found it! Why don’t you go and get your sister and bring her down, and then we’ll all have a break?’

‘Is there any cake?’

‘Ginger cake, if you’re very good!’

‘Whoopee!’ shrieked Justine, and scooted off to find Louella.

Clemmie looked around her at the empty room, still trying to take everything in, wondering why her life never seemed to chug along comfortably like everyone else’s. Not that she was complaining. Not now. Not with this lovely house to call her own. A home at last, after a long time searching.

Clemmie sighed, remembering the man who had brought her and her mother so much happiness. Dear Dan. Because he’d been her stepfather she had not expected him to love her. But he had loved her, loved her as much as if he had been her own father. And yet...

When he died, she had somehow expected him to leave the house to one of his blood relatives, not to her. There had been a nephew somewhere, an elderly aunt somewhere else. And it wasn’t as though she’d seen a lot of him. Her visits from the States had tended to be when she could afford them, which hadn’t been very often. And after her mother had died she hadn’t had the heart to come back to Ashfield at all.

Clemmie’s mother had died six years previously, and—judging by his letters—Dan had never seemed to get over that. Yet when they’d rung Clemmie in America, to tell her that Dan himself was seriously ill, she had damned the expense, jumped on a flight and come straight over. He had died that same day, gratified that the woman he had looked on as a daughter should have been there to hold his hand while he slipped away...

Clemmie had flown back to the States—to her two beloved daughters and the realisation that she could no longer live in the small American town where her life had broken down so dramatically. Something was going to have to change...

Dan’s legacy had come like a bolt out of the blue, and a welcome one. The house and enough capital to live on for a little while. A life-saver. A new beginning. A new life in England.

Clemmie’s divorce had left her even more broke than she’d been before, scrubbing around to make ends meet in a country where suddenly, without her American husband, she was a foreigner. A foreigner, moreover, with foxy dark eyes and a curvy body. The kind of woman universally feared by other, not-so-happily-married women...

So she had packed the three of them up, lock, stock and barrel, and moved them back to Ashfield. Back to the town where she had spent two fractured years before going off to college, her whole view of the place coloured by her ill-advised passion for Aleck Cutler. What a gullible little fool she had been!

Part of her had wondered about coming back at all, but it had only been a small part. Women in her position had little choice about where they lived. She was happy, and grateful for Dan’s legacy, and strangely drawn to Ashfield. In spite of her youthful mistakes, it was the only place where she felt some affinity with the past. And with such an uncertain future lying ahead of her, Clemmie needed to hang onto that feeling right now.