by Penny Jordan
Read this classic romance by New York Times bestselling author Penny Jordan, now available for the first time in e-book!
“Wanted: Prince Charming for damsel in distress.”
Melanie was certainly in distress! But the last thing she wanted was prince—or any man for that matter—to come riding to her rescue. She wanted only to disappear, to retreat to a peaceful haven to mend her broken heart. But then she met Luke Chalmers, whose sensual intrusion in her life was anything but peaceful!
His stolen kisses left her flustered, and his devastating smile sent her heart racing. But her disastrous engagement had left Melanie unwilling to trust a man again. Especially this mysterious man whose touch enticed her to surrender her innocence to him…
Originally published in 1991
A Time to Dream
Penny Jordan
CONTENTS
Chapter One
Chapter Two
Chapter Three
Chapter Four
Chapter Five
Chapter Six
Chapter Seven
Chapter Eight
Chapter Nine
Chapter Ten
CHAPTER ONE
WHEN the telephone started to ring, Melanie was poised precariously on the narrow platform of a pair of heavy wooden stepladders. The tip of her tongue was curled determinedly between her lips as she concentrated on trying to successfully hang the all-important, first piece of wallpaper on walls which fell woefully short of being anything remotely like flat and straight.
Firmly ignoring the insistent clamour of the phone, she carefully pressed the pasted paper to the wall, but already her concentration was wavering.
The trouble was that—much as she had looked forward to the isolation of these next few months, telling herself that a spring and summer spent in the peaceful depths of the country, gently and leisurely bringing into reasonable decorative order the cottage she had been so unexpectedly left; much as she knew she needed this period of valuable recuperation to recover not just from a very nasty bout of flu, but also from the anguish of discovering that Paul had not loved her after all, and had simply been amusing himself with her while all the time intending to marry Sarah Jefferies and thus amalgamate the two businesses owned and run by their respective fathers—she was still beginning to feel rather alone.
She had been warned about Paul, of course. The older, wiser eyes of Louise Jenkins, her boss and the head of Carmichael’s PR department, had seen what was happening and had gently warned her not to place too much reliance on Paul and the attention he was paying her.
Fortunately her pride had probably been more hurt than her heart, especially when she had discovered that the very weekend she had firmly refused to go away with Paul he had then spent with Sarah.
When Louise had gently and sorrowfully broken this news to her, warning her of the impending engagement, she had hidden the pain she felt and had tossed her head defiantly, stating that she did not care, and that Paul Carmichael meant nothing to her.
She was very wise, Louise had remarked calmly, because she suspected that Paul was too shallow, too vain and self-obsessed to make any woman truly happy, and that, once she was married to him and her father’s business empire was secured for Carmichael’s, Sarah would find that Paul’s present pseudo-adoration of her would very quickly turn to indifference.
Melanie had listened and mechanically agreed with Louise’s pronouncement, but inside the shock of what she had learned was making her feel sick and desperately unhappy.
Now Melanie was only glad that the flu which had then struck her down had not manifested itself until after the engagement party, which all the staff had been commanded to attend, and that, even though she had felt as though she were being wrenched apart inside, she had managed to put in an appearance at the table reserved for her colleagues, a bright false smile pinned to her face as she joined in the celebrations.
It didn’t matter how much she told herself that she had had a lucky escape; that it was plain that Paul had never intended her to be anything other than a brief diversion in his life: the pain of discovering how poor her judgement had been, how foolish her heart, was not easy to dismiss.
And then had come the extraordinary letter from a hitherto unknown firm of solicitors, informing her that she was the sole beneficiary under the will of a certain John William Burrows, who had left her not only the entire contents of his bank account, which amounted to some fifty thousand pounds, but also a comfortably sized but very dilapidated cottage, together with its large overgrown garden and several acres of land on the outskirts of a tiny Cheshire village.
She should, the solicitors informed her when she presented herself at their offices, have no difficulty in selling the property; a course which they had recommended since Mr Burrows had been rather eccentric in the latter years of his life and the property had become extremely run-down.
‘Were there no blood relatives, no family to whom Mr Burrows could have left his estate?’ Melanie had asked anxiously, totally unable to understand why her unknown benefactor had chosen to leave everything to her.
‘Only one,’ she had been informed. ‘A second cousin with whom Mr Burrows had not apparently seen eye to eye.’
When she had asked with further anxiety if the estate ought not more properly have gone to this man, the solicitor had patiently advised her that Mr Burrows had been free to dispose of his assets to whomever he chose and that he had chosen her. His cousin, moreover, was a successful and wealthy businessman to whom, or so the solicitor seemed to imply, the inheritance of such a paltry sum as fifty thousand pounds and a very run-down property, would be more of a nuisance than an advantage.
If it had not been for the fact that she had been feeling so run down herself, so depressed with life in general and her own circumstances in particular, if the bright spring sunshine had not so deplorably highlighted the deficiencies of her small Manchester bedsit…if she had not been overwhelmed by a sharp surge of curiosity about not merely the cottage but John Burrows himself, she suspected that she would have accepted the solicitor’s advice and instructed them to sell the house and land immediately.
It had been Louise who had persuaded her that the cottage was almost heaven sent and that six months or so spent living in the country was just what she needed right now.
‘But I don’t know anything about living in the country,’ she had protested, and Louise had laughed at her, pointing out that Cheshire was hardly the deepest South American jungle.
‘If you like, Simon and I will drive you out there this weekend and you can take a look at the place.’
Since Simon, Louise’s husband, was a qualified surveyor and would be able to tell her just how dilapidated the property actually was, Melanie had gratefully accepted this suggestion.
Which was how she now came to be perched so precariously on top of this ladder, trying desperately to follow Louise’s and Simon’s advice that, since the cottage was basically sound, it would pay her to spend some time and money on redecorating it before putting it up for sale.
‘Although if you do decide to sell you must hold on to the land,’ Simon had warned her. ‘There’s some talk of a new motorway extension in the area, which could send the price of any local land soaring.’
The phone had thankfully now stopped ringing, and very gingerly she climbed back down the ladder to survey the results of her handiwork.
When she had explained to the man in the wallpaper shop the condition of the cottage walls, explaining that she wanted to do something to brighten up the dull dinginess, she had been thrilled when he had suggested this pretty floral paper with its soft pinks and blues on a gentle cream background. Since there was no formal pattern to the paper it would not matter so much that
the walls were not completely straight, he had explained to her; and the fact that the paper was ready-pasted and needed only to be moistened in the specially provided water-tray would greatly assist her in this her first venture as a wallpaper-hanger.
And then if all else failed he did just happen to have the name and address of an excellent local decorator, he had added with a kind smile, correctly interpreting her uncertain look at what seemed to be a vast amount of rolls of paper.
The trouble was that she had lived so long in rented accommodation in the confines of one tiny cluttered room that she was completely inexperienced in this sort of thing.
Before that her home had been the shabby institutionalised atmosphere of the children’s home where she had grown up.
When Melanie was orphaned when just three years old, there had been no one to take her into their charge. As she had grown up and realised how alone in the world she was, she had learned to cover the loneliness and aching sense of loss this brought her with a bright smile and an insouciant air of cheerfulness, while inwardly giving in to the compulsion to daydream on what her life might have been if her parents had not been killed in that car crash.
Perhaps it had been that inner loneliness, that need she had always tried to keep so firmly under control which had made her so susceptible to Paul’s false declaration of love.
Louise had been right about one thing. Living here in this cottage was giving her a new perspective on life.
Always fiercely independent, fiercely determined not to rely on anyone for anything, she was beginning to discover that needing the companionship, the friendship of others was not perhaps a weakness after all, but simply an acceptable fact of being human.
She had been surprised to discover how curious people were about her, and how ready they were to express that curiosity. The cottage was situated almost two miles outside the village, but already Melanie had had several callers, no doubt curious to see the young woman to whom old Mr Burrows had left his property.
Melanie still had no idea why on earth John Burrows had left his estate to her, and the solicitors had been as baffled as she was herself.
She frowned, worried as she studied her wallpaper, wondering if it was straight enough.
She wasn’t a very tall girl, barely five feet three with fine delicate bones that made her look far more fragile than she actually was. Her debilitating attack of flu had left her looking more finely drawn than ever, leaving shadows beneath her dark blue eyes and a listlessness to her normally energetic way of moving.
Today her long dark hair was tied back off her face and plaited, making her look much younger than her twenty-four years.
Twenty-four. Paul had laughed at her when she had turned down his suggestion that they spend the weekend together. She couldn’t possibly still be a virgin, he had mocked her. Not at her age and with her background.
That had hurt her; as though somehow the fact that she had no family to support and protect her meant that she must somehow be promiscuous. She had immediately denied such a suggestion, ignoring the unkind way he was laughing at her.
As a child she had loved reading; had found in her books an escape from the loneliness of her life, and perhaps it was because she had absorbed so many fairy-tales that she had clung so tenaciously during her late teens to the fantasy that one day she would meet someone; that they would fall in love and that not until that happened would she have any desire for the kind of sexual intimacy that seemed so casually taken for granted by others.
Perhaps Paul was right and she was being naïve and idiotic; perhaps it was true that the majority of men would deplore and mock her inexperience; perhaps it was also true that at her age she ought to finally be abandoning her ridiculous notions of falling in love and living happily ever after.
Certainly, now that her eyes had been opened to Paul’s true character, she would not want to change places with Sarah.
Very carefully she cut the next strip of wallpaper, equally carefully rolling it up and placing it in the water-filled tray.
It had been Louise who had suggested that she tried her hand at doing some of her own decorating, taking Melanie home with her to show her what she and Simon had achieved in their own elegant detached house.
Some ten years her senior, Louise was proving to be a good friend, the first real friend she had ever had. She and Simon had been very kind to her and they were the only people she had ever admitted into her life and her trust.
Quite why, when she was eighteen years old, she had decided to take a course of driving lessons and ultimately her driving test she had never really known, but now she was thoroughly glad she had done so. Although Melanie was reluctant at first to touch any of her savings, Louise and Simon had firmly told her that when living in such an isolated area a car was an absolute necessity, and then when she had seen the fire-engine red VW Beetle she had fallen so immediately in love with it that Louise had chided her teasingly about being a salesman’s dream.
She did not intend to touch a penny of her inheritance—she had other plans for that!
Wealth, luxuries, life in what was popularly termed ‘the fast lane’—these had no appeal whatsoever for Melanie, but what she had always secretly hankered for was a home of her own, preferably in a country setting.
Of course in her daydreams this home was peopled with the family she had never had, but perhaps that was why she had given in so easily to Louise’s urgings that she move into the cottage if only for a little while.
Perhaps there had also been another reason; perhaps she had hoped that in living in the cottage she might somehow discover more about her unknown benefactor.
Melanie didn’t know very much about men, as the lamentable way in which she had almost fallen for Paul’s deceit had shown. She had no idea why a man, a total stranger, should choose to make her the beneficiary of his will. The solicitors had suggested that perhaps there was a blood connection, but she had shaken her head, knowing already that she had no blood relatives whatsoever.
Perhaps, then, he had known her parents. Again she had shaken her head, forced to admit that she had no idea whether or not this might have been the case, but privately she doubted it. If he had, surely he would have come forward to make himself known to her while he was still alive.
Apart from his cousin, it seemed that John Burrows had had no other family. He had lived in the area all his life and so had his family before him, although in the latter years of his life he had apparently become something of a recluse.
Carefully Melanie mounted the ladder again, gingerly carrying the second piece of wallpaper.
This proved harder to stick on to the wall than the first piece. Even harder was trying to align the edges of the two pieces so that the random pattern matched. The damp paper tore, causing her to make a small verbal protest at her own lack of skill as she hastily tried to stop the paper ripping even further.
Perhaps if she hadn’t been concentrating so hard on what she was doing it would not have been such a shock when the bedroom door opened abruptly and a totally unfamiliar male voice called out cheerfully, ‘Sorry to barge in like this. I tried ringing the bell but couldn’t get any response and, since your back door was open…’
Automatically Melanie let go of the sticky paper and turned round, forgetting her precarious position on top of the ladder.
The man’s reactions were fast. As the ladder started to topple and she with it, he seemed to virtually leap forward across the room, grabbing her around the waist and swinging her free of the heavy ladders just as they crashed down on to the floor.
It must be the shock of both his totally unexpected appearance and nearly having a painful fall that was making her feel so weak, she decided shakily, unable to do a thing other than simply cling to the hard muscles of his arms while he held her firmly suspended quite some distance from the floor, his black-lashed grey eyes subjecting her to a very thorough and slow appraisal.
As the colour rose up under her skin, her body la
nguage betraying immediately that she was both unused to and not entirely comfortable with such intimacy, his expression changed, a tiny frown appearing between his dark eyebrows as he studied her again.
What was it about her that was bringing that almost irritated frown to those otherwise rather carefully blank grey eyes? Melanie wondered when she found the courage to shyly look into them.
He was still holding on to her, as effortlessly as though she were a small child, she realised rather indignantly as she struggled uncomfortably within his grasp, trying to remind him that he was still holding her some dozen or more inches off the floor.
When this gave no response, she demanded rather breathlessly, ‘Could you please put me down?’
He had stopped looking at her, thankfully, and seemed to be studying the wall behind her with a rather arrested and bemused look on his face. The wall she had just been papering, she realised defensively; but now he looked at her again, and her whole body seemed to receive a shocking jolt of sensation that made her feel literally as though her bones had turned to fluid and that if he put her down now she would simply dissolve into a small heap at his feet.
The trouble was that she wasn’t used to being so physically close to a man; and certainly not a man like this one. He might not be handsome in the way that Paul had been. Paul, with his blond good looks, his carefully groomed hair, his hard, compelling bone-structure and his equally hard muscles; but this man had something about him, something which she dimly recognised was far more potent and dangerously male than Paul’s rather effeminate and weak good looks.
‘Not yet, I think,’ the stranger told her easily. ‘First I demand my forfeit…’
‘Your forfeit…’ Melanie was unaware of saying the words aloud in a stupefied almost drugged voice until he smiled at her. She had often read of smiles being described as wolfish, but this was the first time she had ever seen one. It made her skin go cold and then hot, and a tiny, forbidden pulse of excitement beat into life deep within her body; a sensation so unfamiliar and shocking that she could only stare at him with her bewilderment openly betrayed in her eyes.