Marco's Convenient Wife

PENNY JORDAN

Penny Jordan needs no introduction as arguably the most recognisable name writing for Mills & Boon. We have celebrated her wonderful writing with a special collection, many of which for the first time in eBook format and all available right now.Italian count Marco di Vincenti feared for baby Angelina's safety. He needed a wife to get custody – so he proposed a marriage of convenience to the baby's English nanny, Alice Walsingham!Having secretly fallen in love with Marco, Alice found the wedding pure torture! All her family and five hundred other guests expected to see lots of passion… Marco was all too willing to oblige in public – but what about in private, on their wedding night… ?

Celebrate the legend that is bestselling author

PENNY JORDAN

Phenomenally successful author of more than two hundred books with sales of over a hundred million copies!

Penny Jordan's novels are loved by millions of readers all around the word in many different languages. Mills & Boon are proud to have published one hundred and eighty-seven novels and novellas written by Penny Jordan, who was a reader favourite right from her very first novel through to her last.

This beautiful digital collection offers a chance to recapture the pleasure of all of Penny Jordan's fabulous, glamorous and romantic novels for Mills & Boon.

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 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.

Marco’s Convenient Wife

Penny Jordan

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

PROLOGUE

‘GOOD luck with your interview. You’re bound to get the job, though—no one could find a better nanny than you, Alice. Your only fault is that you love children too much!’

As she returned her elder sister’s warm hug Alice tried to smile. Even though it was over a month since she had left her previous job she still missed her two young charges. She did not, however, miss their father, who had made her last few months in the employ of his wife so uncomfortable, with his sexual come-ons towards her.

Even without his unwanted attentions, Alice knew she would not have accepted his wife’s invitation to work for them in New York, where she had been relocated.

Her former employer was in many ways typical of some career women, who whilst needing to employ a nanny to look after their children, often resented and even deliberately undermined their nanny’s role within the household.

But that was the price one paid for the job she had chosen to do, and now she was about to fly to Florence to be interviewed for a new post, that of looking after a very young baby—a motherless six-month-old baby.

‘And thanks for agreeing to take Louise w