Levelling The Score. PENNY JORDANЧитать онлайн книгу.

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      CHAPTER ONE

      ‘JENNA, please … you’ve got to help me, there just isn’t anyone else. God, if only I’d listened to you years ago … You warned me what sort of brother I’ve got, but—’

      ‘Susie, come on, you’re exaggerating,’ Jenna interrupted her volatile friend. ‘Simon can’t stop you from marrying whoever you wish—nor force you into marrying someone against your will. You’re twenty-four, for God’s sake, and he is only your elder brother …’

      ‘He’s no brother of mine. Not any more,’ Susie responded theatrically. ‘Machiavelli would be a better name for him. God, to think I never guessed what he was up to, all the time he was shovelling that gross friend of his down my throat … go to the theatre … All the time I thought I was doing it to help Simon out with an old friend suffering from loneliness, and now I find out that Simon has been trying to marry me off to the guy.’

      ‘What’s he like?’ Jenna asked curiously.

      Susie frowned, her blonde hair with its soft pink streaks standing up on end all round her small head. No matter how outlandish her clothes and hair-style might be, there was an unmistakable soft femininity about Susie that simply couldn’t be hidden. She had been having man trouble of one sort or another for as long as Jenna had known her, and that had been since they had both started senior school together when they were eleven years old.

      ‘Who, Simon? Come on, it isn’t that long since you last saw him … My twenty-first, wasn’t it? And he hasn’t changed that much … Men don’t, do they, not once they get over thirty … He still looks deliciously distinguished … especially when he’s wearing his court gear. He hasn’t gone grey, though, or anything like that. Odd, isn’t it, that he should have such dark hair, black as a crow’s wing really, and mine should be so fair … Ma reckons he inherited his colouring from a Cornish great-grandmother …’

      Jenna subdued a faint sigh at her friend’s ramblings, and then interrupted firmly, ‘No, Susie, not Simon! What’s his friend like, the one he wants you to marry?’

      ‘You mean you will help me? Oh, my God, Jenna, I knew you would! I know it will work, the minute he sets eyes on you he’s bound to fall for you … It’s not fair … why couldn’t I be tall and slim, instead of small and round? And your hair, I’ve always yearned for dark red hair … it’s so … so …’

      ‘Red?’ Jenna supplied challengingly, with a gleam in her eyes, quite forgetting for the moment that as yet she had most definitely not made any commitment to help her friend rid herself of her unwanted suitor, no matter what Susie might choose to believe.

      Her red hair was a constant source of irritation to her. People who didn’t know her constantly made reference to the temper they suspected must go with it. Others, normally women, asked her if it was dyed … It was a rather spectacular shade of dense, dark red. It went well with her creamy skin, although untypically her eyes were not gold or green, but a dark, true sapphire-blue.

      All her life she had had pinned on her the label of a redhead’s infamous temper, and because of it she had cultivated a cool remoteness that outwardly at least she allowed nothing to shake.

      The temper was there all right, but she hated being predictable. And if there was one person above all others who had the knack of arousing that temper it was Simon Townsend.

      They had first met when she was twelve and he was nineteen. Susie had taken her home with her after school. An only child herself, she had been inclined to stand in awe of the elder brother Susie talked so much about, even before she had met him.

      It had a been a summer’s afternoon, and they had arrived from school, hot and sticky. Simon, home from university, had been playing tennis, but he had come in looking cool and unflappable in his tennis whites, his dark hair slicked smoothly to his masculine skull, his eyes cool and unfathomable, making Jenna feel as though he was looking right into her mind and reading every single little thing that was hidden there.

      So powerful was the memory of that meeting that she actually squirmed uncomfortably in her chair.

      Susie, at last realising the whole of her best friend’s attention was not focused upon her, broke off in mid-sentence and stared at her, her brown eyes rounded and filling with tears.

      ‘Jenna, please … please help me. You don’t know what it’s like to be in love, the way Peter and I are …’

      ‘No, I don’t,’ Jenna agreed firmly. ‘Nor can I see why you don’t simply tell dear brother Simon to forget his empire-building plans and say you’re in love with someone else! Come on, Susie, he can’t force you into marriage with this friend of his … Your parents wouldn’t let him.’

      ‘You don’t know Simon,’ Susie responded darkly. ‘It’s becoming a barrister that’s done it—all that power, it’s gone to his head. You know how persuasive he can be, Jenna, once he starts talking to me …’ She gave a tiny, but effective shiver, making Jenna remember rather wryly the fact that she had been one of the leading lights in their theatrical group when they were at school.

      ‘It’s all right for you,’ Susie continued miserably. ‘You’re so strong-willed, so firm in what you want to do. I’m not, and once Simon gets to work on me, I’m terrified that he’ll get me to agree to doing something I don’t really want to do … The problem is that he