Back In The Marriage Bed. PENNY JORDAN

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      CHAPTER ONE

      ANNIE paused halfway up the stairs of her pretty Victorian cottage, a softly tantalising smile curling her mouth in secret appreciation, a dreamy, distant look hazing the normal clarity of her widely spaced intelligent grey eyes. She had had the dream again last night, the one that featured ‘him’. And this time, last night, he had been even more deliciously real than ever before. So real, in fact…

      As her cheeks pinkened betrayingly and her eyelashes modestly swept down to conceal the expression her eyes might inadvertently betray, Annie could feel the sharp thrill of remembered pleasure running hotly through her body. Last night when he had held her, touched her…A fierce shiver openly tensed her body and a little guiltily she hurried the rest of the way upstairs.

      She only had an hour to get ready before leaving to collect Helena and her husband. The three of them were going out for a special celebratory meal, and by rights it was that she ought to be thinking about, not some impossibly wonderful and totally unreal man she had created out of her own imagination, her own dreams…her own need…

      Her frown deepened a little. For a woman of twenty-three without a man in her life, without a lover in her life, the sheer intensity of the sensuality of the periodic dreams she had about the fantasy male she had mentally labelled her perfect lover, her soul mate and other half, were becoming increasingly explicit. A sign of her loveless, manless state, or an indication of the power of her imagination? Annie didn’t know. What she did know, though, was that since she had first started dreaming about him none of the real men she had met had had the power to compare with him, nor to touch her emotions.

      She was looking forward to the evening ahead. Helena was not, after all, just her closest friend and a substitute mother figure to her; she was also the woman, the surgeon, who was responsible for saving her life. No, Annie corrected herself quickly, what Helena was responsible for in many ways was giving her life, giving it back to her after others, less determined, less compassionate, less seeing, had said that…

      Tensely Annie swallowed. Even now, nearly five years after the event, after the accident which had so nearly cost her her life, the mere thought of how close she had come to death had the power to strike an icy chill of terror right through her.

      Perhaps illogically, the fact that she had no memory, either of the events leading up to the accident itself nor the weeks when she had been in a coma, made her fear of how easily she might not have survived all the more intense.

      As she pushed at her bedroom door the slight awkwardness of her arm, which was the sole physical legacy she now had left of the accident, showed itself in the way she had to open it. Her arm had been so badly crushed, so badly damaged, that the senior registrar on duty when she had been rushed into the accident unit had been on the point of having her prepared for an amputation when Helena, who had only dropped in at the hospital to see another patient, had happened to walk through the unit and had been called over by him for a second opinion.

      As the hospital’s senior microsurgeon Helena had immediately taken charge, deciding it might be possible to save Annie’s arm.

      Her face had been the first one Annie had seen when she had first regained consciousness, but it hadn’t been for many, many weeks after that that she had learned, not from Helena herself but from one of the nurses, how lucky she was that Helena had chanced to be in the hospital when she had been brought in.

      It had been Helena who had spent СКАЧАТЬ