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Автор James Julia

Yet another party-girl approached him, and yet again he dismissed her—to her displeasure. He flicked his eyes back to the dancers, but as he did so there was a sudden gap in his eyeline to the far side of the room.

Everything stopped. Every faculty he possessed stopped. Except one.

Vision.

And one other. Memory.

Burning, coruscating, vicious memory.

Like a zombie, he started to walk forward. His face was a mask, his pulse insensible.

Into the vortex.

Towards the one human being he had never wanted to see again for the rest of his life. But who was standing there, across the room, staring at him with an expression of absolute shock on her face. For a moment it was like a knife slicing open his guts.

Emotion lashed through him, whipping up from deep inside—from a place he had long, long since buried. Reanimating him.

Shock was still uppermost in him, but he was controlling it now. Channelling it. Focussing it. Targeting it.

Targeting it on the one person he had wanted never again to see in this world. His sole lapse of judgement. His one mistake.

Sophie Granton.

Julia James lives in England with her family.

Mills & Boon® were the first ‘grown-up’ books she read as a teenager, alongside Georgette Heyer and Daphne du Maurier, and she’s been reading them ever since. Julia adores the English and Celtic countryside, in all its seasons, and is fascinated by all things historical, from castles to cottages. She also has a special love for the Mediterranean—‘The most perfect landscape after England’!—and considers both ideal settings for romance stories. In between writing she enjoys walking, gardening, needlework, baking extremely gooey cakes and trying to stay fit!

Penniless And Purchased

Julia James

CHAPTER ONE

SOPHIE stood, holding herself motionless, quite still. She stared, unblinking, at the reflection staring back at her in the long mirror of the hotel’s powder room. The woman in the mirror looked out at her with the same expressionless stare.

She was wearing a clinging, low-cut satin evening dress, her blond hair slicked with hairspray around one shoulder. Her eyes were heavy with glittery make-up, lashes loaded down with coal-black mascara, skin larded with foundation, earlobes dripping crystal, mouth sticky with scarlet lipstick.

It isn’t me!

The cry came from somewhere very deep in Sophie. Very deep. Like a buried place. A grave.

The grave of the person she once had been.

Would never be again.

Heaviness lay like a deadweight in her stomach, wound around by revulsion at what she could see in the mirror.

‘Excuse me—’

The voice was clipped, impatient, wanting Sophie to move aside. Jerkily, she did so, catching the look of unveiled contempt in the older woman’s eyes as she took her place to inspect her appearance. Sophie knew what she had seen. Knew why the woman had looked contemptuous. She felt her stomach churn again. The inside of her mouth was dry, and she poured herself a glass of water from the jug placed on the vanity unit for the use of guests, gulping it down as if it could still her turmoil. For one final time, she stared at herself bleakly in the mirror. Then, with a sudden short intake of breath that cut like glass in her throat, she seized up her evening bag and walked out of the powder room with a stiff, taut gait, on heels so high they swayed her body despite the rigidity in her aching leg muscles as she forced herself to keep going.