Penny Jordan Read Online Free

burning the candle at both ends, studying and partying and desperately trying to deny her aristocratic background and connections to become part of the London 'scene'. Ironically, it had not been on the London scene that she had met her late husband but through one of her mother's friends.
    Lady Caroline Agnew had been giving a coming-out party for her daughter, and Honor's mother had insisted that Honor had to attend.
    Rourke had been there photographing the event.
    Lady Caroline had contacts at Vogue and he was the 'in' photographer of the moment, more used to photographing long-legged models than chubby adolescent debs.
    Honor had been fascinated by him. Everything about him had proclaimed that he belonged to the world she so longed to join. His clothes, his hair, his laid-back manner and, most of all, his sharp cockney speech. Somehow or other she had managed to catch his eye and they had left the party together.
    Three months later they became lovers and three months after that they married and she dropped out of medical school.
    For two years she had been so passionately and completely in love with him that she had blinded herself to reality, his unfaithfulness, his drinking, the drugs he was taking with increasing regularity, the bills that mounted up because he refused to pay them, the unsavoury characters who hung like dark shadows on the edges of his life, their lives, and then she had become pregnant.
    Their first daughter Abigail had been less than six months old the first time he left her.
    Her parents, who had never really forgiven her for her marriage, had refused to have her home, but her father had given her a tiny allowance just enough to cover the rent on a small flat, and she had found herself a job working in a small family-owned chemist's shop. It had been whilst working there that her interest in medicine had been re-activated. The shop was old-fashioned, its upper room stuffed with all manner of things amongst which Honor, who had been sent upstairs to tidy it, had found the herbal book that once opened she had been unable to put down.

    Rourke, his affair over, had turned up on her doorstep one dark, wet night and foolishly she had taken him in. Nine months later Ellen was born.
    Rourke had already embarked on another affair with a rich older woman this time.
    On her own again, Honor had become fascinated by herbal medicine and cures, so much so that when she learned of a local herbalist in a magazine she was reading in the dentist's waiting room, she made a note of her address so that she could get in touch with her.
    Now a fully trained herbalist herself, Honor always made a point of advising her patients to make sure they went to similarly trained and ac-credited practitioners whenever they chose alter-native forms of healing.
    Her own training had been long and thorough and one of her main reasons for coming to live here in the rather dilapidated house she had just moved into on her second cousin Lord Astlegh's Cheshire estate was because of the land that went with it—land on which she would be able to grow some of her own herbs in a way that was completely natural and free from pesticides and any kind of chemicals. The house, which was miles away from any other habitation, might have drawn cries of despair from both her daughters, who had protested at its lack of modern amenities and creeping damp, but Honor had assured them that once she had time to get someone in to repair and improve the place, it would make a very snug home indeed.
    'It's a hovel,' Abigail had said forthrightly.
    'A wretched hovel,' Ellen had agreed.
    'The locals will probably think you're some kind of witch,' Abigail had joked.
    'Thank you very much,' Honor had told her daughter drily. 'When I want my ego boosted, I shall know where to come.'
    'Oh, no, Mum, I didn't mean you look like a witch,' Abigail had immediately reassured her.
    'Actually, you look pretty good for your age.'
    ,'Mmm... Nowhere near forty-five,' Ellen