For Better For Worse – Penny Jordan

What kind of equal partnership was this, when she was left to deal single- handedly with all the problems? What kind of mutual awareness of one another’s rights as individuals? At bedtime she discovered she was deliberately delaying going upstairs, almost deliberately holding on to her anger and irritation, and when Marcus announced that he was going to bed she told him coolly that she still had some work to do. As he showered and cleaned his teeth, Marcus wondered tiredly if Eleanor had any idea of the pressure he wasunder.

She was so preoccupied with that damned house that she seemed completely oblivious to everything else, especially him. He checked, staring at his reflection in the bathroom mirror. Of course she was preoccupied. She had one hell of a lot on her mind, what with the break-up of the partnership and Louise swanning off to France and leaving her to sort everything out.

He knew that Vanessa had been particularly difficult to deal with recently. And he knew how much this house meant to her.. .how many hopes she had pinned on it. Too many? He was still not convinced that it was the right move, but every time he tried to point this out to her Eleanor swamped him with her enthusiastic plans. Marcus had grown up in a household where his mother and maternal grandmother, who had lived with them, had totally dominated his quiet father, between them overruling every decision that he tried to make.

The garden shed had been his father’s retreat, a place he vanished to whenever the criticism and carping of his wife and mother-in-law grew too much for him. Marcus had learned early in his life that the best way to make an easy life for himself was simply not to argue with his mother and grandmother, but to let their forceful opinions wash over him in silence and then to make up his own mind what he wished to do.

The day he realised that in her way his first wife bore many similar characteristics to his mother, he questioned whether he really had any intelligence at all, and one of the first things that had drawn him to Eleanor — apart from the sharp keenness of his sexual desire for her—had been the gentle calmness of her nature; the way she always seemed prepared to listen and accept that he might have views which differed from her own.

But suddenly she didn’t seem to be listening to him any more. She was under a lot of pressure, he reminded himself. But so was he.

Broughton House, an old English country estate set along the Wiltshire/Dorset border in England, is the inanimate protagonist of Penny Jordan’s lengthy exploration into the human drama. Three couples view the house as the answer to their personal problems. Eleanor, with her new husband, two sons from a previous marriage and troubled teenaged stepdaughter, hopes the house will help them bond as a family. Hotel manager Zoe, who dreams of turning Broughton House into a bed-and-breakfast in order to her lover, Ben, from the demands of his dysfunctional family.

Finally, there is Fern, trapped in an emotionally abusive marriage to Nick. She’s hopelessly in love with Nick’s stepbrother Adam, with whom she once had an affair and who is now involved in the sale of Broughton House. Fern is the most interesting of the lot as she comes to realize that she is a battered wife – sans the bruises – and slowly emerges as a self- possessed woman.

OceanofPDF.com PROLOGUE As Fern saw Nick walk into the kitchen, her stomach muscles tensed. She had heard him arrive from upstairs, had witnessed the impatience with which he had slewed the car to a halt and climbed out, slamming the door, and then glancing up at the house. She had stepped back from the window then, an automatic and very betraying gesture, pausing as she caught sight of herself in her dressing- table mirror. She looked strained and tired, her eyes empty and lifeless…as empty and lifeless as her marriage to Nick?

Abruptly she had turned away from the mirror and hurried downstairs. It was her own fault that Nick was in a bad mood, of course. She should not have raised the subject of how much time he was spending working last night. He had always hated her ‘interfering in his life’, as he called it. She had learned early on in her marriage that Nick loathed any form of restraint, even the mildest hint of criticism.

What was wrong with her? he had demanded to know last night. Didn’t she realise how fortunate she was, how many women would gladly change places with her? ‘You’re my wife,’ he had told her. ‘Nothing can change that.’ A promise, or a threat? She tensed now, guiltily trying to suppress her rebellious thoughts. Nick was right.

This is a short excerpt from the opening of “” by Unknown, quoted for review and introduction purposes. All rights belong to the copyright holders.

Book Information

• Unique ID: 33d67cb2545470ce
• File Extension: .pdf
• File Size: 2,332,291 bytes (2.224 MB)
• Title: –
• Author: Unknown
• Pages: 612
• Language: English (en)

Reading & Word Statistics

• Estimated Reading Time: 877.26 minutes
• Total Words: 175,453
• Total Characters: 980,530
• Average Words per Page: 286.69
• Average Characters per Page: 1602.17

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