A Matter Of Trust
A Matter Of Trust
PENNY JORDAN
Never Get Involved…Debra Latham followed her instructions closely when she was persuaded by her private detective sister to keep a watch on a suspicious client. But no instructions told her how to cope with an angry man who believed she was spying on him, or how to defend herself against his impassioned kisses. Marsh Graham turned out to be completely innocent and, embarrassingly for Debra, he was also her new boss. Not exactly the most auspicious of starts to a working relationship.But another form of a more personal relationship was what Marsh had made clear he wanted. They shared many common interests, after all, including a desire to help local children in need. But Debra had serious reasonsfor never wanting to get involved….
Celebrate the legend that is bestselling author
PENNY JORDAN
Phenomenally successful author of more than two hundred books with sales of over a hundred million copies!
Penny Jordan’s novels are loved by millions of readers all around the word in many different languages. Mills & Boon are proud to have published one hundred and eighty-seven novels and novellas written by Penny Jordan, who was a reader favourite right from her very first novel through to her last.
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About the Author
PENNY JORDAN is one of Mills & Boon’s most popular authors. Sadly, Penny died from cancer on 31st December 2011, aged sixty-five. She leaves an outstanding legacy, having sold over a hundred million books around the world. She wrote a total of one hundred and eighty-seven novels for Mills & Boon, including the phenomenally successful A Perfect Family, To Love, Honour & Betray, The Perfect Sinner and Power Play, which hit the Sunday Times and New York Times bestseller lists. Loved for her distinctive voice, her success was in part because she continually broke boundaries and evolved her writing to keep up with readers’ changing tastes. Publishers Weekly said about Jordan ‘Women everywhere will find pieces of themselves in Jordan’s characters’ and this perhaps explains her enduring appeal.
Although Penny was born in Preston, Lancashire and spent her childhood there, she moved to Cheshire as a teenager and continued to live there for the rest of her life. Following the death of her husband, she moved to the small traditional Cheshire market town on which she based her much-loved Crighton books.
Penny was a member and supporter of the Romantic Novelists’ Association and the Romance Writers of America—two organisations dedicated to providing support for both published and yet-to-be-published authors. Her significant contribution to women’s fiction was recognised in 2011, when the Romantic Novelists’ Association presented Penny with a Lifetime Achievement Award.
A Matter of Trust
Penny Jordan
www.millsandboon.co.uk (http://www.millsandboon.co.uk)
CHAPTER ONE
‘BUT Leigh, you’re the private detective, not me,’ Debra pointed out firmly to her stepsister. ‘I’m a tax accountant.’
‘A tax accountant who is just about to start a week’s holiday and who doesn’t have to attend a business meeting that’s vital to her business,’ Leigh interrupted quickly.
Although there were six years between them and Leigh was the elder, it had always been Debra who had been the calm, down-to-earth one, and Leigh the impulsive cause of family chaos.
‘Look, Debs, you know how important this business is to me,’ Leigh pleaded coaxingly now. ‘After Paul left me, after the divorce, I felt as though my whole life was over. Now, since Jen and I started up Secrets, I feel as though life actually has some proper purpose again. I wouldn’t ask you to help if there were anything difficult or dangerous involved. It’s simply a matter of spending a few days in an empty house, keeping a tape-recorded list of someone’s comings and goings, that’s all.
‘He won’t even know you’re there. We’ve persuaded his next-door neighbour to go and visit her sister so that we can use her house. I promise you, you won’t have to do a thing other than—’
‘Keep a twenty-four hour surveillance over someone’s cheating husband,’ Debra interrupted drily. ‘Look, Leigh, I disapprove of men who cheat on their wives and families just as much as you do, but—’
‘This one isn’t cheating on his wife,’ Leigh told her flatly, her normally animated face suddenly set hard. ‘He’s trying to seduce a seventeen-year-old into leaving home and going to live with him…He’s thirty-four, Debs, with a string of women in his past and a taste for innocent young girls.’ Her mouth tightened in distaste.
‘According to her mother, Ginny is completely besotted with him and won’t listen to a thing either of her parents has to say. They felt if they could present her with concrete evidence of the kind of man he really is, although it will hurt her now, it will save her much more pain in the long run.
‘She’s a clever girl, Debs, university material, with her whole life ahead of her, but this man has a reputation for picking up and discarding clever young girls like her.’
Debra sighed. She could feel herself weakening. And was it really so much that Leigh was asking? She knew what a struggle her stepsister had had since her marriage broke up. Deserted by her husband and with two small children to support, she had changed overnight from a bright, breezy, bubbly personality into a withdrawn, tormented woman whom Debra barely recognised.
But since she and a friend had set up this detective agency specialising in handling cases mainly for other women she had recovered all her lost self-esteem. The business, although moderately successful, was still quite precariously balanced and very much in its infancy. With her partner away on a much-needed short holiday and Leigh herself suddenly being offered the opportunity to expand into a wider market, Debra could quite understand why Leigh should feel it was so essential that she not miss out on this all-important meeting.
Equally she could also understand why, having organised events so that a twenty-four-hour watch could be kept on the man involved in this current case, Leigh was pleading with her to take her place in the next-door house and watch him for her.
‘You won’t have to keep watch on him for the full twenty-four hours,’ Leigh was telling her coaxingly now. ‘I’ve arranged for Jeff to watch the house from midnight to seven in the morning from a car outside.’
Jeff was Leigh’s boyfriend, a solid, placid man, a teacher, some fifteen years older than Leigh, whom Debra liked and thought an ideal partner for her more volatile stepsister.
‘Look, I wouldn’t ask you if I weren’t absolutely desperate,’ Leigh told her. ‘The parents are going to have the girls for me, but you’re the only person…’
‘Soft enough to be persuaded into helping you out,’ Debra finished drily for her. ‘All right,’ she agreed, adding under her breath, ‘I just hope I don’t end up regretting this.’
‘You won’t,’ Leigh promised her. ‘Look, I’ll have to take you round to introduce you to Mrs Johnson. You’re her god-daughter and you’re staying at the house to keep an eye for it while she’s away.
‘She’s a nice old thing, although I don’t think she quite approves of the idea of female private detectives.’ Leigh pulled a wry face. ‘She certainly isn’t on her own there. She’s only just moved into the house a month or so ago, so unfortunately she wasn’t able to tell us very much about her neighbour. Only that he comes and goes rather a lot.’
‘She’s seen Ginny going into the house with him?’
Leigh sighed. ‘Not as yet, thank God. I keep asking myself how I would feel if it was one of my two. What I’d do if, when they get to that age…’
‘You’ve a long way to go before they do,’ Debra pointed out to her. ‘Sally is only eight and Bryony ten.’
‘I know. Paul should have had them this weekend, but he cancelled at the last moment. I could have killed him, Debs…Not for my sake, but for theirs. Oh, Bryony put a brave face on it…said she expected that Daddy had a lot of work to do, and I went along with it. Work. Hah…more like some bimbo blonde occupying his time. Luckily Jeff came round, so we went into Chester, walked round the walls and then went on the river. He’s so good with them, Debs. You can see in his eyes how much he’d have liked kids of his own. That must be so hard for a man, knowing that he can’t be a father. That’s why Alex divorced him, you know. Apparently, when they found out that his sperm count was too low for her to conceive, she told him that she couldn’t stay married to him. That the reason she had married had been to have children.’
‘He’s a nice man,’ Debra told her.
‘A very nice man,’ Leigh agreed.
Both of them started to laugh as Leigh mimicked one of the voices from a popular current TV advertisement. Although they were physically completely different, a sense of humour was something they shared.
Leigh had been ten when her father had married Debra’s mother, and Debra had been four.
Leigh was like her father, tall, vigorous, with strong bones and thick curly brown hair.
Debra was like her mother, average height, slim, with delicate bones and the kind of honey-coloured hair that went strikingly fair in the summer.
Luckily, although it was very fine, it was also very thick. As an accountant, she often felt she would look more businesslike if she had it cut, but she had always worn it at shoulder-length, and she liked the versatility this gave her, plus the fact that her simple timeless style was easy to maintain.
Her mother and stepfather still lived in the same Cheshire village where she had been brought up. Leigh had bought a small house there after her divorce so that her daughters could be near to their grandparents.
Debra was now the proud owner of a very pretty little Georgian terraced house in Chester which was within walking distance of where she worked.
She was a happy, contented girl who enjoyed the friendships she shared with people of both sexes. At twenty-six, she was in no hurry to commit herself to a permanent relationship. A brief love-affair during the early years of her training when she had worked in London had taught her that the intensely passionate and deeply private part of her nature which she wanted to share with her lover was not always something that the male sex seemed to want. She had decided she wanted, needed a partner who would share her goals in life, who wanted security and calm; a family. Passion, she had decided, was not for her. One day she wanted to marry, but not yet. Leigh had once remarked that she was afraid of passion. She had, of course, denied it—too vehemently perhaps.
‘Come on, I’ll drive you over to Mrs Johnson’s now,’ Leigh told her.
She had arrived out of the blue at Debra’s front door just over an hour earlier. Debra had been outside in her small back garden, watering the plants in her pots, and wondering if the current spell of good weather really merited the purchase of that wooden seat she had been coveting at the garden centre.
‘Won’t she mind, so early on a Sunday?’ Debra protested, but Leigh shook her head, giving her a naughty smile as she told her,
‘I’ve already warned her to expect us.’
Leigh had always been able to coax her into doing what she wanted, Debra admitted as she got into Leigh’s car and secured the seatbelt.
Elsie Johnson’s house was the next but last in a row of substantial Victorian houses in the suburbs of the city.
Leigh parked outside it with a flourish of gear-changing and sharp braking that made Debra wince a little.
All the houses in the row had short front gardens enclosed by a low communal wall, and from what Debra could see all of them were well maintained. It was the sort of quiet, respectable middle-class area that one would not normally have associated with the kind of situation Leigh had described to her, but if the man was as cold-blooded in his deliberate seductions as Leigh had implied then he probably found the area’s respectability an asset.
‘He won’t be in now,’ Leigh told Debra as she saw her glancing at the end house. ‘He’s taking Ginny out for the day. Her parents are afraid to refuse to let her see him in case she leaves home before they can help her to see just what kind of man he is.
‘At seventeen, she’s still barely more than a child still…at least, she is compared with him, a man in his mid-thirties. I hate that kind of man.’
‘Yes,’ Debra agreed vehemently. ‘So do I.’
She followed Leigh up to the front door.
Elsie Johnson had obviously seen them arrive because she opened the door before they could knock.
Half an hour later, as they drove away, Elsie having assured herself that it would be safe to leave her home in Debra’s care, Leigh turned to Debra and thanked her.
‘I suspect she thinks you’re much more trustworthy than me. You always did have the gift of inspiring confidence in people.’
‘Probably because they realise that, unlike you, I’m not going to do anything rash or reckless,’ Debra told her with a smile.
Leigh laughed.
‘I’ve got the tape and everything else you’ll need in the boot. I’ll give them to you when I drop you off. It will only be for a couple of days. I’ll be back from London on Wednesday. I really am grateful to you, Debs. If we can get this contract to vet job applicants for Driberg’s it will make all the difference to us.’
Debra pulled a face.
‘I’m not sure if I approve of large companies using private agencies to vet potential employees.’
‘I understand how you feel,’ Leigh agreed. ‘But it’s a fact of commercial life these days, and if we don’t get the commission then someone else will, and I have two growing daughters to support. Don’t tell me that none of your clients has ever hinted that you might help them find a loophole in the tax laws,’ Leigh added.
‘We aren’t that kind of firm,’ Debra told her firmly. ‘The advice we give our clients is always strictly within the terms of the law.’
Or at least it had been, Debra reflected later on when she was on her own and thinking over her conversation with her stepsister.
Would that continue to be the case now that the small old-fashioned firm she had worked for for the last three years had been amalgamated with a much more modern, thrusting Chester offshoot of a large multinational firm of accountants?
The multinational was putting in a new partner. None of them had met him yet, although they had all heard the rumours and whispers about how dynamic he was; about how determined he was to ensure that the new amalgamated firm would run efficiently and profitably. There had been no suggestion that jobs would go, but still there was an air of tension and uncertainty in the office, and Debra had been rather looking forward to her short break, especially since over the past few months she herself had been particularly busy, having had to take on the workload of a colleague who had left unexpectedly and not been replaced, in addition to working for her own clients.
She had planned to spend her time doing nothing more mentally demanding than working in her garden and redecorating her spare bedroom, but wryly she admitted that she could not really have refused to help Leigh out. Despite their differences, the two women were good friends, and Debra knew that in the same circumstances Leigh would have been the first to offer to help her.
The arrangement was that she would drive over to Elsie Johnson’s in the morning just before Elsie was due to leave for her sister’s, and that she would stay at the house until Leigh returned from London to relieve her on Wednesday.
If her stepsister’s business continued to expand they would need to think of taking on extra staff, Debra mused as she packed. Both Leigh and her partner were adamant about preferring to take on only other women. They were not a tough, macho agency, Leigh had pointed out when Debra had gently reminded her that in doing so they could be accused of discrimination. The reason they were getting so many small commissions from other women was perhaps because it was a female-based agency and because, as women, they understood all too well how other members of their sex felt about male betrayal.
‘Jeff helped out and he’s a man,’ Debra had pointed out.
‘That was different,’ Leigh had overruled her, adding that Jeff only helped them out as a favour. He didn’t work for them.
In the morning Debra was careful to make sure that she arrived at Elsie Johnson’s exactly on time.
As she had expected, she found the older woman was packed and waiting for her, a relieved expression touching her face as she opened the door to her.
Inside the house was shadowy and dark, the hall filled with old-fashioned Edwardian furniture.
Mrs Johnson was meticulous about security. Both outer doors had security chains as well as double locks; all the windows had locks as well, and Mrs Johnson herself reminded Debra of a timid little field-mouse, all nervously twitching whiskers and tensely anxious little body.
She would ring every evening, just to make sure that everything was all right, she told Debra before getting into her waiting taxi.
It was just as well that Leigh’s clients were wealthy, Debra reflected later as she made herself a cup of coffee in the immaculately tidy kitchen. It was they who were paying Mrs Johnson for the use of her house, and paying her very generously as well.
Cautious and orderly by nature, Debra did not, as she suspected that Leigh would have done, find the immaculate tidiness of the house constricting.
She had brought all her own food supplies with her, and once she had had her coffee she unpacked her case in the small spare bedroom.
From upstairs she had a completely unrestricted view of the next-door house and rear garden, and if she left the landing window open she could, additionally, hear cars arriving at the front of the house.
Her instructions from Leigh were relatively simple. All she had to do was to monitor and then log down on the tape-recorder the details of anyone who visited the house.
Leigh had also provided her with a camera.
‘Just in case we really get lucky and he brings one of his other women here,’ Leigh had told her.
In any other circumstances Debra might have balked a little at such an intrusion of anyone’s privacy, but she agreed with Leigh that a girl of seventeen, madly in love and totally obsessed with her lover, was in a dangerously vulnerable situation, and she could well understand Ginny’s parents’ concern for their daughter.
Before she had left, Elsie Johnson had told her nervously that there had been a good deal of commotion next door during the previous evening, raised voices, doors slamming, that kind of thing; but today all was peace and silence.
Debra had brought some work with her to help pass the time…not office work.
The previous summer she had accidentally become involved with a semi-private, semi-council-sponsored scheme which had involved individuals giving some of their spare time to young teenagers whom the council had in care.
It had been through a friend of a friend that Debra had originally heard of the organisation, and now she was a very committed member of the group, giving up a couple of evenings a month plus odd days at weekends to spend at the home.
The object of the exercise was to provide the teenager with someone with whom they could hopefully form a bond on a one-to-one basis, someone who, while not being their parents or having any authority over them, could help them with their problems in an adult way.
Debra was still in touch with the fourteen-year-old Amy, who was now back with her mother, and she was presently trying to form a bond with Karen, who had been taken into care having been abused by her stepfather, a withdrawn and obviously desperately unhappy girl. It made Debra’s heart ache with compassion and sadness to see the look of despair and misery in her eyes.
If and when she ever managed to break through Karen’s isolation, she hoped that she could do as she had done with Amy—take Karen out for small treats and help her to re-establish herself and to feel less institutionalised.
Now Debra was making a list of the problems she confronted in trying to make contact with Karen, and opposite these problems she was writing down the solutions she might find to them.
It wasn’t easy; she found working with the teenagers emotionally and mentally draining, but the counselling and courses that all members of the group took had helped her to understand the children’s problems and how best she could help them.
It was seven o’clock before she saw any sign of movement from next door.
She almost missed hearing the car pull up outside, and in fact she suspected that she would have done if she hadn’t happened to be on her way downstairs at the time.
She frowned a little. The small compact Volvo was not somehow or other the kind of car she had expected the man to drive.
The net curtains hanging at the landing window obscured her vision of him and she had to flick them back a little as well as switching on the cassette which Leigh had impressed upon her she was to have with her at all times.
The man emerging from the car was tall and dark-haired. Before opening the garden gate he paused, glancing down the road, so that Debra had an unobscured view of his face.
A tiny shock of sensation curled through her, an immediate and disturbing physical response to him that made her check and tense.
He was frowning slightly and looked rather more formidable than she had imagined. He looked like a man used to being in control of himself and others. Warily Debra watched him. She had expected him to look different, less powerful, less compelling. She had assumed that he would have about him an air of weakness and self-indulgence, which this man most assuredly did not.
Before walking up the path he paused and then looked up at Elsie Johnson’s house. Immediately Debra tensed. He couldn’t possibly have seen her watching him, could he?
Her heartbeat suddenly accelerated, her muscles tensing. She dared not look out of the window in case he was still studying the house.
One minute went by and then another. This was ridiculous, she told herself crossly. There was no reason why she should not simply walk past the window, why she should feel so intimidated.
She took a deep breath and forced herself to move. Only when she was safely on the other side of the window did she allow herself a brief glance out of it. The man had gone inside the house.
Vigilantly Debra kept watch all evening, but all that happened was that she got cramp. All was quiet from next door. No one had arrived or left.
When she went to bed she set her alarm for six-thirty so that she could be on duty for seven when Jeff went home.
She didn’t need the alarm. She hardly slept at all, and not just because she was in a strange bed, she admitted as she dressed. It wasn’t just what she was doing that disturbed her; the man himself had unnerved her.
By seven o’clock she was eating her breakfast in front of the sitting-room window, where she had a clear view of the Volvo.
When by nine o’clock the Volvo was still there she began to panic a little.
Could he have left via the back door? Had he guessed that he was being watched? Had he perhaps even left during the night while Jeff was watching him?
At half-past nine she settled herself upstairs, where she had a clear view of the back garden and through the open landing window could hear any sound from outside at the front.
At eleven o’clock a taxi drew up alongside the Volvo and a woman got out. She was tall and elegant, expensively dressed, and as she paid off the driver Debra congratulated herself on noticing the wedding ring she wore.
Whoever she was, she certainly wasn’t Ginny Towers, Debra reflected with satisfaction, and then she remembered that she was supposed to take photographs.
She had almost left it too late, and, as it was, she had to squash herself into the side of the window-frame and lean out of the window a little to get a good clear shot of the woman.
It was only as she withdrew that she realised that the man had opened the front door to welcome his visitor.
He had his back to her, and for some reason it gave her an odd sensation in her tummy to look down on him.
Vertigo, she told herself quickly, wondering if she dared risk trying to photograph them together without his noticing her, but it was too late. He was already ushering the woman inside.
Debra could hardly believe her luck when later on the two of them emerged into the garden. Despite her shaking hands, she managed to get several good shots of them standing talking together.
At three in the afternoon another taxi arrived and the woman left.
Standing beside the open landing window, Debra dutifully recorded this fact.
Although the man accompanied her to the taxi, he did not touch her in any way.
Leigh had described him as having a penchant for very young women. His visitor had not fallen into that field. She had been around his own age, early to mid-thirties.
Well, at least she had got some photographs of them together, Debra told herself as she went downstairs to make herself a drink.
She had just made it when the doorbell rang. She went to answer it without any sense of apprehension, her mind on the task Leigh had given her.
The safety chain wasn’t on and she opened the door automatically without thinking, tensing in an alarm which came too late as she watched the man from next door march angrily into the hall and push the door closed behind him.
‘Would you mind telling me exactly what you think you’re doing?’ he demanded curtly.
He was tall, Debra acknowledged, and strong as well, his body athletic and powerfully muscled. No doubt he found it paid to keep himself fit in order to impress his youthful victims. After all, a man of thirty-odd could not possibly hope to have the physical appeal of one much younger, she told herself, stubbornly ignoring the evidence of her own senses, which told her quite categorically that this man need not have any fear that younger rivals might present a more physically compelling appeal.
‘I’m sorry,’ she stammered as the guilty colour stormed her face. ‘But I don’t—’
‘You don’t what? You don’t know what I’m talking about?’ he interrupted her savagely. ‘Like hell you don’t. In someone old and alone, snooping on the neighbours can be understood and excused; in someone your age…well, let’s just say you’d have to have some profound behavioural problems.’
As she heard the contempt in his voice Debra found that she wasn’t shocked any more. She was angry…very, very angry.
‘You’re the one with the problems,’ she told him unequivocally. ‘Or don’t you believe that it’s a problem for a man of your age to want to seduce a girl barely over the legal age limit for sex? Men like you disgust me,’ she added passionately. ‘You deliberately lie and deceive. You don’t care who you hurt…how many lives you destroy. It’s just a game to you, isn’t it? Girls like Ginny…too young and innocent to see what you really are.’
‘Now just a minute,’ he began grimly, but Debra had the bit between her teeth now and she wasn’t going to stop. How dared he force his way in here and try to bully her…to accuse her, when he was the one…?
All her normal caution and restraint was swept aside in the passionate tide of feeling that engulfed her. She had been so lucky, so loved and protected as she had grown up, but she was well aware that not all young girls were, that there were men like this one…like Karen’s stepfather, who deliberately made young, vulnerable girls their victims; who destroyed them emotionally and ruined their lives. And he had the gall to stand there, glowering angrily at her.
‘Why don’t you simply leave her alone?’ Debra swept on, ignoring his interruption. ‘She’s seventeen years old. Young enough to be your daughter.’
She saw him start and was grimly aware of the shock that momentarily darkened his eyes.
‘I suppose you hadn’t thought of it like that, had you? Men like you never do. You’re too obsessed with your own appetites…your own perversions.’
She heard the breath whistle out of his chest, and stopped, suddenly shocked by her own vehemence, suddenly realising her own vulnerability and danger.
‘I don’t understand what’s going on here,’ he told her, adding menacingly, ‘but if you think I’m going to tolerate you spying on me, photographing me, lying about me, well, let me tell you, there are laws against the kind of thing you’re doing.’
‘There should be laws against people like you,’ Debra spat shakily at him.
He was clever, she had to give him that, twisting things…accusing her…intimidating her with his alien male presence.
She was suddenly acutely conscious of the narrowness of the hall, of the closeness of his body, of the anger she could feel emanating from him.
‘You won’t be in any danger,’ Leigh had told her. Suddenly she wasn’t so sure.
‘I want those photographs,’ he told her flatly, ‘and I want to know just what you think you’re doing.’
‘You know what I’m doing,’ she told him. ‘I’m trying to make sure that Ginny finds out exactly what kind of man you are…before it’s too late.’
‘Ginny?’
His deceit infuriated Debra. ‘Yes. Ginny,’ she snapped back at him. ‘You know, the only-just-seventeen-year-old you’re trying to seduce. You’ve been seen before, you know…bringing other girls here.’
As she threw a defiant look at him it seemed to Debra that something in his face suddenly changed, that there was some subtle alteration she couldn’t quite define.
‘You should be ashamed of yourself,’ she hurled angrily at him. ‘She’s little more than a child. It’s…it’s perverted.’
He moved so quickly that she didn’t have a chance to defend herself, taking hold of her, hauling her against his body, imprisoning her so completely that she actually found herself gripping hold of the front of his jacket to stop herself from losing her balance.
As she stared furiously up at him she could feel the frantic race of her own heartbeat. She could even, she recognised, feel the fiercely hard beat of his, just as she could feel the impact of his muscles against her own softness.
It was a disturbing sensation, and one that, to her shock, her body seemed to find distressingly sensual. Nausea rose inside her at the unacceptability of her physical response to him.
‘That’s the second time you’ve said that to me. The first was once too many. Whatever else I might be, I am not perverted,’ she heard him saying grimly to her, ‘and just to prove it…’
She had started to glance up at him as he spoke, an automatic reaction and one which he used to his own advantage, keeping her imprisoned between his body and the wall with one hand while the other held and cupped her face so that there was no way for her to avoid the alien masculine pressure of his mouth.
She could feel the anger in his kiss, the hard, fierce pressure that spoke of his antipathy towards her, but she could feel something else as well, a whisper of sensation, of awareness, curling like woodsmoke on a clear autumn day until it was everywhere. And as her body trembled she knew that he had felt it as well.
Later she told herself miserably that he at least had an excuse, as a man. It was in his genes to react with sexual aggression, but she had known none, and it wasn’t even as though she didn’t know exactly what he was.
But still her body responded to him, her muscles softening, relaxing, so that her body clung to him instead of rejecting him, and so that her mouth was pliant and eager beneath his, turning the kiss from what it had been to something very different indeed. Something very different.
And he responded to that difference, shifting his weight so that he was no longer imprisoning her but embracing her, the hand that cupped her face softening as his fingers slid into her hair, his mouth moving erotically on hers as his tongue-tip teased the moist softness of her lips.
Somewhere in the distance Debra could hear a sound, but it wasn’t until he released her with a soft curse that she realised it was the telephone.
Abruptly she came back to reality, her face on fire with self-contempt, while unbelievably her body ached and yearned for the contact it had just lost.
‘Aren’t you going to answer it?’ he questioned her as he reached for the door.
His anger had gone, a remote coolness taking its place, making her feel as though somehow she was the one who had transgressed.
Thoroughly flustered by the whole encounter, Debra stepped back from him. He was already opening the front door. She told herself that she was glad that he was going, that she was glad that the phone had started to ring when it did, but her body said rebelliously that it did not share those feelings.
It wasn’t until he had actually closed the door behind himself that she realised that instead of answering the phone she had idiotically been standing watching him.
She turned round and hurried into the kitchen, lifting the receiver, her hand shaking.
‘Yes, everything’s fine,’ she assured Elsie, trying to swallow the hard ball of disbelief and shock that was threatening to block her throat.
What on earth had got into her? she asked herself shakily ten minutes later. The whole incident had been so alien to the way she normally behaved.
She bit her lip, wincing as she remembered the way she had lost control of the situation. How could she have behaved so idiotically? Leigh would be furious with her, and no wonder.
And as for that accusation about his being a pervert…She stifled a moan of despair that rose in her throat.
Well, he couldn’t have chosen a more devastating way of punishing her for it. Not in kissing her in anger. That she could have handled…should have handled with cold disdain and rejection instead of…She swallowed painfully, desperately trying to avoid remembering just how she had reacted to him, and then shivered a little as she tried to suppress the frisson of sensation that raced over her skin.
She wasn’t normally like that. Didn’t normally respond so immediately, nor so intensely, to being kissed. In fact, she couldn’t remember a time when she had ever experienced that extraordinarily powerful surge of sensuality and desire.
Relentlessly she forced herself to keep watch throughout the evening, even though she knew that it was hardly likely that he would provide the evidence she needed, now that she had so idiotically given everything away.
She couldn’t think what had come over her. Not only had she acted entirely against her own nature in losing her temper with him, not only had she let Leigh down, but she might also have ruined Ginny’s parents’ chances of making their daughter aware of the truth.
And on top of all that, as if it weren’t enough, she had actually physically desired the man.
She gave a small shudder of self-contempt and despair.
CHAPTER TWO
‘I’M SO sorry, Leigh. I just don’t know what came over me. I’ve ruined everything.’
‘No, you haven’t,’ Leigh assured her cheerfully as Debra reached the end of her explanation of what had happened.
‘It seems that the owner of the house had served notice on our friend to leave. Apparently the rent hadn’t been paid for several months and he had re-let the property and found another tenant. I suspect that the commotion Elsie overheard from next door the night before you moved in was our Mr Bryant, leaving under protest. The man you have been watching must be the new tenant, because Jeff told me that Bryant left in the early hours of the morning, and that he followed him as far as the motorway. Bryant was driving south and he was on his own.
‘Ginny’s mother has been in touch with me to tell me that she suspects he and Ginny must have had a row, because, although Ginny has been very weepy, she has told her mother that she isn’t seeing him any more and that she doesn’t want to. So, all’s well that ends well.
‘I’d have loved to see his face when you accused him of being a pervert,’ Leigh grinned. ‘Pity you didn’t manage to capture that on film.’
Debra gave her an appalled stare.
‘Do you mean that he wasn’t…?’
‘Bryant? It doesn’t sound like it,’ Leigh confirmed, ‘and from your description he doesn’t sound like it either. Your man seems to bear more resemblance to Superman than Mike Bryant,’ she added with a touch of wry amusement.
Debra flushed, torn between relief that she hadn’t messed everything up for her stepsister, and an appalled recognition of what she actually had done.
‘You don’t think he might report me to the police, do you?’ she asked Leigh in a small voice.
‘Saying what?’ Leigh asked. ‘That you took photographs of him and accused him of being a pervert? Hardly.’ She grinned. ‘Have you seen him again since he came round?’
Flushing again, Debra shook her head.
She had diligently kept a watch on him, monitoring his comings and goings, and while doing so she had been acutely aware of the way he would pause and look up at the house every time he left or entered next door, leaving her in no doubt that he was aware of what she was doing.
‘Please don’t ever ask me to help you out again, will you?’ Debra pleaded feelingly as she handed Elsie’s keys over to her stepsister.
Thank goodness she herself lived on the other side of the city and was unlikely to ever see him again. She gave a small shudder as she contemplated the embarrassment that that would cause her. And it made it worse, not better, hearing Leigh say that he had not been Mike Bryant. No wonder he had been so furious with her.
But who was the woman who had visited him and what was his relationship with her? Debra wondered as she drove home. Whoever she was and whatever her role in his life, it was no concern of hers, she told herself severely as she let herself into her house.
It felt blessedly familiar and safe, and as she closed the door behind her she told herself firmly that she was also closing the door on what had happened over the last few days. The best and most sensible thing she could do was, as Leigh had counselled her, to put it completely out of her mind.
She had not told Leigh everything, though, she acknowledged uncomfortably. She had not told her about that kiss.
Because it had nothing to do with helping Leigh out, she told herself swiftly. Nothing at all.
Was that the reason, or was it that she was still acutely aware of how quickly and immediately she had responded to him? She had shocked herself with that response and, even though she had tried desperately hard to forget it, to push it away from her and out of her mind, it was still there, threatening to haunt and punish her.
Not that she didn’t deserve punishing, but not like this, not by waking abruptly in the night, aching and tense, knowing shamingly that she had been on the edge of reliving his kiss…that she had wanted to relive it.
What she ought to be punishing herself with was her own self-contempt, not some silly, immature yearning that belonged more properly to a teenager than an adult woman.
She spent the rest of the day diligently gardening and decorating, and on Thursday when she went to see Karen she admitted to herself that part of her outburst had probably been fuelled by her own emotional response to the trauma that Karen had endured. Not that he, even if he had been Mike Bryant, was guilty of the same sort of crime as Karen’s stepfather, but Ginny’s age and his maturity had sparked off all the anguish and helpless anger she had felt at Karen’s plight.
Karen’s social worker had already explained to her that Karen had been distraught at the thought of causing the break-up of her family and that her mother, far from supporting Karen, had accused her of trying to come between her and Karen’s stepfather.
As she watched her now, withdrawn, silent and so obviously distressed, Debra’s heart ached for her.
Very gently she started to talk to her, giving her time to respond, and then, when she did not, she simply continuing talking, keeping the tone of her voice as soothing and reassuring as possible, knowing that she must not try to rush things, or to pressurise Karen into lowering the barriers she obviously felt she needed to protect herself.
By Monday morning she had almost convinced herself that she had put the man and his kisses firmly to the back of her mind. On a very high shelf, lettered in red, ‘Do not touch—danger’, she told herself wryly as she walked to work.
Linda, the receptionist, smiled at her as she walked in, and asked her if she had had a good holiday.
‘Not too bad,’ Debra told her. ‘I managed to weed the garden and to strip the paper off my spare bedroom. Anything interesting happened?’
She asked the question casually as she picked up her own post, not really expecting an affirmative answer, but, to her surprise, Linda nodded and then leaned conspiratorially over her desk.
‘He’s arrived. A fortnight ahead of schedule. Obviously wanting to catch us on the hop.’
When Debra looked puzzled, she explained, ‘Him. You know, the partner from London who was due down next Monday—Marsh Graham.’
Debra’s forehead cleared.
‘Seems as if I’ve really missed out,’ she commented with a smile.
She was not too concerned about Marsh Graham’s appointment. She was a conscientious worker who knew she merited the praise she had received from her superiors. She was ambitious but not aggressively so, content to learn all that she could from her present position and to stay within it for another couple of years before embarking on something more challenging.
She felt she was too far down the hierarchy to be of much interest to the new man.
She was also very proud of the way she had streamlined her own systems, subtly and quietly adjusting the rather old-fashioned methods employed by her retired predecessor without stepping on anyone’s toes. That she had found several rather disturbing errors and oversights was something else she had kept to herself, discreetly putting things right without drawing attention to them. After all, what genuine satisfaction was there in laying claim to a progress that was only made by correcting errors which should never have occurred?
‘He’s taken over old Mr Thompson’s office,’ Linda told her as though this were something totally unexpected, whereas to Debra it seemed perfectly acceptable that he should take over the empty office of the newly retired senior partner.
As she walked into her own office, calmly secure in her environment and her abilities, Debra felt a little of the tension and shock of the last few days ease from her. Here she felt in control of her life once again; here it was much much easier to push that kiss and its bestower safely out of her thoughts.
At eleven o’clock she received a telephone call from Marsh Graham’s secretary, Mary, to say that Marsh wanted to see her.
‘Nothing to worry about,’ Mary told her cheerfully. ‘He just wants to introduce himself to everyone and since you weren’t here when he arrived…’
Firmly suppressing an impulse to ask Mary what he was like, Debra thanked her and replaced the receiver.
She was wearing a plain navy suit with a soft cream silk shirt, her tights were a toning blue-grey shade and her shoes the same navy as her suit.
It was a neat and very businesslike outfit, the sort of thing she always wore for work, apart from on those days when she had to visit one of her farmer clients, when she wore a fuller skirt and made sure she had her wellington boots in her car.
Even in summer, farmyards always seemed to be muddy and damp, and after ruining a pair of shoes she had sensibly made sure that she didn’t ruin a second.
Her hair was caught back softly and neatly off her face with a navy silk scarf, and, having checked that her lipstick hadn’t disappeared, Debra set off for Marsh Graham’s office.
Mary smiled at her as she walked past her desk.
‘Just go straight in,’ she told her. ‘He’s expecting you.’
Debra did so, pushing open the door and then turning to close it behind her so that it wasn’t until she turned round again that she actually properly saw the man standing up to greet her.
The blood seemed to leave the extremities of her body, her fingers, her toes and most dangerously of all her head, in a fierce, dizzying compression of shock as she stared at him in disbelief.
Impossible for her not to recognise him, or for him not to recognise her.
Even in her shock, her brain registered his momentary tension and the rapid dilation of his pupils, but he recovered faster than her, saying wryly, ‘I take it that you are Debra Latham?’
Debra willed herself not to give in to the impulse to open the door and run.
‘Yes,’ she confirmed, her voice croaky and unsteady.
‘It says in your file that you’re employed here as a tax accountant.’
‘Yes,’ she agreed even more croakily.
Inadvertently she focused on him. The hands holding her file were long-fingered and strong, very male, the nails short and clean. A disturbing sensation quivered through her stomach as she remembered how he had touched her, sliding his fingers into her hair while he’d kissed her.
She made a small agonised sound in her throat, which immediately made him focus on her face.
‘If you are a tax accountant, I wonder if you can explain to me exactly what it was you were doing last week? Or perhaps it’s your hobby,’ he added derisively. ‘Spying on people.’
Debra could feel her face burning. One half of her wanted to tell him that how she chose to spend her free time had nothing whatsoever to do with him; the other reluctantly admitted that he had every right to demand an explanation. Had their positions been reversed, she would have wanted one.
But would she have got one? Would she have dared to challenge him the way he was challenging her?
If he had not held the position within the firm that he did she might have been tempted to ignore him, but morally he perhaps had a right to know what had happened, she admitted.
Haltingly she explained, unable to bring herself to look at him.
‘Mistaking me for this man Bryant, I can understand…although I should have thought your stepsister would have supplied you with a photograph of him,’ he said scathingly. ‘Losing your temper and accusing him…or, rather, me of being a pervert…’ He paused, and Debra discovered that she was holding her breath. It had been bad enough when she had turned round and recognised him, but to have to suffer this as well…
‘Has it struck you,’ he pursued grimly, ‘just what danger you might have brought down on your own head, had I been this man Bryant, in making that kind of accusation? You were completely alone in that house, and, from your description of him, Bryant does not sound the type of man who would ignore that kind of accusation. It isn’t one that any man would take lightly,’ he added, watching her.
Unwisely Debra had lifted her head and turned to look at him, and now she was forced to withstand the full intensity of his thorough scrutiny of her flushed, defensive face.
He was lecturing her as though she were a child, she decided miserably, and it was obvious that he thought her completely irresponsible and incapable of calm, mature judgement. Her heart sank as she worried about how this might reflect on her in her career, and then acknowledged that he would have to be either a saint or inhuman not to let what had happened influence his assessment of her. In his shoes she doubted if she could have divorced herself from what had happened.
But if he was expecting her to apologise then he would just have to go on expecting.
She might have wrongly identified him, but she hadn’t grabbed hold of him and physically punished him.
No, but she had responded to him; had turned that punishment into a few seconds of illuminatingly intense mutual intimacy. Because he had responded to her.
She realised that he had started talking again, only this time it was work he was discussing, saying something about wanting to look at some aspects of their tax planning service with her.
‘Unfortunately I’m not going to have time until later in the week,’ he added, dismissing her.
She had reached the door when he asked her coldly, ‘What did you do with the photographs?’
Without turning round, she told him in a muffled voice, ‘I burned the film without having it developed once Leigh told me that you weren’t Mike Bryant.’
Why had he been so anxious about the film? she asked herself miserably as she half walked and half stumbled back to her own office. Or was it his companion he had wanted to protect, the married woman who had visited him?
A small shudder convulsed her body, a cold sweat breaking out on her skin despite the warmth of her office.
When she had comforted herself that she was hardly likely to see him again, fate must have been laughing out loud at her.
The incident had upset her enough as it was, without this extra burden of realising that she was going to have to work for him, without knowing that what had happened must influence his judgement of her, to her detriment.
And besides all that…
Besides all that, when she had incautiously looked across his office at him she had found herself focusing helplessly on his mouth, her body tensing with remembered pleasure and an unwanted frightening yearning to repeat it.
She got up, walking tensely over to her office window, and stared out. Please God, not that, she prayed desperately. Anything…anything at all, but not that.
She warned herself of the humiliation she would suffer if anyone, anyone at all other than herself, guessed what kind of effect he had on her, and he would be the first to lead the pack, she warned herself grimly.
She must not allow this ridiculous awareness of him to take root; she must destroy it, ignore it; it must not be allowed to flourish and to threaten the easy calmness of her life.
As she tried to concentrate on her work she wondered helplessly whether, had she not first met him in the way she had, had he not, as he had done, kissed her, but had they met for the first time today across his desk, she would have felt the same helpless surge of physical desire towards him.
Thankfully she didn’t see anything of him for the rest of the day. She was just leaving at five-thirty when one of the other girls rushed into her office and apologised, ‘I forgot to put it in your diary, but I made an appointment for you to go out and see Eric Smethurst tomorrow morning. Is that OK?’
‘Yes,’ Debra assured her.
Eric Smethurst was a fairly new client. A large, quietly spoken farmer who, her colleagues teased her, had something of a crush on her.
Debra had accepted their teasing good-naturedly. She half suspected they might have a point. Eric was thirty-two, hard-working, and very anxious to make a go of the run-down farm he had recently inherited from an uncle. He was also very shy and rather inarticulate, and, while Debra felt nothing for him in any remotely romantic sense, she did like him and wanted to do her best to help him to get the chaos his uncle had left behind him into proper order.
As she walked home she decided the only way to make sure that no one—but especially Marsh Graham himself—guessed about that vulnerable physical responsiveness she had to him was to treat him as coldly and distantly as she could. Not, she suspected, that she would be given the opportunity to do anything else.
Checking that she’d got her wellington boots in the boot of the car, Debra drove to work. The firm had its own private car park, and as she drove into it she immediately recognised Marsh Graham’s Volvo.
Her mouth tightened a little as she deliberately looked away from it. She had overheard one of the secretaries chattering about Marsh to her friends the previous day, talking admiringly about the fact that he practised what he preached in that, when he said that he thought it wantonly selfish of greedy, self-important executives to demand larger and larger company cars, he obviously meant it, because he himself drove a small lead-free-fuelled car.
Privately Debra agreed with him. The days were gone when through ignorance one could allow oneself to believe that it wasn’t up to each and every individual to be responsible and aware, not just on behalf of those closest to them, but on behalf of all humankind.
And, far from demeaning or lowering his stature in any way, the fact that he did not need to announce his success to the world by driving a large expensive car only seemed to reinforce the mental and emotional strength in him which Debra had recognised the first time she saw him.
She parked her car and got out, locking it before heading for the office.
‘You’re early this morning,’ Linda commented as she saw her.
‘I’m going out to see Eric Smethurst,’ Debra told her. ‘And I wanted to go through my post before I leave.’
‘Eric Smethurst. Oh, the farmer. Isn’t he the one who sent you those gorgeous flowers last Christmas?’
Debra knew she was flushing. She had her back to the corridor, but she was aware of the firm, male footsteps coming down it towards her.
A warning tingle ran down her spine and she knew without turning round that it was Marsh. She heard him stop behind her, felt in some subtle way the actual displacement of air caused by his presence.
‘Are you sure it is just a business meeting?’ Linda teased her.
Debra was acutely conscious of Marsh standing behind her. Even without turning round, she could sense his disapproval. Quickly picking up her post, she turned round, keeping her head down as she side-stepped him with a tense, ‘Good morning,’ before hurrying into the sanctuary of her own office.
The meeting with Eric went very much as she had expected. He wanted her advice about switching his accounting system on to a computer, something his uncle had scorned and refused to even consider, and Debra offered to arrange for the head of their own computer department to come out and see him.
‘Margaux will have a much better idea than me of which system would be best for you,’ she told him when he confessed that he had hoped she might be the one to advise him. Linda’s light-hearted comment had alerted her to the danger of inadvertently encouraging him to believe theirs could be more than merely a business relationship. He was a very sensitive man, and the last thing she wanted to do was to hurt him, but she sensed from his reaction to her statement that he had picked up the subtle distancing message she was giving him.
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PENNY JORDAN
Never Get Involved…Debra Latham followed her instructions closely when she was persuaded by her private detective sister to keep a watch on a suspicious client. But no instructions told her how to cope with an angry man who believed she was spying on him, or how to defend herself against his impassioned kisses. Marsh Graham turned out to be completely innocent and, embarrassingly for Debra, he was also her new boss. Not exactly the most auspicious of starts to a working relationship.But another form of a more personal relationship was what Marsh had made clear he wanted. They shared many common interests, after all, including a desire to help local children in need. But Debra had serious reasonsfor never wanting to get involved….
Celebrate the legend that is bestselling author
PENNY JORDAN
Phenomenally successful author of more than two hundred books with sales of over a hundred million copies!
Penny Jordan’s novels are loved by millions of readers all around the word in many different languages. Mills & Boon are proud to have published one hundred and eighty-seven novels and novellas written by Penny Jordan, who was a reader favourite right from her very first novel through to her last.
This beautiful digital collection offers a chance to recapture the pleasure of all of Penny Jordan’s fabulous, glamorous and romantic novels for Mills & Boon.
About the Author
PENNY JORDAN is one of Mills & Boon’s most popular authors. Sadly, Penny died from cancer on 31st December 2011, aged sixty-five. She leaves an outstanding legacy, having sold over a hundred million books around the world. She wrote a total of one hundred and eighty-seven novels for Mills & Boon, including the phenomenally successful A Perfect Family, To Love, Honour & Betray, The Perfect Sinner and Power Play, which hit the Sunday Times and New York Times bestseller lists. Loved for her distinctive voice, her success was in part because she continually broke boundaries and evolved her writing to keep up with readers’ changing tastes. Publishers Weekly said about Jordan ‘Women everywhere will find pieces of themselves in Jordan’s characters’ and this perhaps explains her enduring appeal.
Although Penny was born in Preston, Lancashire and spent her childhood there, she moved to Cheshire as a teenager and continued to live there for the rest of her life. Following the death of her husband, she moved to the small traditional Cheshire market town on which she based her much-loved Crighton books.
Penny was a member and supporter of the Romantic Novelists’ Association and the Romance Writers of America—two organisations dedicated to providing support for both published and yet-to-be-published authors. Her significant contribution to women’s fiction was recognised in 2011, when the Romantic Novelists’ Association presented Penny with a Lifetime Achievement Award.
A Matter of Trust
Penny Jordan
www.millsandboon.co.uk (http://www.millsandboon.co.uk)
CHAPTER ONE
‘BUT Leigh, you’re the private detective, not me,’ Debra pointed out firmly to her stepsister. ‘I’m a tax accountant.’
‘A tax accountant who is just about to start a week’s holiday and who doesn’t have to attend a business meeting that’s vital to her business,’ Leigh interrupted quickly.
Although there were six years between them and Leigh was the elder, it had always been Debra who had been the calm, down-to-earth one, and Leigh the impulsive cause of family chaos.
‘Look, Debs, you know how important this business is to me,’ Leigh pleaded coaxingly now. ‘After Paul left me, after the divorce, I felt as though my whole life was over. Now, since Jen and I started up Secrets, I feel as though life actually has some proper purpose again. I wouldn’t ask you to help if there were anything difficult or dangerous involved. It’s simply a matter of spending a few days in an empty house, keeping a tape-recorded list of someone’s comings and goings, that’s all.
‘He won’t even know you’re there. We’ve persuaded his next-door neighbour to go and visit her sister so that we can use her house. I promise you, you won’t have to do a thing other than—’
‘Keep a twenty-four hour surveillance over someone’s cheating husband,’ Debra interrupted drily. ‘Look, Leigh, I disapprove of men who cheat on their wives and families just as much as you do, but—’
‘This one isn’t cheating on his wife,’ Leigh told her flatly, her normally animated face suddenly set hard. ‘He’s trying to seduce a seventeen-year-old into leaving home and going to live with him…He’s thirty-four, Debs, with a string of women in his past and a taste for innocent young girls.’ Her mouth tightened in distaste.
‘According to her mother, Ginny is completely besotted with him and won’t listen to a thing either of her parents has to say. They felt if they could present her with concrete evidence of the kind of man he really is, although it will hurt her now, it will save her much more pain in the long run.
‘She’s a clever girl, Debs, university material, with her whole life ahead of her, but this man has a reputation for picking up and discarding clever young girls like her.’
Debra sighed. She could feel herself weakening. And was it really so much that Leigh was asking? She knew what a struggle her stepsister had had since her marriage broke up. Deserted by her husband and with two small children to support, she had changed overnight from a bright, breezy, bubbly personality into a withdrawn, tormented woman whom Debra barely recognised.
But since she and a friend had set up this detective agency specialising in handling cases mainly for other women she had recovered all her lost self-esteem. The business, although moderately successful, was still quite precariously balanced and very much in its infancy. With her partner away on a much-needed short holiday and Leigh herself suddenly being offered the opportunity to expand into a wider market, Debra could quite understand why Leigh should feel it was so essential that she not miss out on this all-important meeting.
Equally she could also understand why, having organised events so that a twenty-four-hour watch could be kept on the man involved in this current case, Leigh was pleading with her to take her place in the next-door house and watch him for her.
‘You won’t have to keep watch on him for the full twenty-four hours,’ Leigh was telling her coaxingly now. ‘I’ve arranged for Jeff to watch the house from midnight to seven in the morning from a car outside.’
Jeff was Leigh’s boyfriend, a solid, placid man, a teacher, some fifteen years older than Leigh, whom Debra liked and thought an ideal partner for her more volatile stepsister.
‘Look, I wouldn’t ask you if I weren’t absolutely desperate,’ Leigh told her. ‘The parents are going to have the girls for me, but you’re the only person…’
‘Soft enough to be persuaded into helping you out,’ Debra finished drily for her. ‘All right,’ she agreed, adding under her breath, ‘I just hope I don’t end up regretting this.’
‘You won’t,’ Leigh promised her. ‘Look, I’ll have to take you round to introduce you to Mrs Johnson. You’re her god-daughter and you’re staying at the house to keep an eye for it while she’s away.
‘She’s a nice old thing, although I don’t think she quite approves of the idea of female private detectives.’ Leigh pulled a wry face. ‘She certainly isn’t on her own there. She’s only just moved into the house a month or so ago, so unfortunately she wasn’t able to tell us very much about her neighbour. Only that he comes and goes rather a lot.’
‘She’s seen Ginny going into the house with him?’
Leigh sighed. ‘Not as yet, thank God. I keep asking myself how I would feel if it was one of my two. What I’d do if, when they get to that age…’
‘You’ve a long way to go before they do,’ Debra pointed out to her. ‘Sally is only eight and Bryony ten.’
‘I know. Paul should have had them this weekend, but he cancelled at the last moment. I could have killed him, Debs…Not for my sake, but for theirs. Oh, Bryony put a brave face on it…said she expected that Daddy had a lot of work to do, and I went along with it. Work. Hah…more like some bimbo blonde occupying his time. Luckily Jeff came round, so we went into Chester, walked round the walls and then went on the river. He’s so good with them, Debs. You can see in his eyes how much he’d have liked kids of his own. That must be so hard for a man, knowing that he can’t be a father. That’s why Alex divorced him, you know. Apparently, when they found out that his sperm count was too low for her to conceive, she told him that she couldn’t stay married to him. That the reason she had married had been to have children.’
‘He’s a nice man,’ Debra told her.
‘A very nice man,’ Leigh agreed.
Both of them started to laugh as Leigh mimicked one of the voices from a popular current TV advertisement. Although they were physically completely different, a sense of humour was something they shared.
Leigh had been ten when her father had married Debra’s mother, and Debra had been four.
Leigh was like her father, tall, vigorous, with strong bones and thick curly brown hair.
Debra was like her mother, average height, slim, with delicate bones and the kind of honey-coloured hair that went strikingly fair in the summer.
Luckily, although it was very fine, it was also very thick. As an accountant, she often felt she would look more businesslike if she had it cut, but she had always worn it at shoulder-length, and she liked the versatility this gave her, plus the fact that her simple timeless style was easy to maintain.
Her mother and stepfather still lived in the same Cheshire village where she had been brought up. Leigh had bought a small house there after her divorce so that her daughters could be near to their grandparents.
Debra was now the proud owner of a very pretty little Georgian terraced house in Chester which was within walking distance of where she worked.
She was a happy, contented girl who enjoyed the friendships she shared with people of both sexes. At twenty-six, she was in no hurry to commit herself to a permanent relationship. A brief love-affair during the early years of her training when she had worked in London had taught her that the intensely passionate and deeply private part of her nature which she wanted to share with her lover was not always something that the male sex seemed to want. She had decided she wanted, needed a partner who would share her goals in life, who wanted security and calm; a family. Passion, she had decided, was not for her. One day she wanted to marry, but not yet. Leigh had once remarked that she was afraid of passion. She had, of course, denied it—too vehemently perhaps.
‘Come on, I’ll drive you over to Mrs Johnson’s now,’ Leigh told her.
She had arrived out of the blue at Debra’s front door just over an hour earlier. Debra had been outside in her small back garden, watering the plants in her pots, and wondering if the current spell of good weather really merited the purchase of that wooden seat she had been coveting at the garden centre.
‘Won’t she mind, so early on a Sunday?’ Debra protested, but Leigh shook her head, giving her a naughty smile as she told her,
‘I’ve already warned her to expect us.’
Leigh had always been able to coax her into doing what she wanted, Debra admitted as she got into Leigh’s car and secured the seatbelt.
Elsie Johnson’s house was the next but last in a row of substantial Victorian houses in the suburbs of the city.
Leigh parked outside it with a flourish of gear-changing and sharp braking that made Debra wince a little.
All the houses in the row had short front gardens enclosed by a low communal wall, and from what Debra could see all of them were well maintained. It was the sort of quiet, respectable middle-class area that one would not normally have associated with the kind of situation Leigh had described to her, but if the man was as cold-blooded in his deliberate seductions as Leigh had implied then he probably found the area’s respectability an asset.
‘He won’t be in now,’ Leigh told Debra as she saw her glancing at the end house. ‘He’s taking Ginny out for the day. Her parents are afraid to refuse to let her see him in case she leaves home before they can help her to see just what kind of man he is.
‘At seventeen, she’s still barely more than a child still…at least, she is compared with him, a man in his mid-thirties. I hate that kind of man.’
‘Yes,’ Debra agreed vehemently. ‘So do I.’
She followed Leigh up to the front door.
Elsie Johnson had obviously seen them arrive because she opened the door before they could knock.
Half an hour later, as they drove away, Elsie having assured herself that it would be safe to leave her home in Debra’s care, Leigh turned to Debra and thanked her.
‘I suspect she thinks you’re much more trustworthy than me. You always did have the gift of inspiring confidence in people.’
‘Probably because they realise that, unlike you, I’m not going to do anything rash or reckless,’ Debra told her with a smile.
Leigh laughed.
‘I’ve got the tape and everything else you’ll need in the boot. I’ll give them to you when I drop you off. It will only be for a couple of days. I’ll be back from London on Wednesday. I really am grateful to you, Debs. If we can get this contract to vet job applicants for Driberg’s it will make all the difference to us.’
Debra pulled a face.
‘I’m not sure if I approve of large companies using private agencies to vet potential employees.’
‘I understand how you feel,’ Leigh agreed. ‘But it’s a fact of commercial life these days, and if we don’t get the commission then someone else will, and I have two growing daughters to support. Don’t tell me that none of your clients has ever hinted that you might help them find a loophole in the tax laws,’ Leigh added.
‘We aren’t that kind of firm,’ Debra told her firmly. ‘The advice we give our clients is always strictly within the terms of the law.’
Or at least it had been, Debra reflected later on when she was on her own and thinking over her conversation with her stepsister.
Would that continue to be the case now that the small old-fashioned firm she had worked for for the last three years had been amalgamated with a much more modern, thrusting Chester offshoot of a large multinational firm of accountants?
The multinational was putting in a new partner. None of them had met him yet, although they had all heard the rumours and whispers about how dynamic he was; about how determined he was to ensure that the new amalgamated firm would run efficiently and profitably. There had been no suggestion that jobs would go, but still there was an air of tension and uncertainty in the office, and Debra had been rather looking forward to her short break, especially since over the past few months she herself had been particularly busy, having had to take on the workload of a colleague who had left unexpectedly and not been replaced, in addition to working for her own clients.
She had planned to spend her time doing nothing more mentally demanding than working in her garden and redecorating her spare bedroom, but wryly she admitted that she could not really have refused to help Leigh out. Despite their differences, the two women were good friends, and Debra knew that in the same circumstances Leigh would have been the first to offer to help her.
The arrangement was that she would drive over to Elsie Johnson’s in the morning just before Elsie was due to leave for her sister’s, and that she would stay at the house until Leigh returned from London to relieve her on Wednesday.
If her stepsister’s business continued to expand they would need to think of taking on extra staff, Debra mused as she packed. Both Leigh and her partner were adamant about preferring to take on only other women. They were not a tough, macho agency, Leigh had pointed out when Debra had gently reminded her that in doing so they could be accused of discrimination. The reason they were getting so many small commissions from other women was perhaps because it was a female-based agency and because, as women, they understood all too well how other members of their sex felt about male betrayal.
‘Jeff helped out and he’s a man,’ Debra had pointed out.
‘That was different,’ Leigh had overruled her, adding that Jeff only helped them out as a favour. He didn’t work for them.
In the morning Debra was careful to make sure that she arrived at Elsie Johnson’s exactly on time.
As she had expected, she found the older woman was packed and waiting for her, a relieved expression touching her face as she opened the door to her.
Inside the house was shadowy and dark, the hall filled with old-fashioned Edwardian furniture.
Mrs Johnson was meticulous about security. Both outer doors had security chains as well as double locks; all the windows had locks as well, and Mrs Johnson herself reminded Debra of a timid little field-mouse, all nervously twitching whiskers and tensely anxious little body.
She would ring every evening, just to make sure that everything was all right, she told Debra before getting into her waiting taxi.
It was just as well that Leigh’s clients were wealthy, Debra reflected later as she made herself a cup of coffee in the immaculately tidy kitchen. It was they who were paying Mrs Johnson for the use of her house, and paying her very generously as well.
Cautious and orderly by nature, Debra did not, as she suspected that Leigh would have done, find the immaculate tidiness of the house constricting.
She had brought all her own food supplies with her, and once she had had her coffee she unpacked her case in the small spare bedroom.
From upstairs she had a completely unrestricted view of the next-door house and rear garden, and if she left the landing window open she could, additionally, hear cars arriving at the front of the house.
Her instructions from Leigh were relatively simple. All she had to do was to monitor and then log down on the tape-recorder the details of anyone who visited the house.
Leigh had also provided her with a camera.
‘Just in case we really get lucky and he brings one of his other women here,’ Leigh had told her.
In any other circumstances Debra might have balked a little at such an intrusion of anyone’s privacy, but she agreed with Leigh that a girl of seventeen, madly in love and totally obsessed with her lover, was in a dangerously vulnerable situation, and she could well understand Ginny’s parents’ concern for their daughter.
Before she had left, Elsie Johnson had told her nervously that there had been a good deal of commotion next door during the previous evening, raised voices, doors slamming, that kind of thing; but today all was peace and silence.
Debra had brought some work with her to help pass the time…not office work.
The previous summer she had accidentally become involved with a semi-private, semi-council-sponsored scheme which had involved individuals giving some of their spare time to young teenagers whom the council had in care.
It had been through a friend of a friend that Debra had originally heard of the organisation, and now she was a very committed member of the group, giving up a couple of evenings a month plus odd days at weekends to spend at the home.
The object of the exercise was to provide the teenager with someone with whom they could hopefully form a bond on a one-to-one basis, someone who, while not being their parents or having any authority over them, could help them with their problems in an adult way.
Debra was still in touch with the fourteen-year-old Amy, who was now back with her mother, and she was presently trying to form a bond with Karen, who had been taken into care having been abused by her stepfather, a withdrawn and obviously desperately unhappy girl. It made Debra’s heart ache with compassion and sadness to see the look of despair and misery in her eyes.
If and when she ever managed to break through Karen’s isolation, she hoped that she could do as she had done with Amy—take Karen out for small treats and help her to re-establish herself and to feel less institutionalised.
Now Debra was making a list of the problems she confronted in trying to make contact with Karen, and opposite these problems she was writing down the solutions she might find to them.
It wasn’t easy; she found working with the teenagers emotionally and mentally draining, but the counselling and courses that all members of the group took had helped her to understand the children’s problems and how best she could help them.
It was seven o’clock before she saw any sign of movement from next door.
She almost missed hearing the car pull up outside, and in fact she suspected that she would have done if she hadn’t happened to be on her way downstairs at the time.
She frowned a little. The small compact Volvo was not somehow or other the kind of car she had expected the man to drive.
The net curtains hanging at the landing window obscured her vision of him and she had to flick them back a little as well as switching on the cassette which Leigh had impressed upon her she was to have with her at all times.
The man emerging from the car was tall and dark-haired. Before opening the garden gate he paused, glancing down the road, so that Debra had an unobscured view of his face.
A tiny shock of sensation curled through her, an immediate and disturbing physical response to him that made her check and tense.
He was frowning slightly and looked rather more formidable than she had imagined. He looked like a man used to being in control of himself and others. Warily Debra watched him. She had expected him to look different, less powerful, less compelling. She had assumed that he would have about him an air of weakness and self-indulgence, which this man most assuredly did not.
Before walking up the path he paused and then looked up at Elsie Johnson’s house. Immediately Debra tensed. He couldn’t possibly have seen her watching him, could he?
Her heartbeat suddenly accelerated, her muscles tensing. She dared not look out of the window in case he was still studying the house.
One minute went by and then another. This was ridiculous, she told herself crossly. There was no reason why she should not simply walk past the window, why she should feel so intimidated.
She took a deep breath and forced herself to move. Only when she was safely on the other side of the window did she allow herself a brief glance out of it. The man had gone inside the house.
Vigilantly Debra kept watch all evening, but all that happened was that she got cramp. All was quiet from next door. No one had arrived or left.
When she went to bed she set her alarm for six-thirty so that she could be on duty for seven when Jeff went home.
She didn’t need the alarm. She hardly slept at all, and not just because she was in a strange bed, she admitted as she dressed. It wasn’t just what she was doing that disturbed her; the man himself had unnerved her.
By seven o’clock she was eating her breakfast in front of the sitting-room window, where she had a clear view of the Volvo.
When by nine o’clock the Volvo was still there she began to panic a little.
Could he have left via the back door? Had he guessed that he was being watched? Had he perhaps even left during the night while Jeff was watching him?
At half-past nine she settled herself upstairs, where she had a clear view of the back garden and through the open landing window could hear any sound from outside at the front.
At eleven o’clock a taxi drew up alongside the Volvo and a woman got out. She was tall and elegant, expensively dressed, and as she paid off the driver Debra congratulated herself on noticing the wedding ring she wore.
Whoever she was, she certainly wasn’t Ginny Towers, Debra reflected with satisfaction, and then she remembered that she was supposed to take photographs.
She had almost left it too late, and, as it was, she had to squash herself into the side of the window-frame and lean out of the window a little to get a good clear shot of the woman.
It was only as she withdrew that she realised that the man had opened the front door to welcome his visitor.
He had his back to her, and for some reason it gave her an odd sensation in her tummy to look down on him.
Vertigo, she told herself quickly, wondering if she dared risk trying to photograph them together without his noticing her, but it was too late. He was already ushering the woman inside.
Debra could hardly believe her luck when later on the two of them emerged into the garden. Despite her shaking hands, she managed to get several good shots of them standing talking together.
At three in the afternoon another taxi arrived and the woman left.
Standing beside the open landing window, Debra dutifully recorded this fact.
Although the man accompanied her to the taxi, he did not touch her in any way.
Leigh had described him as having a penchant for very young women. His visitor had not fallen into that field. She had been around his own age, early to mid-thirties.
Well, at least she had got some photographs of them together, Debra told herself as she went downstairs to make herself a drink.
She had just made it when the doorbell rang. She went to answer it without any sense of apprehension, her mind on the task Leigh had given her.
The safety chain wasn’t on and she opened the door automatically without thinking, tensing in an alarm which came too late as she watched the man from next door march angrily into the hall and push the door closed behind him.
‘Would you mind telling me exactly what you think you’re doing?’ he demanded curtly.
He was tall, Debra acknowledged, and strong as well, his body athletic and powerfully muscled. No doubt he found it paid to keep himself fit in order to impress his youthful victims. After all, a man of thirty-odd could not possibly hope to have the physical appeal of one much younger, she told herself, stubbornly ignoring the evidence of her own senses, which told her quite categorically that this man need not have any fear that younger rivals might present a more physically compelling appeal.
‘I’m sorry,’ she stammered as the guilty colour stormed her face. ‘But I don’t—’
‘You don’t what? You don’t know what I’m talking about?’ he interrupted her savagely. ‘Like hell you don’t. In someone old and alone, snooping on the neighbours can be understood and excused; in someone your age…well, let’s just say you’d have to have some profound behavioural problems.’
As she heard the contempt in his voice Debra found that she wasn’t shocked any more. She was angry…very, very angry.
‘You’re the one with the problems,’ she told him unequivocally. ‘Or don’t you believe that it’s a problem for a man of your age to want to seduce a girl barely over the legal age limit for sex? Men like you disgust me,’ she added passionately. ‘You deliberately lie and deceive. You don’t care who you hurt…how many lives you destroy. It’s just a game to you, isn’t it? Girls like Ginny…too young and innocent to see what you really are.’
‘Now just a minute,’ he began grimly, but Debra had the bit between her teeth now and she wasn’t going to stop. How dared he force his way in here and try to bully her…to accuse her, when he was the one…?
All her normal caution and restraint was swept aside in the passionate tide of feeling that engulfed her. She had been so lucky, so loved and protected as she had grown up, but she was well aware that not all young girls were, that there were men like this one…like Karen’s stepfather, who deliberately made young, vulnerable girls their victims; who destroyed them emotionally and ruined their lives. And he had the gall to stand there, glowering angrily at her.
‘Why don’t you simply leave her alone?’ Debra swept on, ignoring his interruption. ‘She’s seventeen years old. Young enough to be your daughter.’
She saw him start and was grimly aware of the shock that momentarily darkened his eyes.
‘I suppose you hadn’t thought of it like that, had you? Men like you never do. You’re too obsessed with your own appetites…your own perversions.’
She heard the breath whistle out of his chest, and stopped, suddenly shocked by her own vehemence, suddenly realising her own vulnerability and danger.
‘I don’t understand what’s going on here,’ he told her, adding menacingly, ‘but if you think I’m going to tolerate you spying on me, photographing me, lying about me, well, let me tell you, there are laws against the kind of thing you’re doing.’
‘There should be laws against people like you,’ Debra spat shakily at him.
He was clever, she had to give him that, twisting things…accusing her…intimidating her with his alien male presence.
She was suddenly acutely conscious of the narrowness of the hall, of the closeness of his body, of the anger she could feel emanating from him.
‘You won’t be in any danger,’ Leigh had told her. Suddenly she wasn’t so sure.
‘I want those photographs,’ he told her flatly, ‘and I want to know just what you think you’re doing.’
‘You know what I’m doing,’ she told him. ‘I’m trying to make sure that Ginny finds out exactly what kind of man you are…before it’s too late.’
‘Ginny?’
His deceit infuriated Debra. ‘Yes. Ginny,’ she snapped back at him. ‘You know, the only-just-seventeen-year-old you’re trying to seduce. You’ve been seen before, you know…bringing other girls here.’
As she threw a defiant look at him it seemed to Debra that something in his face suddenly changed, that there was some subtle alteration she couldn’t quite define.
‘You should be ashamed of yourself,’ she hurled angrily at him. ‘She’s little more than a child. It’s…it’s perverted.’
He moved so quickly that she didn’t have a chance to defend herself, taking hold of her, hauling her against his body, imprisoning her so completely that she actually found herself gripping hold of the front of his jacket to stop herself from losing her balance.
As she stared furiously up at him she could feel the frantic race of her own heartbeat. She could even, she recognised, feel the fiercely hard beat of his, just as she could feel the impact of his muscles against her own softness.
It was a disturbing sensation, and one that, to her shock, her body seemed to find distressingly sensual. Nausea rose inside her at the unacceptability of her physical response to him.
‘That’s the second time you’ve said that to me. The first was once too many. Whatever else I might be, I am not perverted,’ she heard him saying grimly to her, ‘and just to prove it…’
She had started to glance up at him as he spoke, an automatic reaction and one which he used to his own advantage, keeping her imprisoned between his body and the wall with one hand while the other held and cupped her face so that there was no way for her to avoid the alien masculine pressure of his mouth.
She could feel the anger in his kiss, the hard, fierce pressure that spoke of his antipathy towards her, but she could feel something else as well, a whisper of sensation, of awareness, curling like woodsmoke on a clear autumn day until it was everywhere. And as her body trembled she knew that he had felt it as well.
Later she told herself miserably that he at least had an excuse, as a man. It was in his genes to react with sexual aggression, but she had known none, and it wasn’t even as though she didn’t know exactly what he was.
But still her body responded to him, her muscles softening, relaxing, so that her body clung to him instead of rejecting him, and so that her mouth was pliant and eager beneath his, turning the kiss from what it had been to something very different indeed. Something very different.
And he responded to that difference, shifting his weight so that he was no longer imprisoning her but embracing her, the hand that cupped her face softening as his fingers slid into her hair, his mouth moving erotically on hers as his tongue-tip teased the moist softness of her lips.
Somewhere in the distance Debra could hear a sound, but it wasn’t until he released her with a soft curse that she realised it was the telephone.
Abruptly she came back to reality, her face on fire with self-contempt, while unbelievably her body ached and yearned for the contact it had just lost.
‘Aren’t you going to answer it?’ he questioned her as he reached for the door.
His anger had gone, a remote coolness taking its place, making her feel as though somehow she was the one who had transgressed.
Thoroughly flustered by the whole encounter, Debra stepped back from him. He was already opening the front door. She told herself that she was glad that he was going, that she was glad that the phone had started to ring when it did, but her body said rebelliously that it did not share those feelings.
It wasn’t until he had actually closed the door behind himself that she realised that instead of answering the phone she had idiotically been standing watching him.
She turned round and hurried into the kitchen, lifting the receiver, her hand shaking.
‘Yes, everything’s fine,’ she assured Elsie, trying to swallow the hard ball of disbelief and shock that was threatening to block her throat.
What on earth had got into her? she asked herself shakily ten minutes later. The whole incident had been so alien to the way she normally behaved.
She bit her lip, wincing as she remembered the way she had lost control of the situation. How could she have behaved so idiotically? Leigh would be furious with her, and no wonder.
And as for that accusation about his being a pervert…She stifled a moan of despair that rose in her throat.
Well, he couldn’t have chosen a more devastating way of punishing her for it. Not in kissing her in anger. That she could have handled…should have handled with cold disdain and rejection instead of…She swallowed painfully, desperately trying to avoid remembering just how she had reacted to him, and then shivered a little as she tried to suppress the frisson of sensation that raced over her skin.
She wasn’t normally like that. Didn’t normally respond so immediately, nor so intensely, to being kissed. In fact, she couldn’t remember a time when she had ever experienced that extraordinarily powerful surge of sensuality and desire.
Relentlessly she forced herself to keep watch throughout the evening, even though she knew that it was hardly likely that he would provide the evidence she needed, now that she had so idiotically given everything away.
She couldn’t think what had come over her. Not only had she acted entirely against her own nature in losing her temper with him, not only had she let Leigh down, but she might also have ruined Ginny’s parents’ chances of making their daughter aware of the truth.
And on top of all that, as if it weren’t enough, she had actually physically desired the man.
She gave a small shudder of self-contempt and despair.
CHAPTER TWO
‘I’M SO sorry, Leigh. I just don’t know what came over me. I’ve ruined everything.’
‘No, you haven’t,’ Leigh assured her cheerfully as Debra reached the end of her explanation of what had happened.
‘It seems that the owner of the house had served notice on our friend to leave. Apparently the rent hadn’t been paid for several months and he had re-let the property and found another tenant. I suspect that the commotion Elsie overheard from next door the night before you moved in was our Mr Bryant, leaving under protest. The man you have been watching must be the new tenant, because Jeff told me that Bryant left in the early hours of the morning, and that he followed him as far as the motorway. Bryant was driving south and he was on his own.
‘Ginny’s mother has been in touch with me to tell me that she suspects he and Ginny must have had a row, because, although Ginny has been very weepy, she has told her mother that she isn’t seeing him any more and that she doesn’t want to. So, all’s well that ends well.
‘I’d have loved to see his face when you accused him of being a pervert,’ Leigh grinned. ‘Pity you didn’t manage to capture that on film.’
Debra gave her an appalled stare.
‘Do you mean that he wasn’t…?’
‘Bryant? It doesn’t sound like it,’ Leigh confirmed, ‘and from your description he doesn’t sound like it either. Your man seems to bear more resemblance to Superman than Mike Bryant,’ she added with a touch of wry amusement.
Debra flushed, torn between relief that she hadn’t messed everything up for her stepsister, and an appalled recognition of what she actually had done.
‘You don’t think he might report me to the police, do you?’ she asked Leigh in a small voice.
‘Saying what?’ Leigh asked. ‘That you took photographs of him and accused him of being a pervert? Hardly.’ She grinned. ‘Have you seen him again since he came round?’
Flushing again, Debra shook her head.
She had diligently kept a watch on him, monitoring his comings and goings, and while doing so she had been acutely aware of the way he would pause and look up at the house every time he left or entered next door, leaving her in no doubt that he was aware of what she was doing.
‘Please don’t ever ask me to help you out again, will you?’ Debra pleaded feelingly as she handed Elsie’s keys over to her stepsister.
Thank goodness she herself lived on the other side of the city and was unlikely to ever see him again. She gave a small shudder as she contemplated the embarrassment that that would cause her. And it made it worse, not better, hearing Leigh say that he had not been Mike Bryant. No wonder he had been so furious with her.
But who was the woman who had visited him and what was his relationship with her? Debra wondered as she drove home. Whoever she was and whatever her role in his life, it was no concern of hers, she told herself severely as she let herself into her house.
It felt blessedly familiar and safe, and as she closed the door behind her she told herself firmly that she was also closing the door on what had happened over the last few days. The best and most sensible thing she could do was, as Leigh had counselled her, to put it completely out of her mind.
She had not told Leigh everything, though, she acknowledged uncomfortably. She had not told her about that kiss.
Because it had nothing to do with helping Leigh out, she told herself swiftly. Nothing at all.
Was that the reason, or was it that she was still acutely aware of how quickly and immediately she had responded to him? She had shocked herself with that response and, even though she had tried desperately hard to forget it, to push it away from her and out of her mind, it was still there, threatening to haunt and punish her.
Not that she didn’t deserve punishing, but not like this, not by waking abruptly in the night, aching and tense, knowing shamingly that she had been on the edge of reliving his kiss…that she had wanted to relive it.
What she ought to be punishing herself with was her own self-contempt, not some silly, immature yearning that belonged more properly to a teenager than an adult woman.
She spent the rest of the day diligently gardening and decorating, and on Thursday when she went to see Karen she admitted to herself that part of her outburst had probably been fuelled by her own emotional response to the trauma that Karen had endured. Not that he, even if he had been Mike Bryant, was guilty of the same sort of crime as Karen’s stepfather, but Ginny’s age and his maturity had sparked off all the anguish and helpless anger she had felt at Karen’s plight.
Karen’s social worker had already explained to her that Karen had been distraught at the thought of causing the break-up of her family and that her mother, far from supporting Karen, had accused her of trying to come between her and Karen’s stepfather.
As she watched her now, withdrawn, silent and so obviously distressed, Debra’s heart ached for her.
Very gently she started to talk to her, giving her time to respond, and then, when she did not, she simply continuing talking, keeping the tone of her voice as soothing and reassuring as possible, knowing that she must not try to rush things, or to pressurise Karen into lowering the barriers she obviously felt she needed to protect herself.
By Monday morning she had almost convinced herself that she had put the man and his kisses firmly to the back of her mind. On a very high shelf, lettered in red, ‘Do not touch—danger’, she told herself wryly as she walked to work.
Linda, the receptionist, smiled at her as she walked in, and asked her if she had had a good holiday.
‘Not too bad,’ Debra told her. ‘I managed to weed the garden and to strip the paper off my spare bedroom. Anything interesting happened?’
She asked the question casually as she picked up her own post, not really expecting an affirmative answer, but, to her surprise, Linda nodded and then leaned conspiratorially over her desk.
‘He’s arrived. A fortnight ahead of schedule. Obviously wanting to catch us on the hop.’
When Debra looked puzzled, she explained, ‘Him. You know, the partner from London who was due down next Monday—Marsh Graham.’
Debra’s forehead cleared.
‘Seems as if I’ve really missed out,’ she commented with a smile.
She was not too concerned about Marsh Graham’s appointment. She was a conscientious worker who knew she merited the praise she had received from her superiors. She was ambitious but not aggressively so, content to learn all that she could from her present position and to stay within it for another couple of years before embarking on something more challenging.
She felt she was too far down the hierarchy to be of much interest to the new man.
She was also very proud of the way she had streamlined her own systems, subtly and quietly adjusting the rather old-fashioned methods employed by her retired predecessor without stepping on anyone’s toes. That she had found several rather disturbing errors and oversights was something else she had kept to herself, discreetly putting things right without drawing attention to them. After all, what genuine satisfaction was there in laying claim to a progress that was only made by correcting errors which should never have occurred?
‘He’s taken over old Mr Thompson’s office,’ Linda told her as though this were something totally unexpected, whereas to Debra it seemed perfectly acceptable that he should take over the empty office of the newly retired senior partner.
As she walked into her own office, calmly secure in her environment and her abilities, Debra felt a little of the tension and shock of the last few days ease from her. Here she felt in control of her life once again; here it was much much easier to push that kiss and its bestower safely out of her thoughts.
At eleven o’clock she received a telephone call from Marsh Graham’s secretary, Mary, to say that Marsh wanted to see her.
‘Nothing to worry about,’ Mary told her cheerfully. ‘He just wants to introduce himself to everyone and since you weren’t here when he arrived…’
Firmly suppressing an impulse to ask Mary what he was like, Debra thanked her and replaced the receiver.
She was wearing a plain navy suit with a soft cream silk shirt, her tights were a toning blue-grey shade and her shoes the same navy as her suit.
It was a neat and very businesslike outfit, the sort of thing she always wore for work, apart from on those days when she had to visit one of her farmer clients, when she wore a fuller skirt and made sure she had her wellington boots in her car.
Even in summer, farmyards always seemed to be muddy and damp, and after ruining a pair of shoes she had sensibly made sure that she didn’t ruin a second.
Her hair was caught back softly and neatly off her face with a navy silk scarf, and, having checked that her lipstick hadn’t disappeared, Debra set off for Marsh Graham’s office.
Mary smiled at her as she walked past her desk.
‘Just go straight in,’ she told her. ‘He’s expecting you.’
Debra did so, pushing open the door and then turning to close it behind her so that it wasn’t until she turned round again that she actually properly saw the man standing up to greet her.
The blood seemed to leave the extremities of her body, her fingers, her toes and most dangerously of all her head, in a fierce, dizzying compression of shock as she stared at him in disbelief.
Impossible for her not to recognise him, or for him not to recognise her.
Even in her shock, her brain registered his momentary tension and the rapid dilation of his pupils, but he recovered faster than her, saying wryly, ‘I take it that you are Debra Latham?’
Debra willed herself not to give in to the impulse to open the door and run.
‘Yes,’ she confirmed, her voice croaky and unsteady.
‘It says in your file that you’re employed here as a tax accountant.’
‘Yes,’ she agreed even more croakily.
Inadvertently she focused on him. The hands holding her file were long-fingered and strong, very male, the nails short and clean. A disturbing sensation quivered through her stomach as she remembered how he had touched her, sliding his fingers into her hair while he’d kissed her.
She made a small agonised sound in her throat, which immediately made him focus on her face.
‘If you are a tax accountant, I wonder if you can explain to me exactly what it was you were doing last week? Or perhaps it’s your hobby,’ he added derisively. ‘Spying on people.’
Debra could feel her face burning. One half of her wanted to tell him that how she chose to spend her free time had nothing whatsoever to do with him; the other reluctantly admitted that he had every right to demand an explanation. Had their positions been reversed, she would have wanted one.
But would she have got one? Would she have dared to challenge him the way he was challenging her?
If he had not held the position within the firm that he did she might have been tempted to ignore him, but morally he perhaps had a right to know what had happened, she admitted.
Haltingly she explained, unable to bring herself to look at him.
‘Mistaking me for this man Bryant, I can understand…although I should have thought your stepsister would have supplied you with a photograph of him,’ he said scathingly. ‘Losing your temper and accusing him…or, rather, me of being a pervert…’ He paused, and Debra discovered that she was holding her breath. It had been bad enough when she had turned round and recognised him, but to have to suffer this as well…
‘Has it struck you,’ he pursued grimly, ‘just what danger you might have brought down on your own head, had I been this man Bryant, in making that kind of accusation? You were completely alone in that house, and, from your description of him, Bryant does not sound the type of man who would ignore that kind of accusation. It isn’t one that any man would take lightly,’ he added, watching her.
Unwisely Debra had lifted her head and turned to look at him, and now she was forced to withstand the full intensity of his thorough scrutiny of her flushed, defensive face.
He was lecturing her as though she were a child, she decided miserably, and it was obvious that he thought her completely irresponsible and incapable of calm, mature judgement. Her heart sank as she worried about how this might reflect on her in her career, and then acknowledged that he would have to be either a saint or inhuman not to let what had happened influence his assessment of her. In his shoes she doubted if she could have divorced herself from what had happened.
But if he was expecting her to apologise then he would just have to go on expecting.
She might have wrongly identified him, but she hadn’t grabbed hold of him and physically punished him.
No, but she had responded to him; had turned that punishment into a few seconds of illuminatingly intense mutual intimacy. Because he had responded to her.
She realised that he had started talking again, only this time it was work he was discussing, saying something about wanting to look at some aspects of their tax planning service with her.
‘Unfortunately I’m not going to have time until later in the week,’ he added, dismissing her.
She had reached the door when he asked her coldly, ‘What did you do with the photographs?’
Without turning round, she told him in a muffled voice, ‘I burned the film without having it developed once Leigh told me that you weren’t Mike Bryant.’
Why had he been so anxious about the film? she asked herself miserably as she half walked and half stumbled back to her own office. Or was it his companion he had wanted to protect, the married woman who had visited him?
A small shudder convulsed her body, a cold sweat breaking out on her skin despite the warmth of her office.
When she had comforted herself that she was hardly likely to see him again, fate must have been laughing out loud at her.
The incident had upset her enough as it was, without this extra burden of realising that she was going to have to work for him, without knowing that what had happened must influence his judgement of her, to her detriment.
And besides all that…
Besides all that, when she had incautiously looked across his office at him she had found herself focusing helplessly on his mouth, her body tensing with remembered pleasure and an unwanted frightening yearning to repeat it.
She got up, walking tensely over to her office window, and stared out. Please God, not that, she prayed desperately. Anything…anything at all, but not that.
She warned herself of the humiliation she would suffer if anyone, anyone at all other than herself, guessed what kind of effect he had on her, and he would be the first to lead the pack, she warned herself grimly.
She must not allow this ridiculous awareness of him to take root; she must destroy it, ignore it; it must not be allowed to flourish and to threaten the easy calmness of her life.
As she tried to concentrate on her work she wondered helplessly whether, had she not first met him in the way she had, had he not, as he had done, kissed her, but had they met for the first time today across his desk, she would have felt the same helpless surge of physical desire towards him.
Thankfully she didn’t see anything of him for the rest of the day. She was just leaving at five-thirty when one of the other girls rushed into her office and apologised, ‘I forgot to put it in your diary, but I made an appointment for you to go out and see Eric Smethurst tomorrow morning. Is that OK?’
‘Yes,’ Debra assured her.
Eric Smethurst was a fairly new client. A large, quietly spoken farmer who, her colleagues teased her, had something of a crush on her.
Debra had accepted their teasing good-naturedly. She half suspected they might have a point. Eric was thirty-two, hard-working, and very anxious to make a go of the run-down farm he had recently inherited from an uncle. He was also very shy and rather inarticulate, and, while Debra felt nothing for him in any remotely romantic sense, she did like him and wanted to do her best to help him to get the chaos his uncle had left behind him into proper order.
As she walked home she decided the only way to make sure that no one—but especially Marsh Graham himself—guessed about that vulnerable physical responsiveness she had to him was to treat him as coldly and distantly as she could. Not, she suspected, that she would be given the opportunity to do anything else.
Checking that she’d got her wellington boots in the boot of the car, Debra drove to work. The firm had its own private car park, and as she drove into it she immediately recognised Marsh Graham’s Volvo.
Her mouth tightened a little as she deliberately looked away from it. She had overheard one of the secretaries chattering about Marsh to her friends the previous day, talking admiringly about the fact that he practised what he preached in that, when he said that he thought it wantonly selfish of greedy, self-important executives to demand larger and larger company cars, he obviously meant it, because he himself drove a small lead-free-fuelled car.
Privately Debra agreed with him. The days were gone when through ignorance one could allow oneself to believe that it wasn’t up to each and every individual to be responsible and aware, not just on behalf of those closest to them, but on behalf of all humankind.
And, far from demeaning or lowering his stature in any way, the fact that he did not need to announce his success to the world by driving a large expensive car only seemed to reinforce the mental and emotional strength in him which Debra had recognised the first time she saw him.
She parked her car and got out, locking it before heading for the office.
‘You’re early this morning,’ Linda commented as she saw her.
‘I’m going out to see Eric Smethurst,’ Debra told her. ‘And I wanted to go through my post before I leave.’
‘Eric Smethurst. Oh, the farmer. Isn’t he the one who sent you those gorgeous flowers last Christmas?’
Debra knew she was flushing. She had her back to the corridor, but she was aware of the firm, male footsteps coming down it towards her.
A warning tingle ran down her spine and she knew without turning round that it was Marsh. She heard him stop behind her, felt in some subtle way the actual displacement of air caused by his presence.
‘Are you sure it is just a business meeting?’ Linda teased her.
Debra was acutely conscious of Marsh standing behind her. Even without turning round, she could sense his disapproval. Quickly picking up her post, she turned round, keeping her head down as she side-stepped him with a tense, ‘Good morning,’ before hurrying into the sanctuary of her own office.
The meeting with Eric went very much as she had expected. He wanted her advice about switching his accounting system on to a computer, something his uncle had scorned and refused to even consider, and Debra offered to arrange for the head of their own computer department to come out and see him.
‘Margaux will have a much better idea than me of which system would be best for you,’ she told him when he confessed that he had hoped she might be the one to advise him. Linda’s light-hearted comment had alerted her to the danger of inadvertently encouraging him to believe theirs could be more than merely a business relationship. He was a very sensitive man, and the last thing she wanted to do was to hurt him, but she sensed from his reaction to her statement that he had picked up the subtle distancing message she was giving him.
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Пенни Джордан
Тип: электронная книга
Жанр: Современная зарубежная литература
Язык: на английском языке
Издательство: HarperCollins
Дата публикации: 16.04.2024
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О книге: Never Get Involved…Debra Latham followed her instructions closely when she was persuaded by her private detective sister to keep a watch on a suspicious client. But no instructions told her how to cope with an angry man who believed she was spying on him, or how to defend herself against his impassioned kisses. Marsh Graham turned out to be completely innocent and, embarrassingly for Debra, he was also her new boss. Not exactly the most auspicious of starts to a working relationship.But another form of a more personal relationship was what Marsh had made clear he wanted. They shared many common interests, after all, including a desire to help local children in need. But Debra had serious reasonsfor never wanting to get involved….