A Matter Of Trust

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.