A Matter Of Trust

‘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.