Kitabı oku: «A Matter Of Trust»
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
MILLS & BOON
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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.’
